Unemployment claims went down, that doesn't mean that unemployment went down. I believe all the extensions that people used to be able to get have since expired, so a lot of people won't even bother to file at all now and will use their savings instead. It's fun with numbers, it's not a measure of the state of the economy.
I believe Edge has plugin support in Win10's fast update ring right now, as soon as that hits the slow ring, Edge's usage numbers should rise. I'd use it if it was stable and had an adblocker. Without that, it's pointless.
I bet there are plenty of vehicles on the road that are susceptible to someone installing a floor mat wrong and ending up with it applying pressure to the accelerator. I think it was last August when the NHTSA declined to reopen the issue because no faults could be found in the engine computers despite owners claiming their cars accelerated without driver input. It was hysteria. If you removed the floor mat, you were fine. If you installed the floor mat properly such that the hook connected with the eyelet, you were fine. I had a Toyota at the time and they replaced my accelerator pedal during an annual state inspection without my permission and for no good reason. People were trying to "cash in" on the madness, remember that asshole who was being chased by the police that was breaking and apply gas at the same time? That wasn't the car that was the problem.
The GM issue was absolutely a problem and they attempted to cover it up. Toyota? Not so much.
No. The feds pushed all that drama to try and motivate people to buy from the failing US car makers. If you want to talk about failing to take responsibility, look at GM and the faulty ignition switch that ended up killing people.
It's a problem when it affects enough of the vehicles you've sold. Toyota didn't have a fun time with the recalls over floor mats and pedals. Their service centers ran extended hours for months and they had car rental agencies handling loaners because the dealers didn't have enough. I imagine Tesla is in an odd position since they do direct sales, they don't have dealerships all over to handle these recalls.
You are way off base if you think universal works fantastically in any country. For some things, it's great. For other things, not so much. Specialty care is area where universal systems tend to break down. Think rationing. Think long waiting lists. Think a certain number of procedures allocated for the year regardless of how many patients need it or how long the backlog is, or what the survivability is if people are made to wait. There's a reason why the brits still have private doctors even though they have the NHS, and they've talked about re-privatizing large chunks of the healthcare system because the NHS is failing its patients. I've talked with people from Canada and the UK who have health concerns similar to my own, we get treatment here much quicker.
The VA is universal for veterans. There's nothing small scale about it. The VA is larger than many other country's entire health care system, nationalized or otherwise. What you're saying is that we'd have to go all in and somehow that would improve it. That's insane. If we went all in, it would break down completely. They can't service the veterans we have, let alone the entire population.
There's nothing exceptional about my situation. I work for a major US employer and our plans, up till now, have been great. That's not my experience, that's the experience of any of our employees. There may be an annoying medical coding problem now and then but that tends to be the worst of it. My insurer has nurses on staff and they work with me on managing care. If I don't know which specialist to see, they figure out what the best approach is. When the policy gets modified, they've even called to let me know how to work around the changes so I don't end up with any surprise expenses. That's not just one insurer, we've changed insurers from time to time if the savings was worth it and their usefulness has been fairly consistent.
Universal healthcare is human misery. You can die waiting for treatment on a waiting list, and there's nothing you can do other than go to another country where the system isn't nationalized, and hope that you can afford it. If the US system goes universal, I don't know where the waited listed would go. The federal government was never intended to have this much control over our lives. Congress has sky-high disapproval ratings yet people still say they support universal healthcare. Those people that we have no faith in would be the ones enacting it. It makes no sense. We know they're incapable. It would be devastating.
AHA is the Affordable Healthcare Act, also known as Obamacare.
Instead of the mandate, I would like to have seen health insurance move from the employer to the individual. I don't get my auto insurance from work, I don't get my homeowner's insurance from work, why do we get our health insurance that way? This would make individual plans more affordable because there'd be a lot more people buying them. They're sky high now because very few get insurance that way. If it's affordable, more healthy people would buy in. In theory, the state exchanges could do this, but those are a complete mess.. at least in my area, if not everywhere. It's not without challenges. At work, you're accepted no matter what. I don't think that's true of individual plans. But that's something that could be addressed.
I didn't have a plan for an employment gap pre-Obamacare because I've never had a gap in employment anywhere near that long. I somehow dodged that during the dot com crash.
This whole thing is a mess and I do wish that universal health care could fix it, but just look what happened with healthcare.gov.. they can't even set up a website, who would be crazy enough to think they could run healthcare for the whole country? Our politicians work for the corporations, so it'd still be a capitalist solution but they'd be shielded by the fact that you can't effectively sue the government on stuff like this.
