> I won't outright object to a single-payer tax supported medical system, but it's pretty obvious that we'd need to put some rules into place as it's not financially viable to provide the unlimited care that people are capable of consuming.
And yet countries like Canada where I live have a lower healthcare spend per capita, we have a longer life expectancy, and nobody here goes bankrupt from medical conditions. The problem in the US isn't that the people will "consume too much healthcare", the problem is you have a system built where several levels of companies have their hands out to gouge as much as they can. In the US the hospitals and the insurance companies negotiate prices for everything and with several companies in the mix everyone wants (and gets) their piece. In Canada, we have a single payer system where the government runs a board of doctors who determine what a procedure should cost and that is what a doctor or hospital will be paid for that procedure or visit. Period.
>The most obvious are that taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize the consequences if your unhealthy lifestyle.
Hello slippery slope. What's an unhealthy lifestyle? Obesity sure, same with smoking and drinking. But what about other things? Play football, hockey, basketball? Go skydiving, rock climbing, biking or kayaking? Skiing? Construction? All of those activities and more can lead to very expensive injuries. If premiums go up for unhealthy lifestyles, why not risky ones too? Hell for that matter what about using a car, driver or passenger? Statistically the average person will be in 2.7 significant car accidents in their lifetime. So really if you use vehicles it's not a matter of if, but when you will become a burden to your healthcare provider. Better bump those peoples' premiums too....
As I mentioned to operagost, the early Hyundais were a travesty. I worked with a guy who had a mid 80s Pony and the thing was a joke. But rather than taking the domestic car makers approach and believing their shit didn't stink, Hyundai recognized they had a problem and went through a massive improvement program and by the mid 90s when I got my first Accent, they'd practically turned night into day for reliability. My 2003 Accent that I had for 11 years, not a single problem. The only expenses were gas, oil changes and scheduled maintenance on it the whole time I owned it.
I had a 75 Ford, an 86 or 87 Ford, my friend had a 2001 Ford, and just a couple of weeks ago we had a story here in Canada about a guy who wasn't able to find a part to fix his 2009 F150 - which is apparently the most prolific Ford vehicle sold in North America:
"The heating system on his 2009 truck suddenly failed, blowing only extremely hot air on the passenger side — so hot, no one could sit in the passenger seat. But the biggest problem? It can't be fixed. "It's crazy," says Rubner. "My truck is only seven years old.""
So that's 35 years of consistent *crap* behavior and unreliability from Ford. Even if they have managed to turn the ship around - and considering that we are discussing this in an article devoted to how their recent cars infotainment systems are unusable that doesn't appear to be the case - based on that history I'm sure as hell not going to give them another chance.
And let's look at Hyundai by comparison. In the 80s, the Pony was synonymous with cheap crap imports. The Scoupe of the early 90s that got replaced by the Accent was OKish, the 94 Accent I bought was a great budget car with few features but worked well enough. The 2003 Accent I bought was a fantastic car - again budget but with more features. I would have bought another Hyundai instead of my Mazda but they didn't have a model of the Elantra with a nav system (the tech package) that was a stick shift, only automatics, and I don't like automatics so I looked elsewhere.
So to recap, Ford was shit in the 70s, and they're shit now. Hyundai was Super Shit in the early 80s, and now they're fantastic. Both companies have a rep and a track record but only one of them is a good track record.
My first Ford was a badly beaten up '75 Mustang II with a 6 cylinder and a 4 speed stick - of which 2nd gear didn't engage so shifting was 1-3-4. I bought it for $200 so I wasn't expecting much to be honest. But even with that, that thing managed to disappoint me. When I bought it the driver's side window was missing so I got another at a wrecker and then spent 4 hours putting it in. This was a job I had done on other cars in less than an hour. It wasn't stuck nuts/bolts or anything like that, it was just bad design like whoever laid the door out never expected someone would ever have to replace the glass so it was a massive chore that required nearly taking the door completely apart. Same deal with the engine, the engine bay was too damn small to comfortably work on anything, and to get at just about anything you had to take off hoses and belts. After about 6 months of driving it the clutch seized and I couldn't be arsed to fix it so I had it towed for scrap and got $75 of my original investment on the deal.
