I wonder if part of the problem is that this is overly centralized. Someone above mentioned how they did this all with paper in WWII. I can't imagine the pay for millions of service personnel being calculated by an army of clerks based in Indianapolis. The actual calculations must have been more distributed, with perhaps pay records following a soldier along with his other records.
Decentralizing it should make the bureaucracy more flexible too. Especially in hardship cases like the one described in the story, there should be a way for some local officer to say "give him his regular pay until this is sorted out". Being in the military is no way to get rich, so these people usually don't have a big cushion to live off of. If it turns out the soldier wasn't entitled to the pay, then except in cases of obvious fraud (which I'd think would be a court martial offense) they can give them time to pay it back, maybe with some minimal interest. Come on, the IRS can track anybody and everybody if it really comes to that. At worst, if some guy gets paid a few bucks that technically he wasn't entitled to, I'm not going to get too upset about it. We're definitely not talking CEO bonuses here.
Big disclaimer: I'm not a vet. I suspect someone will say "that's not how the military works", which may well be true. I suspect it was something closer to a decentralized system in WWII though. I doubt some guy in Pearl Harbor coming back from a sub patrol had to wait for a piece of paper from Indianapolis to get paid. If someone in congress was serious about fixing this they could too. I would hope this kind of thing would get sympathy from everyone. Then again there's a federal law that says you can't foreclose on someone's house while they're serving overseas. You don't think that stopped the banks, do you? Or that they received any serious punishment because of it.
There is basic pay, plus “entitlements” for everything from serving in a combat zone to housing allowances to re-enlistment bonuses.
Was it that different in WWII? I don't know the details, but there were definitely things like combat pay. Yet they handled it all with paper (and maybe some punch card machines). As the old line goes "to err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer".
Every time there is a bit of news about H1Bs or immigration on tech sites, most Americans display their usual xenophobia and blame immigrants for the lack of jobs in the US.
Dismissing legitimate economic concerns as "xenophobia" is either a false assumption on your part, or a common but cheap trick. Sorry, ain't buying it.
At the same time, every single of them fails to realize that there isn't even a need for foreigners to be in America to take away their jobs.
True only to a certain extent. Being on-site, meeting face-to-face, and understanding more about a customer and a culture so that you can be more than a code monkey, are still useful.
The quantity over quality argument is also moot, foreigners not only keep improving but their low cost allows them to make mistakes while still being more affordable than Americans.
Of course "their low cost allows them to make mistakes while still being more affordable than Americans". It's the very fact that they do make so many mistakes that's part of why they're so affordable! If what you meant was that some people will always buy cheap crap, then that's an obvious truism. Whether or not that's penny wise and pound foolish is another story.
As for "foreigners not only keep improving", or more accurately the quality of foreign sourced work keeps improving, I've found just the opposite to be true. I don't know why, or even why the foreign sourced work is often of such poor quality, and I have little interest in debating theories about why. What I do know is that it's true.
would rather to have that people live, contribute and keep most the industry in your country
No, not if it means sacrificing my job for that. Save the "it's good for the country as a whole" garbage for the congressional hearings. Bonus points for honesty if you say "for the good of the American economy we must screw American programmers, IT people and engineers". Really, go ahead and say it, because it won't matter. The hearings are a formality and congress will just vote however the people that bribe them want congress to vote.
Who is them? Are you talking about immigrants, H-1B's, or people in India? This discussion has everything to do with location and economics, and nothing to do with ethnicity.
That's exactly what the people of Detroit said about Japanese car manufacturers way back in the 1970s.
No, it isn't. What American car manufacturers said (actually more in the 60's and than 70's) is that the Japanese and VW imports were small low-powered cars that would only appeal to a small (and not very profitable) segment of the American market. They generally did not disparage the design or manufacture, just that they wouldn't appeal to many Americans (toy cars). By the mid to late 70's that was obviously nonsense, with the Japanese market share increasing and the Japanese going up-market. The increasing price of gas in the 70's also made small cars much more attractive.
So? Transistors keep getting smaller. It's worth using more transistors to reduce power consumption. Also this isn't an either/or approach - other power saving tricks can be combined with this.
Moreover, "more die area" means nothing until quantified. How much smaller is an A7 than an A15? What portion of the die area of a SOC is an A7?