There's so much with our healthcare system that I don't understand. If I bring my car in for service, I get an estimate. If I bring my body in for service, there aren't even prices listed for anything, nor is an estimate likely. Why do healthcare providers get away with that? No other type of business would. It's such a daunting problem in so many ways.
It's a tricky thing. We vote for President every four years, and we expect the candidates to have intricate plans for so many different issues. It's really not feasible, is it? Foreign policy, health care policy, education, finance, energy, environment, etc. That's why we end up with hand waving. And let's be honest, the AHA had a whole lot of hand waving of its own. If you like your plan, you can keep it. Period.
I don't know if there's a solution that's good for everyone. I think some number of people will be harmed either way. In my own case, I was better off before. How do we fix it? I don't know, I don't think anyone else knows either.
How are you not considering only your own experience? Like any industry, there are bad companies and good companies. You're also wrong in saying that insurance's sole purpose is to profit from misery. I can understand why you think that given your story, but it's simply not true. You know what happens without health insurance? Health care providers end up charging anything they want, especially in urgent or emergency care because they know patients can't effectively "shop around" in an urgent or emergency situation. Health insurance has contracts with providers that control the costs we pay for different types of care. If you look at your insurance claim, easily half the amount billed by the provider is instantly wiped away by those contracted rates. In my own case, I have some pretty serious medical issues, and the insurance that I'm going to lose next year does play a role in managing care across specialists. That's something that I'm going to have to do going forward, which is ugly considering I work full time. At some point, I'll be a full time patient and either end up homeless or on disability even though I have a solution today that works.
Universal health care is a disaster. Profit motive works. What you're proposing is that we all go to the VA, like our veterans do. Except that the VA is constantly having scandals and often fails to serve its patients quickly enough. The lucky ones end up going to for-profit facilities for treatment. If you take those away, then we have no other option. The government ends up running the health care facilities either directly or through purse-strings, and we all get screwed. Patients in other countries that have socialized care come here when they're unable to get timely treatment at home. Poof, that's gone too. At least you can pay out of pocket or choose different insurers or providers. Taking all that away is not good for anyone. Remember when Obama told someone on the campaign trail that instead of getting surgery, maybe she just gets a pain pill instead? That's not the future I want for anyone.
That's what the AHA does, but I'm not a fan of the government forcing us to purchase things. I'd rather deal with the preexisting condition clauses rather than allowing the federal government to dictate health insurance. This is something that COBRA was meant to address. Since many/most people get health insurance from their employer, it provided a way of maintaining health insurance while between jobs such that there was no significant gap in coverage. If you had no significant gap, then the preexisting condition clause of the new policy didn't apply.
COBRA was voluntary. Now we're penalized if we have a significant gap of insurance coverage no matter what. That's not really an improvement. Next year my employer switches everyone to a health savings account with a disaster plan for insurance. That really screws over anyone with preexisting conditions that require maintenance medication and/or routine visits to a specialist. That's going to be all out-of-pocket since the health savings accounts start off empty. We had great PPO options and now we're basically not going to have health insurance at all. "Thanks Obama!"
How do you sell insurance if you can't deny pre-existing conditions for at least the first year? All that does is allow healthy people to forgo having insurance until they end up needing an expensive surgery or some other high cost care. Then they buy insurance, never having contributed to the risk pool they're withdrawing from. They can even drop it afterwards and repeat the process later on.
Yea, I'm not sure what the point of the article is. This is just the continuing decline of American manufacturing. We don't build computers here anymore so obviously computer manufacturing (the steepest loss listed in the article) would be hurt by that. Broadening the scope, software solutions tend to replace specialized hardware solutions because it makes things less expensive. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone either.
Government is preventing competition. In many parts of this area there's one cable provider and one telephone provider, they get exclusive rights for some number of years by the city or town. The two providers know they don't have to offer higher speeds if they both stay slow, so that's what they do. Municipal fiber might help, but it's probably only the cities that can do it, which leaves out rural. It's doubly annoying for me, I know there's a major fiber bundle just down the road, but will either provider tap into it? Hell no. I see fiber utility trucks every other day, just to rub it in.
Comcrap had a contract renewal recently with my city, the public input was horrible, and then the city granted them the contract. Un-f'ing-believable.
Huh? Verizon isn't even in half of New England. Fairpoint is the provider for VT, NH, and ME, and they suck. I had 30mbs over DSL briefly but had to cut it in half because it kept losing sync. We're never getting fiber. Ever.