Next and final Ford was a Tempo, 86 or 87 I think with an automatic transmission. Don't really remember the year. Bought it off a relative. Don't *EVER* buy a car off a relative as an aside. Two days after I get it, it starts randomly shutting the engine off while driving. Sometimes it would start right up again, other times you'd wait up to an hour and it starts again. Several trips to the garage later (where most of the time they couldn't reproduce the problem) it's finally revealed one of the controller boards has a minuscule crack in it and when it shorts out it thinks someone's stealing the car and kills the engine. So, that gets fixed. Then a few months later the radiator core lets go on the freeway on a drive across town. This was a car that at the time was less than 9 years old. So that gets fixed. Then, about a year later the transmission makes a weird lurch when I take off from a stop light. I take it in, the transmission guy says it looks OK and he can't reproduce the issue or find anything wrong from his external inspections - short of pulling the transmission apart - no filings in the transmission fluid, etc. So I drive away and 2 days later the transmission makes the same lurch, then a noise like a cat playing with a blender, and the car loses all propulsion. Towed it to the transmission guy, he opens the pan and pieces just rain out. $1500 later, car works again. Drive it another 6 months it starts blowing blue smoke so we're now looking at serious engine work. Drove it to a Hyundai dealership, traded it in and got a used Accent - stick shift. That Tempo was the first and last automatic car I have owned.
Drove that Hyundai for almost 10 years, great car. Bought another one and drove that for 11 years before trading it in and trying a Mazda 3. Also great car. Screw domestic cars, especially Ford.
Bonus - friend of mine was borrowing his brother's 2001 Focus while his brother was out of the country. Over at my place and he's got to head home. Goes out to the car, knocks on my door 20 minutes later saying "The car won't start. Again. It does this thing where sometimes it won't start and you have to wait a while". He waits another hour, tries again, it doesn't start. I drive him home. He comes back the next day, still doesn't start. He has it towed to the dealer. It's a known problem with the ignition, but the car is out of warranty except for the drivetrain warranty and according to the dealer the ignition isn't part of the drivetrain. Ford USA is doing free replacements on this problem even out of warranty, but we're in Canada and Ford Canada says screw you man, pay $1000 to get it fixed. So he pays, what choice does he have?
Depends. I've got a Mazda 3 and I think the system in it is very well designed and easy to use, with only a minor quirk for accepting an address in the nav that trips you up (no pun intended) the first couple of times until you understand that the red highlight on the QWE button will accept the address in front of you on the display when you press the selector to proceed - just an odd little UX improvement could smooth that out.
Compare and contrast with the Acura system. My dad had an old Acura TL from 2003 that the nav in worked reasonably well and the UI was bland but functional. He traded that in for a 2016 TL and holy shit I cannot believe how bad the user interface on that thing is. It's like they went out of their way to screw with you. He told me he was having trouble using it and I was figuring "eh, older people and tech", but no. I spent 10 minutes trying to get an address into the damn thing and gave up. Reading the manual eventually sussed out how to do it, but for crying out loud, you should easily be able to enter an address into a nav system without having to resort to consulting the manual.
Cost is another reason I liked the Mazda system more. Everything was already built in to the car and Nav was a $300 option with updates for the life of the warranty, unlike the Acura "give me your wallet" model for updates.
Unfortunate fact of life: If your entire revenue stream is based on someone else's infrastructure (like the App Store), you are completely at another non-interested party's mercy. Same goes for all these apps and sites that repackage other content, all it takes is one change upstream and you're screwed.
I'm interpreting it as a software problem instead of a hardware one. I imagine it will already do everything but support the handheld remote and the NFC sensor with every phone out there, and the remote should be a quick driver write away. I have a knock-off Cardboard that everything works on my G3 except the magnetic click sensor for example.
"Currently, Daydream is only working on Google's new Pixel and Pixel XL phones, but the View is supposed to hold any phone that ends up supporting the platform "
They made the API available is what I take away from that. So if it isn't supporting other phones, maybe ask your vendor of choice why not.
Keep friends close and enemies closer? It could be argued the site is a relatively easy way to keep an eye on a lot of people who engage in that borderline illegal behavior. Shut it down and they'll scatter to who knows where. The problem won't disappear, you just won't know where to find it as easily.
