>>You mean like the Galaxy Tab 10.1? It's barred from import into Australia due to Apple successfully winning an injunction against it due to patent disputes.
>>So how exactly do they want to balance the budget? By not cutting and not raising taxes? This is why they get ridiculed.
So is the notion that raising taxes on the rich by a couple points will balance it, too. The simple fact of the matter is that spending has exploded out of control (up 50% in 5 years) whereas revenues have gone down 20% - and we didn't even have a balanced budget then!
How is it possible that we can increase spending by 50%, in order to stimulate the economy, but when it comes time to dail it back down to where it was before, the cuts are impossible?
>>By just eliminating "waste and fraud"? >>That's not enough.
Dropping the defense budget back to 2005 levels is a good start. Eliminating waste and fraud from Medicare and Medicaid (which total a greater expense than defense) is another. 15% of a very large number is still a large number.
>>Thing I've found with memory management is, that while it "just works" and you don't have to think of it for relatively straight forward stuff.. when you start getting into more complex OO designs, memory management actually becomes more of a pain in some situation!
Absolutely. When I tested some Java code, it ran correctly on all platforms except one obscure one (WinNT on SGI). On that platform, which was unfortunately something I had to support, it wouldn't unallocate memory correctly, it'd leak out of memory very quickly, and then run as slow as a dog as it swapped frantically.
I had to rewrite my damn code (which had nothing wrong with it) because Java's "write once run anywhere" motto is more or less a myth - when virtual machines are implemented differently, you *don't* have the guarantee of reliability and portability they promised.
>>Oh wait, it seems that YouTube and most of the ME playerbase thinks you're wrong.
One million Frenchmen - excuse me, Fanbois - can't be wrong! Mind you, people think that FF7 (which was an RPG on rails so strong that the wheels would fall off your buggy if you went off-script) was the best Final Fantasy, too.
>>Characters had actual depth to them.
Meh, not really. Wrex was a lot more interesting than Grunt, for example.
>>Choices in a character's progression had consequences
Eh. I never felt like the choices I made really mattered very much. Especially since ME2 revealed that all the moral choices you made in ME1 had no more consequence than getting a different email from the person in ME2. ("The Rachni would like to thank you for your support!" Really? Do I get a free weapon or something? No? Go away.) DA1 had more meaningful choices, by comparison.
>>ME1 is one of my favorite games but I really think that you didn't give ME2 the chance it deserved.
I beat it, and started playing through it again on the highest difficulty before I became insufferably bored, mainly from having to run around scrounging for single sniper bullets.
The *story* is certainly real. After all, we're all reading it.
Whether or not "my homie Nic Peezy" is a reliable source is, of course, another matter altogether.
As is the fact that anyone can name their network whatever they want. My favorite was a friend's whose SSID was something along the lines of "tell your wife to not quite be so noisy when she's making whoopie" - though much more succinctly, and with a bit less politeness.
>>Hopefully the new engine in Skyrim won't be so broken
Oh, your optimism is refreshing.
Bethesda makes great, buggy, games.
As much crap as Obsidian took for New Vegas, it was probably the least buggy of all the giant-sandbox RPGs made/published by Bethesda since they founded.
I couldn't even get off the boat in Redguard. What boat? Oh, the one you START ON. Shortest game ever.
Seriously. Even simulating a single heart cell is a very complex, compute-intensive task. Simulating heart tissue or the entire heart is even more complicated and time consuming.
Making it a rat heart instead of a human heart doesn't buy you very much, and it's very doubtful a "simple rat model" would be able to simulate what happens when you take certain kinds of drugs that affect, say, cell permeability to various elytes.
>>I'm surprised that even 50% bothered to finish it.
ME2 was a shitty-ass sequel to ME1. They could have just fixed the Mako and inventory issues and had a great sequel, instead they dumbed it down to the point that there were very few choices in character development and item selection. Here's your railroad, hope you enjoy the ride. But at least it was short. I beat it with 100% completion with around 28 hours of gameplay, on hard.
Dragon Age 2 was also a horrible sequel. If the game hadn't been so claustrophobic (it forced you to stay in one city for the entire game), I'd say it would edge out ME2 as being a better sequel, but the cross-class combos made combats a joke (one-shot kill on an entire army?) and the obvious laziness of the designers means DA2 was worse.
I finished both ME2 and DA2, though. I didn't finish RDR, even though I rescued John Marston's family and was in the epilogue missions. Why? It seemed like something horrible was going to happen to his family at the end, and I didn't want to see it.
>>Could you please explain why a judge is elected through politics? It practically guarentees them to be partial. >>There's supposed to be three independant branches of government, yet the legislative seems to control the judicial branch.