Pacifism is great until a bunch of people run in with Kalashnikovs screaming "allah akbar".
Your question is a bit presumptuous. The popular term right now is "economic migrant" because it would appear that they're migrating not because they fear for their lives, but more so because they see an opportunity to relocate to a wealthier nation with the hopes of attaining some of that wealth. That's why they're so desperate to get to countries that offer more in the way of benefits. Then there are the unknown quantity of migrants who are actually jihadists that seek entry to countries that otherwise wouldn't allow them in. At least one of the attacks in the most recent Paris attacks came in via Greece as a refugee. Greece said as much, they couldn't verify the guy's documentation because he claimed to be from an area that has no effective government to confirm his papers. Then there's the non-terrorist violent criminals that enter and end up raping the women in the guest country. That's not exactly respectful of human rights either. Something is seriously wrong if your country is telling you not to go outside alone or at night because it's too dangerous because of *reasons*.
I don't agree with the other person's "blood on their hands " or "no innocents" comments, but there are very good reasons to deny immigration and to send back people that have already entered.
Has it never occurred to you that most immigrants from the Middle East are in your (and my) fine country precisely because they don't like murderous regimes, suicide bombs, and countries which don't respect human rights? Or is that too obvious?
So.. cowards basically, right?
Why would we want to admit able-bodied adults who have shown an unwillingness to aid in the common defense of their fellow citizens?
What attacks? He wants a temporary ban on immigration. You know, the same exact thing that France did after 130 people were slaughtered in Paris. Is France now a hard-line conservative nation full of racists scared of poor women and children? No, they're a nation that's trying to defend its citizens.
Their instructions missed a step because I had the same problem. It had to be plugged in with airplane mode off, which they got right. But instead of syncing, I had to actually navigate to the Kindle store from the device. When I did that, it grabbed the update automatically that night while it was charging. Even so, I still got the postcard.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when do rules matter when it comes to the federal government? Obama could just make an executive order.
What happened to the days of highly functional web interfaces?
User Experience (UX) Engineering.
It doesn't have to function, but it has to have a damn nice drop shadow with rounded edges.
Unemployment claims went down, that doesn't mean that unemployment went down. I believe all the extensions that people used to be able to get have since expired, so a lot of people won't even bother to file at all now and will use their savings instead. It's fun with numbers, it's not a measure of the state of the economy.
I believe Edge has plugin support in Win10's fast update ring right now, as soon as that hits the slow ring, Edge's usage numbers should rise. I'd use it if it was stable and had an adblocker. Without that, it's pointless.
Just like marriage. No one knows what the fuck it means anymore because anything other than everything is "discrimination"!
This society is so screwed.
I bet there are plenty of vehicles on the road that are susceptible to someone installing a floor mat wrong and ending up with it applying pressure to the accelerator. I think it was last August when the NHTSA declined to reopen the issue because no faults could be found in the engine computers despite owners claiming their cars accelerated without driver input. It was hysteria. If you removed the floor mat, you were fine. If you installed the floor mat properly such that the hook connected with the eyelet, you were fine. I had a Toyota at the time and they replaced my accelerator pedal during an annual state inspection without my permission and for no good reason. People were trying to "cash in" on the madness, remember that asshole who was being chased by the police that was breaking and apply gas at the same time? That wasn't the car that was the problem.
The GM issue was absolutely a problem and they attempted to cover it up. Toyota? Not so much.
No. The feds pushed all that drama to try and motivate people to buy from the failing US car makers. If you want to talk about failing to take responsibility, look at GM and the faulty ignition switch that ended up killing people.
It's a problem when it affects enough of the vehicles you've sold. Toyota didn't have a fun time with the recalls over floor mats and pedals. Their service centers ran extended hours for months and they had car rental agencies handling loaners because the dealers didn't have enough. I imagine Tesla is in an odd position since they do direct sales, they don't have dealerships all over to handle these recalls.
You are way off base if you think universal works fantastically in any country. For some things, it's great. For other things, not so much. Specialty care is area where universal systems tend to break down. Think rationing. Think long waiting lists. Think a certain number of procedures allocated for the year regardless of how many patients need it or how long the backlog is, or what the survivability is if people are made to wait. There's a reason why the brits still have private doctors even though they have the NHS, and they've talked about re-privatizing large chunks of the healthcare system because the NHS is failing its patients. I've talked with people from Canada and the UK who have health concerns similar to my own, we get treatment here much quicker.