>(wherein I don't even see anyone saying "just use an old box for pfsense and be done")
As I've gotten older and I do this stuff for my day job my enthusiasm for doing it on off hours has waned, especially now that there are consumer devices that will get you 99% of the way there with very little hassle and the devices are silent and small compared to even an old HTPC case. A lot of people aren't going to customize anything if they can get close enough with an off the shelf product. That said, I did throw Tomato on my ASUS RT-N16 so perhaps I am not 100% sold on off the shelf.
I haven't bought a D-Link router in years. They used to be all right value for the money but over the last 6-8 years it seems like the quality vastly varied between even small model revisions so I got tired of the D-Link Russian Roulette and started buying other routers. ASUS routers have been consistently good in my experience so far, Linksys is a crap shoot like D-Link so I avoid, NetGear is utilitarian but acceptable.
> Insurance covers unexpected high costs, NOT routine, day-to-day expenses. Consider home insurance. You use home insurance if your house burns down, or floods, not to change a light bulb or fix a leaky faucet.
I get that, but what I am saying is in Canada, UHC covers both for health related items.
> I can afford a $25 visit, for a flu shot or whatever. That's a routine, expected day-to-day expense. I used to pay for $25 and that was that. Now, the flu shot goes through multiple levels of huge bureaucracies, so it has a total cost of $75-$150 an it takes three months for the doctor to get paid.
Here if you want a flu shot and you fall into a high risk category - immune issues, elderly, children, the shot is free either at your doctor, a clinic, or at a drug store. If you don't fall in that group, go to Shoppers Drug or Rexall (drug stores) and pay $15-$20. Done. No claims, no forms, no bs.
Exactly right. If we applied the same "but it's got to be safe" hand waving that we do today to historical ventures, we'd still be sitting in Europe wondering about crossing the ocean in sail powered craft and dreaming of flying craft - and the regulations we'd have to slap on them.
Oh I am well aware of the ACA, and I'm also aware that there are a bunch of companies playing games with what constitutes "full time" or meeting the minimum requirements for full time head count, etc. Example: a company had 60 employees full time prior to the ACA's passing, and once that passed they decided to get rid of 11 FTE positions and replace those with 15-20 part time positions. Presto! No need to follow the ACA because now they only have 49 FTEs and the cutoff is 50. Or if that makes it too obvious they could cut back to 40 FTEs..
So a bunch of workers get screwed by having their hours cut from 40 to 30, that's not the owner's problem... he started his own company so he wouldn't be in that boat. If everyone who worked for him wasn't so lazy they could do the same and they wouldn't be whining about losing 25% of their wage. So really it's their own fault....... The preceding was sarcasm, but sadly yes there are some people who *really* think like that. Those people are usually the ones who end up playing games with headcount to get around regulations as well.
>You know, insurance, a system that covers unexpected high costs that I can't readily cover out-of-pocket.
Yes, that's what we have in Canada. When my mother was in the hospital for a month the only thing we paid for was parking and crappy vending machine food. I think the most expensive health care item that someone I know personally has had to shell out for was $60-$70 for a pair of crutches when they had a broken leg.
>$6000 on the government spending PERSON (plus $500 out of pocket). You probably have either kids or parents who are paying very little tax, if any. Guess who is paying the $6,000 each that they cost?
OK, so you seem to have a potential understanding of the term "per capita" and how that relates tangentially to a taxpayer.
So now you can go ahead and explain the following: if I the Canadian taxpayer pay $5292 per person for 4 people that makes 20k per taxpayer, how much does the average US taxpayer pay in healthcare costs if the per capita costs for the US are $9403 per capita? Sounds like $38000 to me.... Please, do explain how that's better than paying $20000.
>Employers provide health coverage in the US.
SOME employers. Many do not. Or many only partially pay.
>They said $1,200, but only $1,000 during off hours, and $650 if I filed the insurance form rather than having them handle it (which means they get paid immediately from my HSA). From $2,000 with the "normal" method that 99% of people do to $1,200 just by making one quick phone call! Another $200 saved if I came in after work, when they less busy. That's fully half the cost saved. What if there were a system that encouraged people to cut the costs in half by making a phone call and scheduling the appointment for 5:30, when they get off work.
Did you know that hospitals and clinics in Canada don't even have POS systems or cash registers? That nobody gets a bill as they walk out? That nobody has to "file insurance forms" for anything other than eyeglasses and dental work?