Popular elections elect a lot of local judges, not congress.
Judges rarely face challenges in a lot of districts, but sometimes they'll do something that pisses off the electorate so much they lose the next election. It's a check-and-balance type thing.
>>Wow....(no pun intended).... Last quarter wow lost 600k plus another 300k this quarter.... and the news appears now on/?
It's even older news to me. Most people I knew quit circa 2007 or so, with the last holdout in our group of friends just quitting last month.
(My thought when I read this was: wait, people still play WoW?)
Anecdote, I know, but maintaining large subscriber numbers can hide people quitting in droves as long as they are picking up new subscriptions or expanding to new markets.
I went back to play the latest expansion and was profoundly unimpressed with the "new game experience" changes, which basically shoehorn you into one of three builds for each class. Rift (which I still play off and on) has taken the opposite approach, allowing you to choose three classes to play as out of seven, in four different archetypes, allowing a rather fun degree of flexibility in making a class that suits your personality and goals. 4x(seven choose 3) = 140 classes. Kinda.
>>I'd have been interested in learning how these people making less than $2/day are paying for cell service, for one thing.
They're not. Probably. Though it hasn't stopped some idiots on here claiming Google is evil for taking away these poor peoples' water and food.
There's 10 million people with cell phones in Kenya. While this sort of takes away from the breathless "Android is the new Gods Must Be Crazy" theme of the article, there's actually a large telecommunications industry in Kenya.
>>scamming poor naive Africans out of education and drinking water, in favor of crap that won't last, and is of no practical use AT ALL in any developing country - especially Kenya
You don't know very much about Kenya, do you? You think "Africa" and get images of starving Ethiopians, don't cha? Kenya is the most developed country in eastern Africa.
A friend of mine at Verizon worked in Kenya back in the mid-2000s setting up wireless relays. It's not the backwater you're imagining in your head. Kenya has been expanding its telecommunications sector pretty rapidly, and (quick Google search) there's 10 million cell phone users and 7.5 million internet users in this country of 40 million people. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Kenya)
>>you can pretty much stack as much weaponry of every description on a drilling platform as will fit, and it's still pathetically weak by modern military standards. Even granting that nobody will be so uncivil as to use nukes (unless you have them), a single cruiser will take you out handily with conventional weaponry, much less a carrier group.
Why would a cruiser attack you? Does the United States just go around blowing up small islands because it can? (Well, outside of nuclear tests, I suppose.)
In the case of Sealand, they were attacked by mercenaries, and the heir kidnapped. The owner hired mercenaries of his own, and recaptured the place.
If Sealand had a couple hundred guys with guns in the first place, they'd have been able to deal with every single pirate in the English Channel.
>>The problem with mitigating "fraud and waste" is that you can't put metrics on it.
Not true. If you shut down a doctor in Florida that has been engaging in Medicare fraud with the local organized crime syndicates (it's quite common there), you can calculate how much it cost you to investigate and shut it down, and how much you'll save per year. When you do so, you find out that you get back about 10x as much money as it costs for such auditors.
So it's a no-brainer, and we should be doing more of it, especially since we spend more money every year on health care than defense.
With waste, again you're wrong. At UCSF medical school, they actually have a specialized program ("health policy and management") for doing exactly what you say is impossible: calculate how much is going to waste, and figure out ways of doing it better. UCSF grads tend to get snapped up by hospitals all over the country, since they (again) pay for themselves many times over.
These sorts of people are needed both at the local (hospital) level, but even more so at the national level. Our current policies are enormously wasteful in terms of both what they mandate for care, and also by how they have set up the reimbursements system.
>>32% of Tea Party supports respond affirmative for themselves personally, vs only 22% for all respondants.
Again, so what? Do you know how Medicare works? You're essentially required by law and common sense to sign up for it, so all that poll means is that there's 50% more older people in the Tea Party than the general population.
To put it another way - they've been paying into it their whole life, so why should they not take the benefits when they retire?
This is an orthogonal issue to 1) If Medicare is well run (it's not) and 2) If moving to a single payer system for all Americans is a good thing.
>>Good luck finding anyone who doesn't support eliminating waste and fraud in all gov't spending
The problem is that there isn't a line item labeled "waste and fraud" in the various budgets for the various departments.
If there was, it would be easy to eliminate it.
We're talking about health care, and there are two easy ways to eliminate it (which makes up 15% of our very large expenditures, according to gov't auditors): 1) Hire more fraud investigators. They pay back about 10x as much as they cost. 2) Convene a panel of actual doctors to eliminate some of the stupid shit they mandate. and one hard thing: 3) Fix medicare reimbursements.