Of course, if it's the one I'm thinking of that's so beloved of libertarians, it's bunk - Franklin never said it.
You don't get liberty in the presence of so-called economic security
So does that mean that the greater the economic insecurity the greater the freedom?
we have plenty of examples of this in practice such as the global phenomenon of "too big to fail"
It's hard to imagine a greater counter-example. TBTF means destroying the economic security of many individuals in order to prop up a few fat cats - the exact opposite of what's meant by economic security.
Interestingly, Sweden is the model for telling bankers to live with their mistakes, so that most people have greater economic security. Shame we didn't follow their example from the early 90's.
Like I said, that's only current costs. It doesn't address lifetime costs, hence that 30% is too high.
Do you understand that this solution entails paying doctors less?
What makes you think that that's the only, or even a necessary approach? Doctor's compensation is only about 10% of all healthcare spending. Moreover the ratio of doctor's median income to overall median income is higher in the US than most countries, but not outrageously so. We're not even at the top of the list.
Do you think that's fair?
Depends. Primaries aren't getting rich, but some specialties, like anesthesiology and radiology, are overpaid for what they do. The amount a doctor makes and the difficulty of the specialty often have little to do with each other.
That's a possibility. I don't think it would be unconstitutional.
Not every bad idea is unconstitutional. I forgot an important one on my list - a way to check if people are having unprotected sex. Do you know what HIV treatment costs?
Here's a simpler approach: charge everybody the same amount. Yeah, yeah, I know, blatantly unfair, socialist, moral hazard, blah, blah, blah. The only argument for it is that it works fine in dozens of other countries, all of which pay substantially less for their healthcare. In theory the idea sucks, and in practice it works great.
I always thought it was interesting that (AFAIK) the air force and navy will only let officers be pilots, but in the army non-coms can pilot helicopters. Seems like they've carried that over to drones too. Personally I call the person who drives a chauffeur. Nothing wrong with the work, but it's not usually considered a very skilled position.
P.S. Are drones a way around the idiotic restriction on the army's use of fixed wing aircraft?
A simple way to settle the debate is to have our unmanned forces attack our manned forces and see who wins. I'm putting $100 on unmanned, and I'll give you 2:1 odds.
Hey sonny, we won the Big One with flat tops, and with them we've lost nothing since (not that we've actually had a major naval engagement since WWII, but still). Just because the battle wagon went the way of the dodo, doesn't mean the flat top ever will. Besides, flying planes is cool.
the social cost is probably fairly high.... You can't really put a price tag on this
So don't even try.
I don't think smoking should be encouraged as a way to save society money.
Do you think anyone is seriously suggesting that? But the point that it would save money is entirely valid, and pokes a hole in all this nonsense.
I think it is quite possible for new advances in medical treatments to transform smoking related illnesses from cheap death sentences to really expensive procedures
That's potentially true of all sorts of things. It's ridiculous to worry about every possible hypothetical. BTW, not much research goes into curing smoking related illnesses, because they're easily preventable. Don't smoke if you don't want lung cancer. Pancreatic cancer is another story.
What kind of savings? That article doesn't address lifetime medical care costs. AFAIK they're higher for the obese, but nowhere near as high as you'd infer from that article.
Worried about costs? First fix the fact that we pay 50% (%/GDP - even higher at exchange rate or PPP) more than any other country, and receive no more treatment for it. Then we can worry about making everybody skinny.
Speaking of skinny, even though percentage wise they're a much smaller problem, for the sake of consistency and cost savings we should charge anorexics and bulimics more. Those lead to serious health problems, and can be avoided by simply eating more or not forcing yourself to puke.
Ok, smoking, over and under weight. What's next? Ah, motorcycles and xtreme sports. We can monitor that based of purchases of the appropriate equipment. Speaking of monitoring, since you should have to show proof of age anyway, how much alcohol a person buys should be easy to keep tabs on, and excess alcohol consumption can be very medically expensive. Illegal drugs will require random testing, but people are used to that anyway. Just do it on everyone. The real problem is to keep tabs on how much exercise everyone gets, which can be a bigger issue than non-extreme obesity. I propose a telemetry system. Some folks will complain it can't monitor you in remote areas, but if we place the burden of proof on the individual then they'll have an incentive to prove they were jogging on that country road. What's next?