> The systems are actually quite similar, just basically in Canada the government runs the one and only insurance company.
And that actually makes all the difference in the world. The Canadian government sets the prices that hospitals get paid for everything, advised by a rotating board of doctors. There are no middleman HMOs taking their share of profit and trying to gouge wherever they can. This is the primary reason the per capita costs in Canada are half of what the US's are. Here we treat it as a service, not a profit center.
You've still failed to address my point. What is your final take home pay after everything including your healthcare costs vs what it would be in Canada? Have you checked? There are tons of online calculators that can tell you in about 2 minutes. I ran them. My results were that if I was in Texas and I had to pay even $20 a month for any healthcare at all, I'd make less than if I stayed here in Vancouver. But you do have excellent tacos there so I can see how that might be a draw.
> The average Canadian taxpayer pays about $20,000 / year for health care costs.
Your numbers are off by almost a factor of 4, actually. The per capita costs for healthcare in 2015 was $5292 for Canada and $9403 for the US.
>Personally, I'd rather pay "hundreds a month in Texas" via my employer than thousands via the govt in Canada, but if you like what you have, great!
It's all about take home pay at the end of the day, right? I ran my income through a tax calculator for Texas and BC (where I live) and it tells me that in USD, I would have an annual take home pay of $132 extra living in Texas. $132 for the year. Before spending a cent on health care. So yeah, I'll stay where I am thanks.
Don't take my word for it though, run the numbers yourself and see. Then add whatever you're paying per month for health care to make it apples to apples and see how it all looks. You'll probably be surprised and not in a good way. For some reason to this day this bizarre myth that Canadians pay Scandinavian level taxes persists when we're in reality probably paying less tax than you are, especially once you roll in health care costs.
I dunno, they're using a reusable booster. I'd prefer to be going up on the 'virgin' launch on the booster instead of the second go around. I'd expect the second launch would be the more risky of the two.
Or I could just stay in Canada and enjoy my universal healthcare vs paying hundreds a month in Texas to a private insurer. Plus I can go swimming in the ocean in the morning and snowboarding in the mountains a couple hours later so that's fun too.
Different parts of the world have different advantages and disadvantages. Some people live in Cali because there are things there that aren't in Texas. Or I live in BC for the same reasons. If everything was down to dollars, we'd all live in the middle of nowhere. But then that would get expensive with the rush of people going there.
This looks like a solution searching for a problem to solve. Who really needs their Plex library "in the cloud"? The vast use case for it is as a home media server so if you go the Amazon cloud way instead you get to upload it all (at a painfully slow rate in many areas) then have it eat into your data cap a second time as you stream it to watch. Not to mention if you have any files of a less than 100% above the board nature, the MPAA/RIAA and a subpoena may start poking around in the PlexAzon caches to see what needs a closer look. No thanks.
Not to mention their idiotic proposition 65 that forced the labeling of everything and every location that might cause cancer with:
"WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."
Which as it turns out is now posted EVERYWHERE. I remember going there for business and it was posted in the elevator of the hotel because I'm not even sure why, but probably one or more of the materials somewhere in the building triggered it. But it's everywhere, gas stations, grocery stores, banks, hardware stores, there's even a sign at Disneyland for God's sake.
The net effect is if the warning is everywhere, everyone ignores it.
It's one thing for libraries and nonprofits to operate them, but as a private citizen running one? Your misguided attempt to help some people will almost certainly end up badly for you because of bad people using that goodwill to do bad things.
To be perfectly honest, reading the linked story I was quite surprised the end result of the police visit was as positive as it was. I fully expected the cops to not know or care what Tor was and just round everyone and everything up and let the courts deal with it, which has happened several other times. Which again reinforces my point that there are precedents that show running a Tor exit node is just bad news and if you are still doing it, you're playing with fire.
Oh piss up a rope AC. I too like to hear about this as I have a bunch of 850 pros deployed in production and was just in the midst of planning their EOL replacements with 950 pros. The 960s sound like an even better replacement assuming I can get them in quantity.
Slashdot Mirror
> I won't outright object to a single-payer tax supported medical system, but it's pretty obvious that we'd need to put some rules into place as it's not financially viable to provide the unlimited care that people are capable of consuming.