>>44 percent of Tea Party supporters were polled as receiving Medicare or have a family member receiving it.
Terrible poll (you OR a family member?) and a meaningless statistic, and says nothing about my statement that probably most of them have private insurance. For one thing, all old people basically are mandated by law to have Medicare. I'm surprised it's not closer to 100%. For another, they should have asked about getting actual free health care, not retirement health care that most Americans pay into all their life.
>>The vast majority of Tea Party supporters - 70% according to polls, oppose cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
The vast majority also support eliminating waste and fraud in all gov't spending, including Medicare and Medicaid.
>>No it isn't. I really wish people would read it and understand it before opening their mouth.
Medicare is tremendously wasteful and badly run. Even their own auditors have claimed that one out of seven Medicare dollars goes to fraud and waste. That's 15% of a very large number of dollars.
There's a few very good reasons why this happens: 1) Fraud - Medicare reimbursements are often below cost for doctors, which gives them the "justification" to fraudlently charge the government for additional services. Organized crime in Florida has been especially good at sucking on the gov't teat.
2) Waste - Medicare reimbursements are often below cost for doctors, which incentivizes them to add services that DO generate profit. Analysis of services performed in hospitals reveals this is exactly what happens - that reimbursements that have the largest margin magically get ordered more often. This isn't fraud, per se, since a precautionary endoscopy or whatever has a valid medical purpose, but if hospitals get a thousand bucks profit on every endoscopy, guess what's going to happen?
Defensive medicine, liability avoidance, and malpractice also figure into all of this.
3) Stupid policy. My neighbor is a registered nurse who works on a lot of outpatient surgeries. Every time they do a cataract surgery, they have to take one eyedrop of medicine from a $150 eyedrop bottle, and then throw the rest away to avoid contamination. This sounds good, right? Except (as she pointed out to me), nurses bloody well know how to avoid contaminating eyedrops when they administer it, and if they do contaminate it? They throw it away. They also were forced to buy millions of dollars of additional unneeded equipment by the federal government, which adds even more costs for power, staffing, and maintenance. She said every hospital knows ways they could save money, but federal regulations prohibit a lot of them.
Also in regards to stupid policy, there's conflicting federal and state safety regulations. A friend of mine here in California was the lead pharmacist at a drug manufacturing company that was essentially put out of business by the conflicting demands by federal and state regulators.
"Our public health care system is well run" is nothing more than an offensively wrong liberal talking point.
>>Come on... $1.25M? Nobody's building any kind of large-ish sea-worthy vessel for that kind of money, much less a floating office building, data center, residences, etc.
It'll buy you an in at the Sultanate of Kinakuta. Then you just need to find a large stash of hidden Japanese gold from WWII, and you're all set.
If you'd read his business plan, you'd have seen all that.
>>These people are the same ones who hate obamacare, right up until they need to show up at an ER and expect a free ride
It's EMTALA, not Obamacare, that guarantees free medical care at every ER in the country (and has put a lot of ERs out of business thereby). I'd expect most Tea Partiers to have medical insurance, and so your objection is rather misguided. Their objection is to excessive federal spending (which is absolutely a valid argument, especially when it comes to public health care, which is almost designed to be tremendously wasteful) and to the lack of fiscal responsibility demonstrated by both parties.
>>It's not that they should be worried about our navy attacking them, it is that they expect to pay no taxes and yet have our navy come and defend them
I don't really see that as being a concern. If these libertarians ever do build their Bioshock seastead, I'd expect they'd either contract out for some other navy to protect them, or to just have a lot of guns lying around. If they're like the libertarians I know, it'll be the guns.
>>the U.S. can just declare it a fraud under the aforementioned United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
Which would be amazing, considering we never ratified it.
It's also hard to determine which country would show up to evict you all if you built an island nation in the middle of the Pacific, well away from any country's national borders.
You think the UN supplies an official list of countries to the world, but, you know: Taiwan. If you hold yourself out to be a country, and (best yet) actually develop positive trade relationships with legitimate countries, then you might be able to apply for recognition some day.
I think the bigger problem is getting a bunch of Randians to live in peace at the bottom of the ocean, when there's so much delicious mind-altering ADAM around waiting to be consumed.
>>doesn't realize that multivariate analysis exists doesn't automatically make those insults true.
No? But you're making the same mistakes. You can't look at the fact that blacks have a higher poverty rate, or incarceration rate, or whatever, and prima facie claim discrimination. What if black men are committing 7x the crimes, but only have 5x the incarceration rate? What if schools with large numbers of minority students get bonus funding from school districts? These stats would entirely explode your argument about systemic discrimination, which is why (I suspect) that you want to only cherrypick statistics that make your case look good.