Private insurance wants to fine smokers since they get those kinds of diseases before they qualify for medicare.
Private insurance also wants to not pay for the cost of your heart disease or breast cancer because you didn't mention on your application that you took something for acne when you were 14. No joke - it's called recission, and one of the few good things that Obamacare supposedly does is ban it.
The problem with Obamacare is that it relies on private for-profit insurance companies, and actually lets them have some of the things they want. No other country does that. Look at some of the comments here from people in other countries - they're astounded at this crap. In every other country for-profit insurers do not pay for basic medical care, and insurers must charge the same rate to everybody. As for cost, they pay at least 1/3 less!
What you call "neo-liberal" in the Netherlands (or almost anywhere else in the world) would be called communist in this country. In the Neanderthal States of America we constantly debate what should and shouldn't work while ignoring the examples from dozens of countries about what actually does work. If engineers worked that way I'd never fly in a plane or even cross a bridge.
Many of us also don't comprehend these things called "data" and "statistics" (e.g. about actual costs of smokers), which makes it so much easier to act holier-than-thou or wail about how we're forced to pay for the sins of others. The people most prone to doing that seem to be the ones most ignorant of the fact that the inefficiency and corporate skim of our system increases our costs by at least 50% compared to any other country.
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Yes, but every line is documented the same way, "don't touch this because I don't know what it does but sometimes it works".
defense spending as a portion of GDP has fallen from about 38% of GDP in 1945 to about 4-5% today
Comparing current spending to WWII spending is either disingenuous or just plain silly.
Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by mere incompetence.
I wonder if part of the problem is that this is overly centralized. Someone above mentioned how they did this all with paper in WWII. I can't imagine the pay for millions of service personnel being calculated by an army of clerks based in Indianapolis. The actual calculations must have been more distributed, with perhaps pay records following a soldier along with his other records.
Decentralizing it should make the bureaucracy more flexible too. Especially in hardship cases like the one described in the story, there should be a way for some local officer to say "give him his regular pay until this is sorted out". Being in the military is no way to get rich, so these people usually don't have a big cushion to live off of. If it turns out the soldier wasn't entitled to the pay, then except in cases of obvious fraud (which I'd think would be a court martial offense) they can give them time to pay it back, maybe with some minimal interest. Come on, the IRS can track anybody and everybody if it really comes to that. At worst, if some guy gets paid a few bucks that technically he wasn't entitled to, I'm not going to get too upset about it. We're definitely not talking CEO bonuses here.
Big disclaimer: I'm not a vet. I suspect someone will say "that's not how the military works", which may well be true. I suspect it was something closer to a decentralized system in WWII though. I doubt some guy in Pearl Harbor coming back from a sub patrol had to wait for a piece of paper from Indianapolis to get paid. If someone in congress was serious about fixing this they could too. I would hope this kind of thing would get sympathy from everyone. Then again there's a federal law that says you can't foreclose on someone's house while they're serving overseas. You don't think that stopped the banks, do you? Or that they received any serious punishment because of it.
Centuries, but it is being continuously updated.
There is basic pay, plus “entitlements” for everything from serving in a combat zone to housing allowances to re-enlistment bonuses.
Was it that different in WWII? I don't know the details, but there were definitely things like combat pay. Yet they handled it all with paper (and maybe some punch card machines). As the old line goes "to err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer".
Every time there is a bit of news about H1Bs or immigration on tech sites, most Americans display their usual xenophobia and blame immigrants for the lack of jobs in the US.
Dismissing legitimate economic concerns as "xenophobia" is either a false assumption on your part, or a common but cheap trick. Sorry, ain't buying it.
At the same time, every single of them fails to realize that there isn't even a need for foreigners to be in America to take away their jobs.
True only to a certain extent. Being on-site, meeting face-to-face, and understanding more about a customer and a culture so that you can be more than a code monkey, are still useful.
The quantity over quality argument is also moot, foreigners not only keep improving but their low cost allows them to make mistakes while still being more affordable than Americans.