And yet countries like Canada where I live have a lower healthcare spend per capita, we have a longer life expectancy, and nobody here goes bankrupt from medical conditions. The problem in the US isn't that the people will "consume too much healthcare", the problem is you have a system built where several levels of companies have their hands out to gouge as much as they can. In the US the hospitals and the insurance companies negotiate prices for everything and with several companies in the mix everyone wants (and gets) their piece. In Canada, we have a single payer system where the government runs a board of doctors who determine what a procedure should cost and that is what a doctor or hospital will be paid for that procedure or visit. Period.
>The most obvious are that taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize the consequences if your unhealthy lifestyle.
Hello slippery slope. What's an unhealthy lifestyle? Obesity sure, same with smoking and drinking. But what about other things? Play football, hockey, basketball? Go skydiving, rock climbing, biking or kayaking? Skiing? Construction? All of those activities and more can lead to very expensive injuries. If premiums go up for unhealthy lifestyles, why not risky ones too? Hell for that matter what about using a car, driver or passenger? Statistically the average person will be in 2.7 significant car accidents in their lifetime. So really if you use vehicles it's not a matter of if, but when you will become a burden to your healthcare provider. Better bump those peoples' premiums too....
As I mentioned to operagost, the early Hyundais were a travesty. I worked with a guy who had a mid 80s Pony and the thing was a joke. But rather than taking the domestic car makers approach and believing their shit didn't stink, Hyundai recognized they had a problem and went through a massive improvement program and by the mid 90s when I got my first Accent, they'd practically turned night into day for reliability. My 2003 Accent that I had for 11 years, not a single problem. The only expenses were gas, oil changes and scheduled maintenance on it the whole time I owned it.
I had a 75 Ford, an 86 or 87 Ford, my friend had a 2001 Ford, and just a couple of weeks ago we had a story here in Canada about a guy who wasn't able to find a part to fix his 2009 F150 - which is apparently the most prolific Ford vehicle sold in North America:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ford-f150-auto-parts-obsolete-go-public-1.3746577
"The heating system on his 2009 truck suddenly failed, blowing only extremely hot air on the passenger side — so hot, no one could sit in the passenger seat.
But the biggest problem? It can't be fixed.
"It's crazy," says Rubner. "My truck is only seven years old.""
So that's 35 years of consistent *crap* behavior and unreliability from Ford. Even if they have managed to turn the ship around - and considering that we are discussing this in an article devoted to how their recent cars infotainment systems are unusable that doesn't appear to be the case - based on that history I'm sure as hell not going to give them another chance.
And let's look at Hyundai by comparison. In the 80s, the Pony was synonymous with cheap crap imports. The Scoupe of the early 90s that got replaced by the Accent was OKish, the 94 Accent I bought was a great budget car with few features but worked well enough. The 2003 Accent I bought was a fantastic car - again budget but with more features. I would have bought another Hyundai instead of my Mazda but they didn't have a model of the Elantra with a nav system (the tech package) that was a stick shift, only automatics, and I don't like automatics so I looked elsewhere.
So to recap, Ford was shit in the 70s, and they're shit now. Hyundai was Super Shit in the early 80s, and now they're fantastic. Both companies have a rep and a track record but only one of them is a good track record.
My first Ford was a badly beaten up '75 Mustang II with a 6 cylinder and a 4 speed stick - of which 2nd gear didn't engage so shifting was 1-3-4. I bought it for $200 so I wasn't expecting much to be honest. But even with that, that thing managed to disappoint me. When I bought it the driver's side window was missing so I got another at a wrecker and then spent 4 hours putting it in. This was a job I had done on other cars in less than an hour. It wasn't stuck nuts/bolts or anything like that, it was just bad design like whoever laid the door out never expected someone would ever have to replace the glass so it was a massive chore that required nearly taking the door completely apart. Same deal with the engine, the engine bay was too damn small to comfortably work on anything, and to get at just about anything you had to take off hoses and belts. After about 6 months of driving it the clutch seized and I couldn't be arsed to fix it so I had it towed for scrap and got $75 of my original investment on the deal.