>>The "confounding factors" you listed are, themselves, partially a result of discrimination. Majority-black schools have lower funding than majority-white schools, so they hire less competent teachers.
Fail, fail, fail. POOR schools have lower funding than other schools because schools are paid for by taxation. That's why there's supplementary funding available to them through Title I and related programs. If you can establish for me a majority black school in a rich neighborhood that receives minimal funding, then sure, I'll take that back. But instead, what you'll find is that minority schools get access to a lot of funding sources that majority white schools cannot.
I write grants for school districts. We won't even work with a lot of white school districts, since it is so hard to win grants for them. More rich minority school districts get funded than poor white schools. Try to tell me that's fair, eh? And don't give me any bullshit about there not being any well to do minority school districts, either. I can only take so much liberal delusion at one time.
To put it simply, blaming everything on discrimination is also not an answer. At least not since the 60s. Since then, it has been a *material benefit* to be a minority or a minority school district in America. The only minorities that might actually get systemically discriminated against here in California are Asians, who are doing "too well" according to one of the UC Regents. (Google "Asians and UC Regents" to read all the different ways Asians are getting fucked.) So he wanted to reduce the numbers of them, since he thought they were "boring".
>>black men were incarcerated at a rate over five times that of white men
Stats fail. Incarceration rate is meaningless without a related criminality rate. Which, incidentally, is 7x higher than whites. How are those liberal talking points doing there?
And blaming the high rates of single motherhood - "surely related" to the incarceration rate you say - on this is quite stupid as well. Even though black incarceration rates are high, percentage-wise, in absolute numbers it's not that large. It's a cultural difference, and one we've worked hard to fix (we used to run advanced academic programs for burnt-out black kids in the ghetto around here - it changed their lives). Also, read your Cosby.
Black single mothers are in numbers half as many as white women, but there's six times as many white women in America.
>>And if you really think people with no financial know-how who were misled by predatory lenders (with the responsibility of providing those people sound advice) are as responsible as those who carefully architected massive fraud, you must be a troll (intentionally or not).
I just had dinner with an economist at Fannie Mae last week.
The predatory lending thing was mostly exaggerated. It happened, it is a real thing, don't get me wrong, but it was not an especially major cause of the collapse. People taking out adjustable rate mortgages, in and of itself, is not predatory lending.
It became a cause celebre by Democrats who were seeking to divert blame away from the fact that they forced banks to lend money to poor people, who, by definition, do not have very much money. The Community Reinvestment Act, Fair Housing Act, and so forth, never had a cost estimate done (not even to this day). Not because nobody wanted to do a cost estimate (how many billions or trillions do you think they've cost us at this point?) but because it was not politically expedient to do so. Also, when housing prices constantly rise, your worst-case scenario used to be "take the house from the poor person who can't pay us back and flip it for a profit". That's what bit us in the ass.
You also have idiots like Barney Frank, who was literally in bed with the head of Fannie Mae at the time he was the chairman in charge of regulating the fucking company. Think about that for a second. He vociferously defended the stability of the system and all of the hippie lending policies (again, which Fannie economists have been prohibited from even figuring out how much they cost us) saying that the fundamentals were good, like women's basketball.
The Black Swan also has a very nice (though a bit thin) analysis of why our risk models weren't really acceptable, and probably still aren't.
>>The only stories ruined by spoilers are the ones which rely on silly twists for effect.
When I was a kid, I was told by my friends that Johnny Five died in Short Circuit. I ran out of the theatre when he got taken out, and waited in the lobby for it to end. (I didn't know he came back to life.) So yeah, spoilers really can ruin an experience for you.
>>Which subgroups should he have disaggregated? How would that invalidate his point that white Americans who whine about discrimination are blatantly cherry-picking because discrimination is overwhelmingly worse for other ethnic groups?
Which other ethnic groups? That's part of my point. Vietnamese people were discriminated against pretty heavily back in the 80s, but their average income and education level exceed white Americans now just 30 years later.
But more importantly, he sees something like "Black people make X% less income than white people" to be a sign that society is discriminating against black people, not realizing that you have to disaggregate the various subgroups to help identify confounding factors like high school graduation rates, rates of single motherhood, geographic location, and so forth.
You can't just claim that since black people or Detroitians, or whatever, face higher levels of unemployment that they're being intentionally discriminated against.
Slashdot Mirror
>>You mean like the Galaxy Tab 10.1? It's barred from import into Australia due to Apple successfully winning an injunction against it due to patent disputes.