Of course "their low cost allows them to make mistakes while still being more affordable than Americans". It's the very fact that they do make so many mistakes that's part of why they're so affordable! If what you meant was that some people will always buy cheap crap, then that's an obvious truism. Whether or not that's penny wise and pound foolish is another story.
As for "foreigners not only keep improving", or more accurately the quality of foreign sourced work keeps improving, I've found just the opposite to be true. I don't know why, or even why the foreign sourced work is often of such poor quality, and I have little interest in debating theories about why. What I do know is that it's true.
would rather to have that people live, contribute and keep most the industry in your country
No, not if it means sacrificing my job for that. Save the "it's good for the country as a whole" garbage for the congressional hearings. Bonus points for honesty if you say "for the good of the American economy we must screw American programmers, IT people and engineers". Really, go ahead and say it, because it won't matter. The hearings are a formality and congress will just vote however the people that bribe them want congress to vote.
it has been a pleasure to work with them
Who is them? Are you talking about immigrants, H-1B's, or people in India? This discussion has everything to do with location and economics, and nothing to do with ethnicity.
That's exactly what the people of Detroit said about Japanese car manufacturers way back in the 1970s.
No, it isn't. What American car manufacturers said (actually more in the 60's and than 70's) is that the Japanese and VW imports were small low-powered cars that would only appeal to a small (and not very profitable) segment of the American market. They generally did not disparage the design or manufacture, just that they wouldn't appeal to many Americans (toy cars). By the mid to late 70's that was obviously nonsense, with the Japanese market share increasing and the Japanese going up-market. The increasing price of gas in the 70's also made small cars much more attractive.
20nm wafers won't be cheaper than the 28nm
Won't be, or currently aren't? There's always the possibility of improved 20nm yields.
it uses more die space
So? Transistors keep getting smaller. It's worth using more transistors to reduce power consumption. Also this isn't an either/or approach - other power saving tricks can be combined with this.
Moreover, "more die area" means nothing until quantified. How much smaller is an A7 than an A15? What portion of the die area of a SOC is an A7?
Code name the next ARM architecture "horn". Then you can have little.BIG.horn (ducks to avoid arrows).
Ben Franklin had a famous quote about that.
Then please share it with us.
Of course, if it's the one I'm thinking of that's so beloved of libertarians, it's bunk - Franklin never said it.
You don't get liberty in the presence of so-called economic security
So does that mean that the greater the economic insecurity the greater the freedom?
we have plenty of examples of this in practice such as the global phenomenon of "too big to fail"
It's hard to imagine a greater counter-example. TBTF means destroying the economic security of many individuals in order to prop up a few fat cats - the exact opposite of what's meant by economic security.
Interestingly, Sweden is the model for telling bankers to live with their mistakes, so that most people have greater economic security. Shame we didn't follow their example from the early 90's.
approx. 30%.
Like I said, that's only current costs. It doesn't address lifetime costs, hence that 30% is too high.
Do you understand that this solution entails paying doctors less?
What makes you think that that's the only, or even a necessary approach? Doctor's compensation is only about 10% of all healthcare spending. Moreover the ratio of doctor's median income to overall median income is higher in the US than most countries, but not outrageously so. We're not even at the top of the list.
Do you think that's fair?
Depends. Primaries aren't getting rich, but some specialties, like anesthesiology and radiology, are overpaid for what they do. The amount a doctor makes and the difficulty of the specialty often have little to do with each other.
That's a possibility. I don't think it would be unconstitutional.
Not every bad idea is unconstitutional. I forgot an important one on my list - a way to check if people are having unprotected sex. Do you know what HIV treatment costs?
Here's a simpler approach: charge everybody the same amount. Yeah, yeah, I know, blatantly unfair, socialist, moral hazard, blah, blah, blah. The only argument for it is that it works fine in dozens of other countries, all of which pay substantially less for their healthcare. In theory the idea sucks, and in practice it works great.
I would think most fighter pilots scored higher than other pilots at flight school
True, but they bias the results by only testing against human pilots.
an enemy with a big pile of drones can, just like we do now, send them out with relative impunity without worry about casualties in the air
All the more reason not to send Snoopy and his Sopwith Camel against them, nostalgia notwithstanding.
