A board that reviews health care expenses and recommends cuts in specific areas isn't new with or unique to Obamacare. Every insurance company has one, and they feed off of an existing, independent board that recommends prices for the entire medical industry (and which is sometimes wildly off the mark in terms of current costs).
Unlike Obamacare, every insurance company also has employees (doctors, yes, but not the ones treating the patient) who can decide that a given treatment isn't worth the cost associated with it and deny its coverage, thereby in some cases sentencing the patient to death. That nearly happened to my then-86-year-old grandfather who was denied coverage for a triple bypass because he was already beyond his life expectancy. It wasn't until it was pointed out--twice--to the insurance company that he was still working 40 hours per week that the surgery was approved, by which time he was in the ICU on oxygen. It was his employer-provided insurance that tried to nix the surgery. This was about 2005. He lived another five years or so after the surgery.
I'm not entirely certain how the insurance-company doctors making such decisions will fare under Obamacare, but I expect that they'll still be around.
I understand your view and to an extent I agree with it, but a lot of people thought Musk was crazy for thinking that he could build rockets basically from the ground up for a few hundred million dollars. There were many who said that such a program would need billions just to get the first launch, but he came up with a way to do it for far less than most expected. He might have something here, though whether it's possible at any price in the current California political environment is a very good question.
A sign like this becomes a magnet to suicidal people, who I think represent the majority of people killed by train impact. The tube pretty much removes any chance of such suicides taking place.
Every nation manipulates their money against the dollar. Preventing that wouldn't work. Some do it blatantly, revaluing their currency every few years; some throw some whitewash on it and let it float in a narrow band; and some pretend it's purely market-driven. But taxes, duties, and currency purchases and sales can and do alter exchange rates, sometimes dramatically.
But yeah, the visa system needs an overhaul, like more documentation that there are no credible candidates stateside. I think it should include holding over the resumes of all who apply for a given period of time and notes on why they weren't qualified, with random audits. Failing an audit would automatically nullify all visas obtained by the company and block them from applying for new visas for a period of ten years.
I'm not opposed to there being visas, just them being abused.
I didn't negate the point. I corrected the intermediary. The FBI is under the DoJ, but is a part of the Intelligence Community. It interfaces with DNI but is not subservient to the office. The FBI is first and foremost a law enforcement agency with a substantial intelligence mission.
Check the bottom of the FBI website: "FBI.gov is an official site of the U.S. government, U.S. Department of Justice"
You can also check Wikipedia, etc., for confirmation.
I was looking for a job in another state for a couple of years, but had a job that I generally enjoyed and paid well so I could afford to bide my time looking for the job I really wanted. It was the first time in about 7 or so years that I had done so, but I had to quickly relearn how to sift out the bad recruiters, which turned out to be most of them. A couple of them that managed to get my updated resume wanted to "update" it, changing terms to things that didn't reflect my experience at all (major example: I'm not a programmer and one guy wanted to make it look like I had more than a decade of C experience because I took a semester of it in the 1990s).
What I discovered is that the majority of the contacts came from resume mills, and further delving suggested that many of them simply collect resumes to dump on clients en masse, with or without editing. Some of them take qualified resumes and change the contact information to others as part of a further hiring scam.
In the last three years, I've worked with maybe four good recruiters who took the time to figure out what I wanted and to try to match me up with a company where everyone would be happy. Unfortunately, all of them have since moved on to different companies.
Mueller's boss is the Attorney General, not the DNI. The FBI is part of the Department of Justice. The FBI works closely with the DNI, but is not run by it.
There is one man between Mueller and the President, and that's Holder. But the head of the FBI briefs the president directly on a fairly common basis.
If Amazon isn't selling it, it says right below the price, "Sold by " but may also have "and fulfilled by Amazon" if Amazon shipping options are available.