And you say iPad prices went up, too??
Man, that's a weird coincidence.
>>So how exactly do they want to balance the budget? By not cutting and not raising taxes? This is why they get ridiculed.
So is the notion that raising taxes on the rich by a couple points will balance it, too. The simple fact of the matter is that spending has exploded out of control (up 50% in 5 years) whereas revenues have gone down 20% - and we didn't even have a balanced budget then!
How is it possible that we can increase spending by 50%, in order to stimulate the economy, but when it comes time to dail it back down to where it was before, the cuts are impossible?
>>By just eliminating "waste and fraud"?
>>That's not enough.
Dropping the defense budget back to 2005 levels is a good start. Eliminating waste and fraud from Medicare and Medicaid (which total a greater expense than defense) is another. 15% of a very large number is still a large number.
>>Thing I've found with memory management is, that while it "just works" and you don't have to think of it for relatively straight forward stuff.. when you start getting into more complex OO designs, memory management actually becomes more of a pain in some situation!
Absolutely. When I tested some Java code, it ran correctly on all platforms except one obscure one (WinNT on SGI). On that platform, which was unfortunately something I had to support, it wouldn't unallocate memory correctly, it'd leak out of memory very quickly, and then run as slow as a dog as it swapped frantically.
I had to rewrite my damn code (which had nothing wrong with it) because Java's "write once run anywhere" motto is more or less a myth - when virtual machines are implemented differently, you *don't* have the guarantee of reliability and portability they promised.
>>Oh wait, it seems that YouTube and most of the ME playerbase thinks you're wrong.
One million Frenchmen - excuse me, Fanbois - can't be wrong! Mind you, people think that FF7 (which was an RPG on rails so strong that the wheels would fall off your buggy if you went off-script) was the best Final Fantasy, too.
>>Characters had actual depth to them.
Meh, not really. Wrex was a lot more interesting than Grunt, for example.
>>Choices in a character's progression had consequences
Eh. I never felt like the choices I made really mattered very much. Especially since ME2 revealed that all the moral choices you made in ME1 had no more consequence than getting a different email from the person in ME2. ("The Rachni would like to thank you for your support!" Really? Do I get a free weapon or something? No? Go away.) DA1 had more meaningful choices, by comparison.
>>ME1 is one of my favorite games but I really think that you didn't give ME2 the chance it deserved.
I beat it, and started playing through it again on the highest difficulty before I became insufferably bored, mainly from having to run around scrounging for single sniper bullets.
>>The story is certainly real
The *story* is certainly real. After all, we're all reading it.
Whether or not "my homie Nic Peezy" is a reliable source is, of course, another matter altogether.
As is the fact that anyone can name their network whatever they want. My favorite was a friend's whose SSID was something along the lines of "tell your wife to not quite be so noisy when she's making whoopie" - though much more succinctly, and with a bit less politeness.
>>Hopefully the new engine in Skyrim won't be so broken
Oh, your optimism is refreshing.
Bethesda makes great, buggy, games.
As much crap as Obsidian took for New Vegas, it was probably the least buggy of all the giant-sandbox RPGs made/published by Bethesda since they founded.
I couldn't even get off the boat in Redguard. What boat? Oh, the one you START ON. Shortest game ever.
Seriously. Even simulating a single heart cell is a very complex, compute-intensive task. Simulating heart tissue or the entire heart is even more complicated and time consuming.
Making it a rat heart instead of a human heart doesn't buy you very much, and it's very doubtful a "simple rat model" would be able to simulate what happens when you take certain kinds of drugs that affect, say, cell permeability to various elytes.
>>I'm surprised that even 50% bothered to finish it.
ME2 was a shitty-ass sequel to ME1. They could have just fixed the Mako and inventory issues and had a great sequel, instead they dumbed it down to the point that there were very few choices in character development and item selection. Here's your railroad, hope you enjoy the ride. But at least it was short. I beat it with 100% completion with around 28 hours of gameplay, on hard.
Dragon Age 2 was also a horrible sequel. If the game hadn't been so claustrophobic (it forced you to stay in one city for the entire game), I'd say it would edge out ME2 as being a better sequel, but the cross-class combos made combats a joke (one-shot kill on an entire army?) and the obvious laziness of the designers means DA2 was worse.
I finished both ME2 and DA2, though. I didn't finish RDR, even though I rescued John Marston's family and was in the epilogue missions. Why? It seemed like something horrible was going to happen to his family at the end, and I didn't want to see it.
>>Could you please explain why a judge is elected through politics? It practically guarentees them to be partial.