The VA is universal for veterans. There's nothing small scale about it. The VA is larger than many other country's entire health care system, nationalized or otherwise. What you're saying is that we'd have to go all in and somehow that would improve it. That's insane. If we went all in, it would break down completely. They can't service the veterans we have, let alone the entire population.
There's nothing exceptional about my situation. I work for a major US employer and our plans, up till now, have been great. That's not my experience, that's the experience of any of our employees. There may be an annoying medical coding problem now and then but that tends to be the worst of it. My insurer has nurses on staff and they work with me on managing care. If I don't know which specialist to see, they figure out what the best approach is. When the policy gets modified, they've even called to let me know how to work around the changes so I don't end up with any surprise expenses. That's not just one insurer, we've changed insurers from time to time if the savings was worth it and their usefulness has been fairly consistent.
Universal healthcare is human misery. You can die waiting for treatment on a waiting list, and there's nothing you can do other than go to another country where the system isn't nationalized, and hope that you can afford it. If the US system goes universal, I don't know where the waited listed would go. The federal government was never intended to have this much control over our lives. Congress has sky-high disapproval ratings yet people still say they support universal healthcare. Those people that we have no faith in would be the ones enacting it. It makes no sense. We know they're incapable. It would be devastating.
AHA is the Affordable Healthcare Act, also known as Obamacare.
Instead of the mandate, I would like to have seen health insurance move from the employer to the individual. I don't get my auto insurance from work, I don't get my homeowner's insurance from work, why do we get our health insurance that way? This would make individual plans more affordable because there'd be a lot more people buying them. They're sky high now because very few get insurance that way. If it's affordable, more healthy people would buy in. In theory, the state exchanges could do this, but those are a complete mess.. at least in my area, if not everywhere. It's not without challenges. At work, you're accepted no matter what. I don't think that's true of individual plans. But that's something that could be addressed.
I didn't have a plan for an employment gap pre-Obamacare because I've never had a gap in employment anywhere near that long. I somehow dodged that during the dot com crash.
This whole thing is a mess and I do wish that universal health care could fix it, but just look what happened with healthcare.gov.. they can't even set up a website, who would be crazy enough to think they could run healthcare for the whole country? Our politicians work for the corporations, so it'd still be a capitalist solution but they'd be shielded by the fact that you can't effectively sue the government on stuff like this.
There's so much with our healthcare system that I don't understand. If I bring my car in for service, I get an estimate. If I bring my body in for service, there aren't even prices listed for anything, nor is an estimate likely. Why do healthcare providers get away with that? No other type of business would. It's such a daunting problem in so many ways.
It's a tricky thing. We vote for President every four years, and we expect the candidates to have intricate plans for so many different issues. It's really not feasible, is it? Foreign policy, health care policy, education, finance, energy, environment, etc. That's why we end up with hand waving. And let's be honest, the AHA had a whole lot of hand waving of its own. If you like your plan, you can keep it. Period.
I don't know if there's a solution that's good for everyone. I think some number of people will be harmed either way. In my own case, I was better off before. How do we fix it? I don't know, I don't think anyone else knows either.
How are you not considering only your own experience? Like any industry, there are bad companies and good companies. You're also wrong in saying that insurance's sole purpose is to profit from misery. I can understand why you think that given your story, but it's simply not true. You know what happens without health insurance? Health care providers end up charging anything they want, especially in urgent or emergency care because they know patients can't effectively "shop around" in an urgent or emergency situation. Health insurance has contracts with providers that control the costs we pay for different types of care. If you look at your insurance claim, easily half the amount billed by the provider is instantly wiped away by those contracted rates. In my own case, I have some pretty serious medical issues, and the insurance that I'm going to lose next year does play a role in managing care across specialists. That's something that I'm going to have to do going forward, which is ugly considering I work full time. At some point, I'll be a full time patient and either end up homeless or on disability even though I have a solution today that works.
Universal health care is a disaster. Profit motive works. What you're proposing is that we all go to the VA, like our veterans do. Except that the VA is constantly having scandals and often fails to serve its patients quickly enough. The lucky ones end up going to for-profit facilities for treatment. If you take those away, then we have no other option. The government ends up running the health care facilities either directly or through purse-strings, and we all get screwed. Patients in other countries that have socialized care come here when they're unable to get timely treatment at home. Poof, that's gone too. At least you can pay out of pocket or choose different insurers or providers. Taking all that away is not good for anyone. Remember when Obama told someone on the campaign trail that instead of getting surgery, maybe she just gets a pain pill instead? That's not the future I want for anyone.