You should check your facts before you post. Back in the dim and distant past, as you call it, airlines took mostly from the military, just as they did up through the end of the 20th century. Testifying before Congress in 2001, then-FAA Director of Flight Standards Service Nicholas Lacey said, "From World War II through the mid-90s, approximately 80 percent of major airline new hires were military trained. Today, civilian pilots make up approximately 60 percent of all pilots hired. Today, civilian pilots make up approximately 60 percent of all pilots hired." Maybe it was different before World War II, but back then, flight was a luxury and safety standards few and far between.
Those "from the ground up" training costs that you mention have to come from somewhere, and with airlines running precariously thin profit margins, they'll come from The military subsidized the cost of training the overwhelming majority of those who would be airline pilots. The current costs of learning to fly on one's own are exorbitant largely due to the regulatory, court, and insurance costs borne by small aircraft manufacturers. A Cessna 172P in 1981 started at about $34,000, about 5-6 times the cost of the average new car. Now, the cost of a new 172S is about $300,000, more than 10 times the cost of the average new car. Add increased fuel prices and you get far fewer people going for the initial outlay of $12K to $16K to get their private pilot's license, the next place that airlines start looking for candidates.
If airlines are to train them from the ground up, as you say, they're looking at outlays just in pilot training on the order of $175K, not including what it takes to set up all of the intermediate operations to get them up to Air Transport Pilot and the required 1500 hours. The end result is going to be either higher costs for the passengers, lower pay for the pilots, or both.
It may be better for safety, but it might not be so good for the industry.
An increase is good and bad. More experience is usually a good thing from a safety perspective, but it does mean it's harder and more expensive to get someone to the point where they can be on the flight deck. That expense drives up airline costs, though it might push air cargo and charter flight costs in small planes down a bit as more pilots compete for limited flight hours there.
The number of pilots in training in all paths (military and private) is declining, so the pool of pilots qualified to make base entry for commercial flight is similarly declining. The decline is because the military is getting along with fewer pilots and private flight is too expensive for most people. I'm hoping that the latter changes with a review of FAA regulations happening this year that should dramatically cut the cost of aircraft development and production, but the dearth of pilots probably won't change in the next decade.
BTW, the FAA changed the requirements for copilots (actually requiring an ATP instead of just a commercial rating, which technically isn't a flight hours requirement) at the direction of Congress. It had resisted for a long time making such changes.
Warning shots exist for law enforcement at sea. The Coast Guard uses them routinely when interdicting speedboats suspected of carrying drugs, sending a few machine gun shots across the path to make it clear that they're prepared to use force. I don't know if police with maritime forces do the same thing.
But for civilians, the concept of a warning shot is iffy at best. You get leeway if you shoot through your intended target and hit someone on the other side; if you intentionally miss someone and hit someone else accidentally, you've just committed a felony. (And in more immediate terms, you now have one or more fewer bullets in case you actually do need to shoot to kill.)
It's not remotely close to revoking citizenship. It's removing your permission to travel through other countries pursuant to treaties to recognize passports as official documents for specific purposes. It's used all the time when fugitives go abroad to trap them in a situation where they can be brought back for trial, usually after being detained for not having a valid passport. It does nothing on its own to remove your rights to vote, hold office, or anything else that citizens can do, and a nation can choose to ignore the lack of a passport if it so chooses. And in case you're thinking it limits the right to travel, nations have long held sovereignty over who crosses their border, whether entering or leaving, and that can include blocking its own citizens from leaving the country for any or no reason.
Stateless means something very specific, and this isn't it. Passports are revoked for fugitives on a fairly regular basis, and have to be turned over to prevent people who have been indicted from leaving the country. Neither case revokes citizenship. Much as I agree with what Snowden did, he's playing up hist current circumstances. The US is simply narrowing his options, just as they would any other fugitive. Odds are that he's going to come back to face trial, because as much as Russia is enjoying tweaking the US, it's not going to do that forever as Snowden will become a sticking point in unrelated negotiations.
Microsoft does a fairly good job at maintaining a generally usable driver set available through Windows Update. It's usually not the latest version (and often is a generic driver from a few years ago), but it works. They have an additional problem if it comes from their servers, they get blamed if something goes wrong. Hence the testing and stability requirements before it goes into the repository, because if they break a million systems with a bad driver update, it hits the news even if it is a comparatively rare impact.