>>There's supposed to be three independant branches of government, yet the legislative seems to control the judicial branch.
Popular elections elect a lot of local judges, not congress.
Judges rarely face challenges in a lot of districts, but sometimes they'll do something that pisses off the electorate so much they lose the next election. It's a check-and-balance type thing.
>>Wow....(no pun intended).... Last quarter wow lost 600k plus another 300k this quarter.... and the news appears now on /?
It's even older news to me. Most people I knew quit circa 2007 or so, with the last holdout in our group of friends just quitting last month.
(My thought when I read this was: wait, people still play WoW?)
Anecdote, I know, but maintaining large subscriber numbers can hide people quitting in droves as long as they are picking up new subscriptions or expanding to new markets.
I went back to play the latest expansion and was profoundly unimpressed with the "new game experience" changes, which basically shoehorn you into one of three builds for each class. Rift (which I still play off and on) has taken the opposite approach, allowing you to choose three classes to play as out of seven, in four different archetypes, allowing a rather fun degree of flexibility in making a class that suits your personality and goals. 4x(seven choose 3) = 140 classes. Kinda.
>>I'd have been interested in learning how these people making less than $2/day are paying for cell service, for one thing.
They're not. Probably. Though it hasn't stopped some idiots on here claiming Google is evil for taking away these poor peoples' water and food.
There's 10 million people with cell phones in Kenya. While this sort of takes away from the breathless "Android is the new Gods Must Be Crazy" theme of the article, there's actually a large telecommunications industry in Kenya.
>>scamming poor naive Africans out of education and drinking water, in favor of crap that won't last, and is of no practical use AT ALL in any developing country - especially Kenya
You don't know very much about Kenya, do you? You think "Africa" and get images of starving Ethiopians, don't cha? Kenya is the most developed country in eastern Africa.
A friend of mine at Verizon worked in Kenya back in the mid-2000s setting up wireless relays. It's not the backwater you're imagining in your head. Kenya has been expanding its telecommunications sector pretty rapidly, and (quick Google search) there's 10 million cell phone users and 7.5 million internet users in this country of 40 million people. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Kenya)
>>you can pretty much stack as much weaponry of every description on a drilling platform as will fit, and it's still pathetically weak by modern military standards. Even granting that nobody will be so uncivil as to use nukes (unless you have them), a single cruiser will take you out handily with conventional weaponry, much less a carrier group.
Why would a cruiser attack you? Does the United States just go around blowing up small islands because it can? (Well, outside of nuclear tests, I suppose.)
In the case of Sealand, they were attacked by mercenaries, and the heir kidnapped. The owner hired mercenaries of his own, and recaptured the place.
If Sealand had a couple hundred guys with guns in the first place, they'd have been able to deal with every single pirate in the English Channel.
>>The problem with mitigating "fraud and waste" is that you can't put metrics on it.
Not true. If you shut down a doctor in Florida that has been engaging in Medicare fraud with the local organized crime syndicates (it's quite common there), you can calculate how much it cost you to investigate and shut it down, and how much you'll save per year. When you do so, you find out that you get back about 10x as much money as it costs for such auditors.
So it's a no-brainer, and we should be doing more of it, especially since we spend more money every year on health care than defense.
With waste, again you're wrong. At UCSF medical school, they actually have a specialized program ("health policy and management") for doing exactly what you say is impossible: calculate how much is going to waste, and figure out ways of doing it better. UCSF grads tend to get snapped up by hospitals all over the country, since they (again) pay for themselves many times over.
These sorts of people are needed both at the local (hospital) level, but even more so at the national level. Our current policies are enormously wasteful in terms of both what they mandate for care, and also by how they have set up the reimbursements system.
>>32% of Tea Party supports respond affirmative for themselves personally, vs only 22% for all respondants.
Again, so what? Do you know how Medicare works? You're essentially required by law and common sense to sign up for it, so all that poll means is that there's 50% more older people in the Tea Party than the general population.
To put it another way - they've been paying into it their whole life, so why should they not take the benefits when they retire?
This is an orthogonal issue to 1) If Medicare is well run (it's not) and 2) If moving to a single payer system for all Americans is a good thing.
>>Good luck finding anyone who doesn't support eliminating waste and fraud in all gov't spending
They're called "Democrats" and "Republicans".
The problem is that there isn't a line item labeled "waste and fraud" in the various budgets for the various departments.
If there was, it would be easy to eliminate it.
We're talking about health care, and there are two easy ways to eliminate it (which makes up 15% of our very large expenditures, according to gov't auditors):
1) Hire more fraud investigators. They pay back about 10x as much as they cost.