Next and final Ford was a Tempo, 86 or 87 I think with an automatic transmission. Don't really remember the year. Bought it off a relative. Don't *EVER* buy a car off a relative as an aside. Two days after I get it, it starts randomly shutting the engine off while driving. Sometimes it would start right up again, other times you'd wait up to an hour and it starts again. Several trips to the garage later (where most of the time they couldn't reproduce the problem) it's finally revealed one of the controller boards has a minuscule crack in it and when it shorts out it thinks someone's stealing the car and kills the engine. So, that gets fixed. Then a few months later the radiator core lets go on the freeway on a drive across town. This was a car that at the time was less than 9 years old. So that gets fixed. Then, about a year later the transmission makes a weird lurch when I take off from a stop light. I take it in, the transmission guy says it looks OK and he can't reproduce the issue or find anything wrong from his external inspections - short of pulling the transmission apart - no filings in the transmission fluid, etc. So I drive away and 2 days later the transmission makes the same lurch, then a noise like a cat playing with a blender, and the car loses all propulsion. Towed it to the transmission guy, he opens the pan and pieces just rain out. $1500 later, car works again. Drive it another 6 months it starts blowing blue smoke so we're now looking at serious engine work. Drove it to a Hyundai dealership, traded it in and got a used Accent - stick shift. That Tempo was the first and last automatic car I have owned.
Drove that Hyundai for almost 10 years, great car. Bought another one and drove that for 11 years before trading it in and trying a Mazda 3. Also great car. Screw domestic cars, especially Ford.
Bonus - friend of mine was borrowing his brother's 2001 Focus while his brother was out of the country. Over at my place and he's got to head home. Goes out to the car, knocks on my door 20 minutes later saying "The car won't start. Again. It does this thing where sometimes it won't start and you have to wait a while". He waits another hour, tries again, it doesn't start. I drive him home. He comes back the next day, still doesn't start. He has it towed to the dealer. It's a known problem with the ignition, but the car is out of warranty except for the drivetrain warranty and according to the dealer the ignition isn't part of the drivetrain. Ford USA is doing free replacements on this problem even out of warranty, but we're in Canada and Ford Canada says screw you man, pay $1000 to get it fixed. So he pays, what choice does he have?
Fuck Ford.
This is my shocked face. I've owned 2 Fords, and as far as I am concerned, that was 2 too many.
Depends. I've got a Mazda 3 and I think the system in it is very well designed and easy to use, with only a minor quirk for accepting an address in the nav that trips you up (no pun intended) the first couple of times until you understand that the red highlight on the QWE button will accept the address in front of you on the display when you press the selector to proceed - just an odd little UX improvement could smooth that out.
Compare and contrast with the Acura system. My dad had an old Acura TL from 2003 that the nav in worked reasonably well and the UI was bland but functional. He traded that in for a 2016 TL and holy shit I cannot believe how bad the user interface on that thing is. It's like they went out of their way to screw with you. He told me he was having trouble using it and I was figuring "eh, older people and tech", but no. I spent 10 minutes trying to get an address into the damn thing and gave up. Reading the manual eventually sussed out how to do it, but for crying out loud, you should easily be able to enter an address into a nav system without having to resort to consulting the manual.
Cost is another reason I liked the Mazda system more. Everything was already built in to the car and Nav was a $300 option with updates for the life of the warranty, unlike the Acura "give me your wallet" model for updates.
It's not. And Walmart ruthlessly uses that to their advantage when negotiating new pricing so they can do "rollbacks".
Unfortunate fact of life: If your entire revenue stream is based on someone else's infrastructure (like the App Store), you are completely at another non-interested party's mercy. Same goes for all these apps and sites that repackage other content, all it takes is one change upstream and you're screwed.
I'm interpreting it as a software problem instead of a hardware one. I imagine it will already do everything but support the handheld remote and the NFC sensor with every phone out there, and the remote should be a quick driver write away. I have a knock-off Cardboard that everything works on my G3 except the magnetic click sensor for example.
"Currently, Daydream is only working on Google's new Pixel and Pixel XL phones, but the View is supposed to hold any phone that ends up supporting the platform "
They made the API available is what I take away from that. So if it isn't supporting other phones, maybe ask your vendor of choice why not.
Keep friends close and enemies closer? It could be argued the site is a relatively easy way to keep an eye on a lot of people who engage in that borderline illegal behavior. Shut it down and they'll scatter to who knows where. The problem won't disappear, you just won't know where to find it as easily.