I tend to agree with your other points, though if Linux actually reached a critical level of use, its security practices would start getting tested, too. Attackers love to see Linux systems because they're trusted to be secure, a trust which is often violated. You seem to know what you're doing, but the corporate Linux uses that I've seen have relied on poor understanding of how they should be maintained, often based on arrogant declarations from the sysadmins who do things like boast of not having rebooted the web server in two years.
On the contrary. Harm to society can trump freedom, and it does regularly. It's why people go to prison for rape, murder, etc. Their freedom is abridged because of the risk of them causing further harm to society both directly (raping and killing more people) and indirectly (causing people to shelter in place, lash out, start vigilante groups).
However, harm to society should not be the only factor involved in determining whether and to what degree a freedom should be abridged.
Divorce was less common before the 1950s, but by no means was it unheard of. There were nearly 200,000 divorces in 1930 and a bit over 1.1 million marriages. That makes divorce fairly well-known.
The last troops left Iraq in December 2011. There aren't even so much as trainers. The only military in-country consists of about 160 Marines on embassy duty.
I've seen some questions raised on how much pollution in the 20th century masked global warming. I think this study shows just how much a relatively small change to a regional temperature can cause comparatively large changes in the area's climate. It should help support the potential changes that could come from a change of only a couple of degrees over the next century.
Farmers around the world already deal with Roundup-resistant strains of weeds. It's not impossible or perhaps even unlikely that, with the widespread use of glyphosate, some resistance among crops would appear.
Every one of those cases that I've seen has involved someone who knew that they were using a Monsanto product and were fully aware of the patents at hand. I'm not fond of Monsanto's practice, but the farmers were on shaky legal ground to start with.
In this case, one of Monsanto's (presumably patented) development products got out. I wonder if there's a case for invalidation based on negligent behavior allowing it out into the wild. Some level of doubt can be applied to products brought to market, but for those that never should have left a controlled environment, there may be other legal issues at hand.
I also wonder if there's not a chance of this being a random mutation. Does Monsanto put markers in its products that could be used to determine this?
I agree that culture changes are necessary. Gawande has written in the past about how introducing a simple checklist to prevent line infections at Johns Hopkins--widely seen as one of the premier hospitals in the country, if not the world--and giving nurses the power to call doctors on a missed step while also having the administration back the nurses cut the infection rate from 11% to zero, likely saving at least eight patients and dozens of infections per year.
But Gawande also notes that doctors have egos, and easily bruised ones at that. This kind of thing doesn't go over well with a lot of them who see nurses as interfering or overstepping if they call out a missed step. Given the shortage of doctors, I expect that it will be a while before most hospital administrations are willing to back their nurses in mandating that every step be followed.
You're thinking of the washing that you do in the bathroom. I looked up Gawande's words and found that I understated the time to wash. Here's how he describes it.
First, you must remove your watch, rings, and other jewelry (which are notorious for trapping bacteria). Next, you wet your hands in warm tap water. Dispense the soap and lather all surfaces, including the lower one-third of the arms, for the full duration recommended by the manufacturer (usually fifteen to thirty seconds). Rinse off for thirty full seconds. Dry completely with a clean, disposable towel. Then use the towel to turn the tap of. Repeat after any new contact with a patient.
Almost no one adheres to this procedure. It seems impossible. On morning rounds, our residents check in on twenty patients in an hour. The nurses in our intensive care units typically have a similar number of contacts with patients requiring hand washing in between. Even if you get the whole cleansing process down to a minute per patient, that’s still a third of staff time spent just washing hands.
And it's not always possible to hire more staff, especially when strict adherence to washing means you have to hire half-again as many staff to do rounds. While there are some private hospitals making a healthy profit, not all of them do, and there are a lot of hospitals that are run by governments, churches, or non-profits and their margins are thin to non-existent. The need to purchase new equipment just to keep up with other hospitals can obliterate that margin in a single purchase. Doctors tend to send their patients to whichever hospital has the shiniest toys and patients want it that way. Failure to keep up with the newest technology puts revenue at risk and may mean cutbacks that further damage the hospital's ability to effectively treat its patients.