I always thought it was interesting that (AFAIK) the air force and navy will only let officers be pilots, but in the army non-coms can pilot helicopters. Seems like they've carried that over to drones too. Personally I call the person who drives a chauffeur. Nothing wrong with the work, but it's not usually considered a very skilled position.
P.S. Are drones a way around the idiotic restriction on the army's use of fixed wing aircraft?
A simple way to settle the debate is to have our unmanned forces attack our manned forces and see who wins. I'm putting $100 on unmanned, and I'll give you 2:1 odds.
Hey sonny, we won the Big One with flat tops, and with them we've lost nothing since (not that we've actually had a major naval engagement since WWII, but still). Just because the battle wagon went the way of the dodo, doesn't mean the flat top ever will. Besides, flying planes is cool.
the social cost is probably fairly high. ... You can't really put a price tag on this
So don't even try.
I don't think smoking should be encouraged as a way to save society money.
Do you think anyone is seriously suggesting that? But the point that it would save money is entirely valid, and pokes a hole in all this nonsense.
I think it is quite possible for new advances in medical treatments to transform smoking related illnesses from cheap death sentences to really expensive procedures
That's potentially true of all sorts of things. It's ridiculous to worry about every possible hypothetical. BTW, not much research goes into curing smoking related illnesses, because they're easily preventable. Don't smoke if you don't want lung cancer. Pancreatic cancer is another story.
Those kinds of savings are hard to pass up.
What kind of savings? That article doesn't address lifetime medical care costs. AFAIK they're higher for the obese, but nowhere near as high as you'd infer from that article.
Worried about costs? First fix the fact that we pay 50% (%/GDP - even higher at exchange rate or PPP) more than any other country, and receive no more treatment for it. Then we can worry about making everybody skinny.
Speaking of skinny, even though percentage wise they're a much smaller problem, for the sake of consistency and cost savings we should charge anorexics and bulimics more. Those lead to serious health problems, and can be avoided by simply eating more or not forcing yourself to puke.
Ok, smoking, over and under weight. What's next? Ah, motorcycles and xtreme sports. We can monitor that based of purchases of the appropriate equipment. Speaking of monitoring, since you should have to show proof of age anyway, how much alcohol a person buys should be easy to keep tabs on, and excess alcohol consumption can be very medically expensive. Illegal drugs will require random testing, but people are used to that anyway. Just do it on everyone. The real problem is to keep tabs on how much exercise everyone gets, which can be a bigger issue than non-extreme obesity. I propose a telemetry system. Some folks will complain it can't monitor you in remote areas, but if we place the burden of proof on the individual then they'll have an incentive to prove they were jogging on that country road. What's next?
Private insurance wants to fine smokers since they get those kinds of diseases before they qualify for medicare.
Private insurance also wants to not pay for the cost of your heart disease or breast cancer because you didn't mention on your application that you took something for acne when you were 14. No joke - it's called recission, and one of the few good things that Obamacare supposedly does is ban it.
The problem with Obamacare is that it relies on private for-profit insurance companies, and actually lets them have some of the things they want. No other country does that. Look at some of the comments here from people in other countries - they're astounded at this crap. In every other country for-profit insurers do not pay for basic medical care, and insurers must charge the same rate to everybody. As for cost, they pay at least 1/3 less!
Might force people to do something silly like cook meth and build a drug empire.
Why would that be silly? You don't pay higher health insurance premiums for using illegal drugs. Tobacco? Yes. Meth, heroin, etc.? No penalty.
What you call "neo-liberal" in the Netherlands (or almost anywhere else in the world) would be called communist in this country. In the Neanderthal States of America we constantly debate what should and shouldn't work while ignoring the examples from dozens of countries about what actually does work. If engineers worked that way I'd never fly in a plane or even cross a bridge.
Many of us also don't comprehend these things called "data" and "statistics" (e.g. about actual costs of smokers), which makes it so much easier to act holier-than-thou or wail about how we're forced to pay for the sins of others. The people most prone to doing that seem to be the ones most ignorant of the fact that the inefficiency and corporate skim of our system increases our costs by at least 50% compared to any other country.
And there in lays the problem with socialist governments.
Which explains why all those "socialist" countries that have true UHC (e.g. Canada) pay at least 1/3 less for healthcare and cover everyone.