>(wherein I don't even see anyone saying "just use an old box for pfsense and be done")
As I've gotten older and I do this stuff for my day job my enthusiasm for doing it on off hours has waned, especially now that there are consumer devices that will get you 99% of the way there with very little hassle and the devices are silent and small compared to even an old HTPC case. A lot of people aren't going to customize anything if they can get close enough with an off the shelf product. That said, I did throw Tomato on my ASUS RT-N16 so perhaps I am not 100% sold on off the shelf.
I haven't bought a D-Link router in years. They used to be all right value for the money but over the last 6-8 years it seems like the quality vastly varied between even small model revisions so I got tired of the D-Link Russian Roulette and started buying other routers. ASUS routers have been consistently good in my experience so far, Linksys is a crap shoot like D-Link so I avoid, NetGear is utilitarian but acceptable.
> Insurance covers unexpected high costs, NOT routine, day-to-day expenses. Consider home insurance. You use home insurance if your house burns down, or floods, not to change a light bulb or fix a leaky faucet.
I get that, but what I am saying is in Canada, UHC covers both for health related items.
> I can afford a $25 visit, for a flu shot or whatever. That's a routine, expected day-to-day expense. I used to pay for $25 and that was that. Now, the flu shot goes through multiple levels of huge bureaucracies, so it has a total cost of $75-$150 an it takes three months for the doctor to get paid.
Here if you want a flu shot and you fall into a high risk category - immune issues, elderly, children, the shot is free either at your doctor, a clinic, or at a drug store. If you don't fall in that group, go to Shoppers Drug or Rexall (drug stores) and pay $15-$20. Done. No claims, no forms, no bs.
Exactly right. If we applied the same "but it's got to be safe" hand waving that we do today to historical ventures, we'd still be sitting in Europe wondering about crossing the ocean in sail powered craft and dreaming of flying craft - and the regulations we'd have to slap on them.
Oh I am well aware of the ACA, and I'm also aware that there are a bunch of companies playing games with what constitutes "full time" or meeting the minimum requirements for full time head count, etc. Example: a company had 60 employees full time prior to the ACA's passing, and once that passed they decided to get rid of 11 FTE positions and replace those with 15-20 part time positions. Presto! No need to follow the ACA because now they only have 49 FTEs and the cutoff is 50. Or if that makes it too obvious they could cut back to 40 FTEs..
So a bunch of workers get screwed by having their hours cut from 40 to 30, that's not the owner's problem... he started his own company so he wouldn't be in that boat. If everyone who worked for him wasn't so lazy they could do the same and they wouldn't be whining about losing 25% of their wage. So really it's their own fault....... The preceding was sarcasm, but sadly yes there are some people who *really* think like that. Those people are usually the ones who end up playing games with headcount to get around regulations as well.
>You know, insurance, a system that covers unexpected high costs that I can't readily cover out-of-pocket.
Yes, that's what we have in Canada. When my mother was in the hospital for a month the only thing we paid for was parking and crappy vending machine food. I think the most expensive health care item that someone I know personally has had to shell out for was $60-$70 for a pair of crutches when they had a broken leg.
>$6000 on the government spending PERSON (plus $500 out of pocket). You probably have either kids or parents who are paying very little tax, if any. Guess who is paying the $6,000 each that they cost?
OK, so you seem to have a potential understanding of the term "per capita" and how that relates tangentially to a taxpayer.
So now you can go ahead and explain the following: if I the Canadian taxpayer pay $5292 per person for 4 people that makes 20k per taxpayer, how much does the average US taxpayer pay in healthcare costs if the per capita costs for the US are $9403 per capita? Sounds like $38000 to me.... Please, do explain how that's better than paying $20000.
>Employers provide health coverage in the US.
SOME employers. Many do not. Or many only partially pay.
>They said $1,200, but only $1,000 during off hours, and $650 if I filed the insurance form rather than having them handle it (which means they get paid immediately from my HSA). From $2,000 with the "normal" method that 99% of people do to $1,200 just by making one quick phone call! Another $200 saved if I came in after work, when they less busy. That's fully half the cost saved. What if there were a system that encouraged people to cut the costs in half by making a phone call and scheduling the appointment for 5:30, when they get off work.