Slashdot Mirror
A board that reviews health care expenses and recommends cuts in specific areas isn't new with or unique to Obamacare. Every insurance company has one, and they feed off of an existing, independent board that recommends prices for the entire medical industry (and which is sometimes wildly off the mark in terms of current costs).
Unlike Obamacare, every insurance company also has employees (doctors, yes, but not the ones treating the patient) who can decide that a given treatment isn't worth the cost associated with it and deny its coverage, thereby in some cases sentencing the patient to death. That nearly happened to my then-86-year-old grandfather who was denied coverage for a triple bypass because he was already beyond his life expectancy. It wasn't until it was pointed out--twice--to the insurance company that he was still working 40 hours per week that the surgery was approved, by which time he was in the ICU on oxygen. It was his employer-provided insurance that tried to nix the surgery. This was about 2005. He lived another five years or so after the surgery.
I'm not entirely certain how the insurance-company doctors making such decisions will fare under Obamacare, but I expect that they'll still be around.
I understand your view and to an extent I agree with it, but a lot of people thought Musk was crazy for thinking that he could build rockets basically from the ground up for a few hundred million dollars. There were many who said that such a program would need billions just to get the first launch, but he came up with a way to do it for far less than most expected. He might have something here, though whether it's possible at any price in the current California political environment is a very good question.
A sign like this becomes a magnet to suicidal people, who I think represent the majority of people killed by train impact. The tube pretty much removes any chance of such suicides taking place.
Every nation manipulates their money against the dollar. Preventing that wouldn't work. Some do it blatantly, revaluing their currency every few years; some throw some whitewash on it and let it float in a narrow band; and some pretend it's purely market-driven. But taxes, duties, and currency purchases and sales can and do alter exchange rates, sometimes dramatically.
But yeah, the visa system needs an overhaul, like more documentation that there are no credible candidates stateside. I think it should include holding over the resumes of all who apply for a given period of time and notes on why they weren't qualified, with random audits. Failing an audit would automatically nullify all visas obtained by the company and block them from applying for new visas for a period of ten years.
I'm not opposed to there being visas, just them being abused.
I didn't negate the point. I corrected the intermediary. The FBI is under the DoJ, but is a part of the Intelligence Community. It interfaces with DNI but is not subservient to the office. The FBI is first and foremost a law enforcement agency with a substantial intelligence mission.
Check the bottom of the FBI website: "FBI.gov is an official site of the U.S. government, U.S. Department of Justice"
You can also check Wikipedia, etc., for confirmation.
I was looking for a job in another state for a couple of years, but had a job that I generally enjoyed and paid well so I could afford to bide my time looking for the job I really wanted. It was the first time in about 7 or so years that I had done so, but I had to quickly relearn how to sift out the bad recruiters, which turned out to be most of them. A couple of them that managed to get my updated resume wanted to "update" it, changing terms to things that didn't reflect my experience at all (major example: I'm not a programmer and one guy wanted to make it look like I had more than a decade of C experience because I took a semester of it in the 1990s).
What I discovered is that the majority of the contacts came from resume mills, and further delving suggested that many of them simply collect resumes to dump on clients en masse, with or without editing. Some of them take qualified resumes and change the contact information to others as part of a further hiring scam.
In the last three years, I've worked with maybe four good recruiters who took the time to figure out what I wanted and to try to match me up with a company where everyone would be happy. Unfortunately, all of them have since moved on to different companies.
Mueller's boss is the Attorney General, not the DNI. The FBI is part of the Department of Justice. The FBI works closely with the DNI, but is not run by it.
There is one man between Mueller and the President, and that's Holder. But the head of the FBI briefs the president directly on a fairly common basis.
If Amazon isn't selling it, it says right below the price, "Sold by " but may also have "and fulfilled by Amazon" if Amazon shipping options are available.