That's what the AHA does, but I'm not a fan of the government forcing us to purchase things. I'd rather deal with the preexisting condition clauses rather than allowing the federal government to dictate health insurance. This is something that COBRA was meant to address. Since many/most people get health insurance from their employer, it provided a way of maintaining health insurance while between jobs such that there was no significant gap in coverage. If you had no significant gap, then the preexisting condition clause of the new policy didn't apply.
COBRA was voluntary. Now we're penalized if we have a significant gap of insurance coverage no matter what. That's not really an improvement. Next year my employer switches everyone to a health savings account with a disaster plan for insurance. That really screws over anyone with preexisting conditions that require maintenance medication and/or routine visits to a specialist. That's going to be all out-of-pocket since the health savings accounts start off empty. We had great PPO options and now we're basically not going to have health insurance at all. "Thanks Obama!"
How do you sell insurance if you can't deny pre-existing conditions for at least the first year? All that does is allow healthy people to forgo having insurance until they end up needing an expensive surgery or some other high cost care. Then they buy insurance, never having contributed to the risk pool they're withdrawing from. They can even drop it afterwards and repeat the process later on.
Yea, I'm not sure what the point of the article is. This is just the continuing decline of American manufacturing. We don't build computers here anymore so obviously computer manufacturing (the steepest loss listed in the article) would be hurt by that. Broadening the scope, software solutions tend to replace specialized hardware solutions because it makes things less expensive. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone either.
If you're trying to escape bloatware, Verizon is not your salvation.
Government is preventing competition. In many parts of this area there's one cable provider and one telephone provider, they get exclusive rights for some number of years by the city or town. The two providers know they don't have to offer higher speeds if they both stay slow, so that's what they do. Municipal fiber might help, but it's probably only the cities that can do it, which leaves out rural. It's doubly annoying for me, I know there's a major fiber bundle just down the road, but will either provider tap into it? Hell no. I see fiber utility trucks every other day, just to rub it in.
Comcrap had a contract renewal recently with my city, the public input was horrible, and then the city granted them the contract. Un-f'ing-believable.
Huh? Verizon isn't even in half of New England. Fairpoint is the provider for VT, NH, and ME, and they suck. I had 30mbs over DSL briefly but had to cut it in half because it kept losing sync. We're never getting fiber. Ever.
Just send me the file to my Yahoo email address, the corporate one is a PITA.
Bad news - your son died because we didn't know he was allergic to the meds we gave him because that information was destroyed by hackers.
Pacifism is great until a bunch of people run in with Kalashnikovs screaming "allah akbar".
Your question is a bit presumptuous. The popular term right now is "economic migrant" because it would appear that they're migrating not because they fear for their lives, but more so because they see an opportunity to relocate to a wealthier nation with the hopes of attaining some of that wealth. That's why they're so desperate to get to countries that offer more in the way of benefits. Then there are the unknown quantity of migrants who are actually jihadists that seek entry to countries that otherwise wouldn't allow them in. At least one of the attacks in the most recent Paris attacks came in via Greece as a refugee. Greece said as much, they couldn't verify the guy's documentation because he claimed to be from an area that has no effective government to confirm his papers. Then there's the non-terrorist violent criminals that enter and end up raping the women in the guest country. That's not exactly respectful of human rights either. Something is seriously wrong if your country is telling you not to go outside alone or at night because it's too dangerous because of *reasons*.
I don't agree with the other person's "blood on their hands " or "no innocents" comments, but there are very good reasons to deny immigration and to send back people that have already entered.
Has it never occurred to you that most immigrants from the Middle East are in your (and my) fine country precisely because they don't like murderous regimes, suicide bombs, and countries which don't respect human rights? Or is that too obvious?
So.. cowards basically, right?
Why would we want to admit able-bodied adults who have shown an unwillingness to aid in the common defense of their fellow citizens?
What attacks? He wants a temporary ban on immigration. You know, the same exact thing that France did after 130 people were slaughtered in Paris. Is France now a hard-line conservative nation full of racists scared of poor women and children? No, they're a nation that's trying to defend its citizens.
Their instructions missed a step because I had the same problem. It had to be plugged in with airplane mode off, which they got right. But instead of syncing, I had to actually navigate to the Kindle store from the device. When I did that, it grabbed the update automatically that night while it was charging. Even so, I still got the postcard.
Yes, one postcard is just like multiple bound piles of paper.