Did you know that hospitals and clinics in Canada don't even have POS systems or cash registers? That nobody gets a bill as they walk out? That nobody has to "file insurance forms" for anything other than eyeglasses and dental work?
> The systems are actually quite similar, just basically in Canada the government runs the one and only insurance company.
And that actually makes all the difference in the world. The Canadian government sets the prices that hospitals get paid for everything, advised by a rotating board of doctors. There are no middleman HMOs taking their share of profit and trying to gouge wherever they can. This is the primary reason the per capita costs in Canada are half of what the US's are. Here we treat it as a service, not a profit center.
You've still failed to address my point. What is your final take home pay after everything including your healthcare costs vs what it would be in Canada? Have you checked? There are tons of online calculators that can tell you in about 2 minutes. I ran them. My results were that if I was in Texas and I had to pay even $20 a month for any healthcare at all, I'd make less than if I stayed here in Vancouver. But you do have excellent tacos there so I can see how that might be a draw.
> The average Canadian taxpayer pays about $20,000 / year for health care costs.
Your numbers are off by almost a factor of 4, actually. The per capita costs for healthcare in 2015 was $5292 for Canada and $9403 for the US.
>Personally, I'd rather pay "hundreds a month in Texas" via my employer than thousands via the govt in Canada, but if you like what you have, great!
It's all about take home pay at the end of the day, right? I ran my income through a tax calculator for Texas and BC (where I live) and it tells me that in USD, I would have an annual take home pay of $132 extra living in Texas. $132 for the year. Before spending a cent on health care. So yeah, I'll stay where I am thanks.
Don't take my word for it though, run the numbers yourself and see. Then add whatever you're paying per month for health care to make it apples to apples and see how it all looks. You'll probably be surprised and not in a good way. For some reason to this day this bizarre myth that Canadians pay Scandinavian level taxes persists when we're in reality probably paying less tax than you are, especially once you roll in health care costs.
I dunno, they're using a reusable booster. I'd prefer to be going up on the 'virgin' launch on the booster instead of the second go around. I'd expect the second launch would be the more risky of the two.
Or I could just stay in Canada and enjoy my universal healthcare vs paying hundreds a month in Texas to a private insurer. Plus I can go swimming in the ocean in the morning and snowboarding in the mountains a couple hours later so that's fun too.
Different parts of the world have different advantages and disadvantages. Some people live in Cali because there are things there that aren't in Texas. Or I live in BC for the same reasons. If everything was down to dollars, we'd all live in the middle of nowhere. But then that would get expensive with the rush of people going there.
This looks like a solution searching for a problem to solve. Who really needs their Plex library "in the cloud"? The vast use case for it is as a home media server so if you go the Amazon cloud way instead you get to upload it all (at a painfully slow rate in many areas) then have it eat into your data cap a second time as you stream it to watch. Not to mention if you have any files of a less than 100% above the board nature, the MPAA/RIAA and a subpoena may start poking around in the PlexAzon caches to see what needs a closer look. No thanks.
Not to mention their idiotic proposition 65 that forced the labeling of everything and every location that might cause cancer with:
"WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."
Which as it turns out is now posted EVERYWHERE. I remember going there for business and it was posted in the elevator of the hotel because I'm not even sure why, but probably one or more of the materials somewhere in the building triggered it. But it's everywhere, gas stations, grocery stores, banks, hardware stores, there's even a sign at Disneyland for God's sake.
The net effect is if the warning is everywhere, everyone ignores it.
It's one thing for libraries and nonprofits to operate them, but as a private citizen running one? Your misguided attempt to help some people will almost certainly end up badly for you because of bad people using that goodwill to do bad things.
To be perfectly honest, reading the linked story I was quite surprised the end result of the police visit was as positive as it was. I fully expected the cops to not know or care what Tor was and just round everyone and everything up and let the courts deal with it, which has happened several other times. Which again reinforces my point that there are precedents that show running a Tor exit node is just bad news and if you are still doing it, you're playing with fire.
Why is this being rated funny? It's probably true. Or if not, then they ended up in a "work camp".
Oh piss up a rope AC. I too like to hear about this as I have a bunch of 850 pros deployed in production and was just in the midst of planning their EOL replacements with 950 pros. The 960s sound like an even better replacement assuming I can get them in quantity.