You should check your facts before you post. Back in the dim and distant past, as you call it, airlines took mostly from the military, just as they did up through the end of the 20th century. Testifying before Congress in 2001, then-FAA Director of Flight Standards Service Nicholas Lacey said, "From World War II through the mid-90s, approximately 80 percent of major airline new hires were military trained. Today, civilian pilots make up approximately 60 percent of all pilots hired. Today, civilian pilots make up approximately 60 percent of all pilots hired." Maybe it was different before World War II, but back then, flight was a luxury and safety standards few and far between.
Those "from the ground up" training costs that you mention have to come from somewhere, and with airlines running precariously thin profit margins, they'll come from The military subsidized the cost of training the overwhelming majority of those who would be airline pilots. The current costs of learning to fly on one's own are exorbitant largely due to the regulatory, court, and insurance costs borne by small aircraft manufacturers. A Cessna 172P in 1981 started at about $34,000, about 5-6 times the cost of the average new car. Now, the cost of a new 172S is about $300,000, more than 10 times the cost of the average new car. Add increased fuel prices and you get far fewer people going for the initial outlay of $12K to $16K to get their private pilot's license, the next place that airlines start looking for candidates.
If airlines are to train them from the ground up, as you say, they're looking at outlays just in pilot training on the order of $175K, not including what it takes to set up all of the intermediate operations to get them up to Air Transport Pilot and the required 1500 hours. The end result is going to be either higher costs for the passengers, lower pay for the pilots, or both.
It may be better for safety, but it might not be so good for the industry.
An increase is good and bad. More experience is usually a good thing from a safety perspective, but it does mean it's harder and more expensive to get someone to the point where they can be on the flight deck. That expense drives up airline costs, though it might push air cargo and charter flight costs in small planes down a bit as more pilots compete for limited flight hours there.
The number of pilots in training in all paths (military and private) is declining, so the pool of pilots qualified to make base entry for commercial flight is similarly declining. The decline is because the military is getting along with fewer pilots and private flight is too expensive for most people. I'm hoping that the latter changes with a review of FAA regulations happening this year that should dramatically cut the cost of aircraft development and production, but the dearth of pilots probably won't change in the next decade.
BTW, the FAA changed the requirements for copilots (actually requiring an ATP instead of just a commercial rating, which technically isn't a flight hours requirement) at the direction of Congress. It had resisted for a long time making such changes.
Warning shots exist for law enforcement at sea. The Coast Guard uses them routinely when interdicting speedboats suspected of carrying drugs, sending a few machine gun shots across the path to make it clear that they're prepared to use force. I don't know if police with maritime forces do the same thing.
But for civilians, the concept of a warning shot is iffy at best. You get leeway if you shoot through your intended target and hit someone on the other side; if you intentionally miss someone and hit someone else accidentally, you've just committed a felony. (And in more immediate terms, you now have one or more fewer bullets in case you actually do need to shoot to kill.)
It's not remotely close to revoking citizenship. It's removing your permission to travel through other countries pursuant to treaties to recognize passports as official documents for specific purposes. It's used all the time when fugitives go abroad to trap them in a situation where they can be brought back for trial, usually after being detained for not having a valid passport. It does nothing on its own to remove your rights to vote, hold office, or anything else that citizens can do, and a nation can choose to ignore the lack of a passport if it so chooses. And in case you're thinking it limits the right to travel, nations have long held sovereignty over who crosses their border, whether entering or leaving, and that can include blocking its own citizens from leaving the country for any or no reason.
Stateless means something very specific, and this isn't it. Passports are revoked for fugitives on a fairly regular basis, and have to be turned over to prevent people who have been indicted from leaving the country. Neither case revokes citizenship. Much as I agree with what Snowden did, he's playing up hist current circumstances. The US is simply narrowing his options, just as they would any other fugitive. Odds are that he's going to come back to face trial, because as much as Russia is enjoying tweaking the US, it's not going to do that forever as Snowden will become a sticking point in unrelated negotiations.