2) Convene a panel of actual doctors to eliminate some of the stupid shit they mandate.
and one hard thing:
3) Fix medicare reimbursements.
>>44 percent of Tea Party supporters were polled as receiving Medicare or have a family member receiving it.
Terrible poll (you OR a family member?) and a meaningless statistic, and says nothing about my statement that probably most of them have private insurance. For one thing, all old people basically are mandated by law to have Medicare. I'm surprised it's not closer to 100%. For another, they should have asked about getting actual free health care, not retirement health care that most Americans pay into all their life.
>>The vast majority of Tea Party supporters - 70% according to polls, oppose cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
The vast majority also support eliminating waste and fraud in all gov't spending, including Medicare and Medicaid.
>>No it isn't. I really wish people would read it and understand it before opening their mouth.
Medicare is tremendously wasteful and badly run. Even their own auditors have claimed that one out of seven Medicare dollars goes to fraud and waste. That's 15% of a very large number of dollars.
There's a few very good reasons why this happens:
1) Fraud - Medicare reimbursements are often below cost for doctors, which gives them the "justification" to fraudlently charge the government for additional services. Organized crime in Florida has been especially good at sucking on the gov't teat.
2) Waste - Medicare reimbursements are often below cost for doctors, which incentivizes them to add services that DO generate profit. Analysis of services performed in hospitals reveals this is exactly what happens - that reimbursements that have the largest margin magically get ordered more often. This isn't fraud, per se, since a precautionary endoscopy or whatever has a valid medical purpose, but if hospitals get a thousand bucks profit on every endoscopy, guess what's going to happen?
Defensive medicine, liability avoidance, and malpractice also figure into all of this.
3) Stupid policy. My neighbor is a registered nurse who works on a lot of outpatient surgeries. Every time they do a cataract surgery, they have to take one eyedrop of medicine from a $150 eyedrop bottle, and then throw the rest away to avoid contamination. This sounds good, right? Except (as she pointed out to me), nurses bloody well know how to avoid contaminating eyedrops when they administer it, and if they do contaminate it? They throw it away. They also were forced to buy millions of dollars of additional unneeded equipment by the federal government, which adds even more costs for power, staffing, and maintenance. She said every hospital knows ways they could save money, but federal regulations prohibit a lot of them.
Also in regards to stupid policy, there's conflicting federal and state safety regulations. A friend of mine here in California was the lead pharmacist at a drug manufacturing company that was essentially put out of business by the conflicting demands by federal and state regulators.
"Our public health care system is well run" is nothing more than an offensively wrong liberal talking point.
>>Come on... $1.25M? Nobody's building any kind of large-ish sea-worthy vessel for that kind of money, much less a floating office building, data center, residences, etc.
It'll buy you an in at the Sultanate of Kinakuta. Then you just need to find a large stash of hidden Japanese gold from WWII, and you're all set.
If you'd read his business plan, you'd have seen all that.
>>These people are the same ones who hate obamacare, right up until they need to show up at an ER and expect a free ride
It's EMTALA, not Obamacare, that guarantees free medical care at every ER in the country (and has put a lot of ERs out of business thereby). I'd expect most Tea Partiers to have medical insurance, and so your objection is rather misguided. Their objection is to excessive federal spending (which is absolutely a valid argument, especially when it comes to public health care, which is almost designed to be tremendously wasteful) and to the lack of fiscal responsibility demonstrated by both parties.
>>It's not that they should be worried about our navy attacking them, it is that they expect to pay no taxes and yet have our navy come and defend them
I don't really see that as being a concern. If these libertarians ever do build their Bioshock seastead, I'd expect they'd either contract out for some other navy to protect them, or to just have a lot of guns lying around. If they're like the libertarians I know, it'll be the guns.
>>the U.S. can just declare it a fraud under the aforementioned United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
Which would be amazing, considering we never ratified it.
It's also hard to determine which country would show up to evict you all if you built an island nation in the middle of the Pacific, well away from any country's national borders.
You think the UN supplies an official list of countries to the world, but, you know: Taiwan. If you hold yourself out to be a country, and (best yet) actually develop positive trade relationships with legitimate countries, then you might be able to apply for recognition some day.
I think the bigger problem is getting a bunch of Randians to live in peace at the bottom of the ocean, when there's so much delicious mind-altering ADAM around waiting to be consumed.
>>doesn't realize that multivariate analysis exists doesn't automatically make those insults true.
No? But you're making the same mistakes. You can't look at the fact that blacks have a higher poverty rate, or incarceration rate, or whatever, and prima facie claim discrimination. What if black men are committing 7x the crimes, but only have 5x the incarceration rate? What if schools with large numbers of minority students get bonus funding from school districts? These stats would entirely explode your argument about systemic discrimination, which is why (I suspect) that you want to only cherrypick statistics that make your case look good.
>>The "confounding factors" you listed are, themselves, partially a result of discrimination. Majority-black schools have lower funding than majority-white schools, so they hire less competent teachers.
Fail, fail, fail. POOR schools have lower funding than other schools because schools are paid for by taxation. That's why there's supplementary funding available to them through Title I and related programs. If you can establish for me a majority black school in a rich neighborhood that receives minimal funding, then sure, I'll take that back. But instead, what you'll find is that minority schools get access to a lot of funding sources that majority white schools cannot.
I write grants for school districts. We won't even work with a lot of white school districts, since it is so hard to win grants for them. More rich minority school districts get funded than poor white schools. Try to tell me that's fair, eh? And don't give me any bullshit about there not being any well to do minority school districts, either. I can only take so much liberal delusion at one time.
To put it simply, blaming everything on discrimination is also not an answer. At least not since the 60s. Since then, it has been a *material benefit* to be a minority or a minority school district in America. The only minorities that might actually get systemically discriminated against here in California are Asians, who are doing "too well" according to one of the UC Regents. (Google "Asians and UC Regents" to read all the different ways Asians are getting fucked.) So he wanted to reduce the numbers of them, since he thought they were "boring".
>>black men were incarcerated at a rate over five times that of white men
Stats fail. Incarceration rate is meaningless without a related criminality rate. Which, incidentally, is 7x higher than whites. How are those liberal talking points doing there?
And blaming the high rates of single motherhood - "surely related" to the incarceration rate you say - on this is quite stupid as well. Even though black incarceration rates are high, percentage-wise, in absolute numbers it's not that large. It's a cultural difference, and one we've worked hard to fix (we used to run advanced academic programs for burnt-out black kids in the ghetto around here - it changed their lives). Also, read your Cosby.
Black single mothers are in numbers half as many as white women, but there's six times as many white women in America.
>>And if you really think people with no financial know-how who were misled by predatory lenders (with the responsibility of providing those people sound advice) are as responsible as those who carefully architected massive fraud, you must be a troll (intentionally or not).
I just had dinner with an economist at Fannie Mae last week.
The predatory lending thing was mostly exaggerated. It happened, it is a real thing, don't get me wrong, but it was not an especially major cause of the collapse. People taking out adjustable rate mortgages, in and of itself, is not predatory lending.
It became a cause celebre by Democrats who were seeking to divert blame away from the fact that they forced banks to lend money to poor people, who, by definition, do not have very much money. The Community Reinvestment Act, Fair Housing Act, and so forth, never had a cost estimate done (not even to this day). Not because nobody wanted to do a cost estimate (how many billions or trillions do you think they've cost us at this point?) but because it was not politically expedient to do so. Also, when housing prices constantly rise, your worst-case scenario used to be "take the house from the poor person who can't pay us back and flip it for a profit". That's what bit us in the ass.
You also have idiots like Barney Frank, who was literally in bed with the head of Fannie Mae at the time he was the chairman in charge of regulating the fucking company. Think about that for a second. He vociferously defended the stability of the system and all of the hippie lending policies (again, which Fannie economists have been prohibited from even figuring out how much they cost us) saying that the fundamentals were good, like women's basketball.
The Black Swan also has a very nice (though a bit thin) analysis of why our risk models weren't really acceptable, and probably still aren't.
>>The only stories ruined by spoilers are the ones which rely on silly twists for effect.
When I was a kid, I was told by my friends that Johnny Five died in Short Circuit. I ran out of the theatre when he got taken out, and waited in the lobby for it to end. (I didn't know he came back to life.) So yeah, spoilers really can ruin an experience for you.
Also, Snape killed Dumbledore.
>>Which subgroups should he have disaggregated? How would that invalidate his point that white Americans who whine about discrimination are blatantly cherry-picking because discrimination is overwhelmingly worse for other ethnic groups?
Which other ethnic groups? That's part of my point. Vietnamese people were discriminated against pretty heavily back in the 80s, but their average income and education level exceed white Americans now just 30 years later.
But more importantly, he sees something like "Black people make X% less income than white people" to be a sign that society is discriminating against black people, not realizing that you have to disaggregate the various subgroups to help identify confounding factors like high school graduation rates, rates of single motherhood, geographic location, and so forth.
You can't just claim that since black people or Detroitians, or whatever, face higher levels of unemployment that they're being intentionally discriminated against.