Microsoft does a fairly good job at maintaining a generally usable driver set available through Windows Update. It's usually not the latest version (and often is a generic driver from a few years ago), but it works. They have an additional problem if it comes from their servers, they get blamed if something goes wrong. Hence the testing and stability requirements before it goes into the repository, because if they break a million systems with a bad driver update, it hits the news even if it is a comparatively rare impact.
I tend to agree with your other points, though if Linux actually reached a critical level of use, its security practices would start getting tested, too. Attackers love to see Linux systems because they're trusted to be secure, a trust which is often violated. You seem to know what you're doing, but the corporate Linux uses that I've seen have relied on poor understanding of how they should be maintained, often based on arrogant declarations from the sysadmins who do things like boast of not having rebooted the web server in two years.
On the contrary. Harm to society can trump freedom, and it does regularly. It's why people go to prison for rape, murder, etc. Their freedom is abridged because of the risk of them causing further harm to society both directly (raping and killing more people) and indirectly (causing people to shelter in place, lash out, start vigilante groups).
However, harm to society should not be the only factor involved in determining whether and to what degree a freedom should be abridged.
Divorce was less common before the 1950s, but by no means was it unheard of. There were nearly 200,000 divorces in 1930 and a bit over 1.1 million marriages. That makes divorce fairly well-known.
Fascism combines elements of both the right and the left while being moderate on few, if any, aspects.
I believe the Branch Davidians shot first when the ATF agents were on the roof.
The last troops left Iraq in December 2011. There aren't even so much as trainers. The only military in-country consists of about 160 Marines on embassy duty.
I've seen some questions raised on how much pollution in the 20th century masked global warming. I think this study shows just how much a relatively small change to a regional temperature can cause comparatively large changes in the area's climate. It should help support the potential changes that could come from a change of only a couple of degrees over the next century.
Farmers around the world already deal with Roundup-resistant strains of weeds. It's not impossible or perhaps even unlikely that, with the widespread use of glyphosate, some resistance among crops would appear.
Every one of those cases that I've seen has involved someone who knew that they were using a Monsanto product and were fully aware of the patents at hand. I'm not fond of Monsanto's practice, but the farmers were on shaky legal ground to start with.
In this case, one of Monsanto's (presumably patented) development products got out. I wonder if there's a case for invalidation based on negligent behavior allowing it out into the wild. Some level of doubt can be applied to products brought to market, but for those that never should have left a controlled environment, there may be other legal issues at hand.
I also wonder if there's not a chance of this being a random mutation. Does Monsanto put markers in its products that could be used to determine this?
Robot surgeons can't do rounds to check on patients, and even if they could, they would still have to be resterilized between patient visits.
I agree that culture changes are necessary. Gawande has written in the past about how introducing a simple checklist to prevent line infections at Johns Hopkins--widely seen as one of the premier hospitals in the country, if not the world--and giving nurses the power to call doctors on a missed step while also having the administration back the nurses cut the infection rate from 11% to zero, likely saving at least eight patients and dozens of infections per year.
But Gawande also notes that doctors have egos, and easily bruised ones at that. This kind of thing doesn't go over well with a lot of them who see nurses as interfering or overstepping if they call out a missed step. Given the shortage of doctors, I expect that it will be a while before most hospital administrations are willing to back their nurses in mandating that every step be followed.
You're thinking of the washing that you do in the bathroom. I looked up Gawande's words and found that I understated the time to wash. Here's how he describes it.
And it's not always possible to hire more staff, especially when strict adherence to washing means you have to hire half-again as many staff to do rounds. While there are some private hospitals making a healthy profit, not all of them do, and there are a lot of hospitals that are run by governments, churches, or non-profits and their margins are thin to non-existent. The need to purchase new equipment just to keep up with other hospitals can obliterate that margin in a single purchase. Doctors tend to send their patients to whichever hospital has the shiniest toys and patients want it that way. Failure to keep up with the newest technology puts revenue at risk and may mean cutbacks that further damage the hospital's ability to effectively treat its patients.