Card everyone makes it much simpler than having to make a guess.
Doesn't make it a good policy. Simple one-size-fits-all policies that do not allow for common sense are rarely a good idea. I would never anyone to scan my driver's license to buy a game. That is simply none of their business. I might show it to them for security purposes for my credit card but they only get to look, nothing more.
Well, Wachovia was eventually eaten by Wells Fargo. They did return my money after about two weeks - it just took going through their fraud investigation stuff.
But that is the problem. With a credit card you don't have to recover anything. While in most cases you will get the money back from debit card fraud you still are out the cash in the mean time and there is some chance you won't get it back at all.
You'd think people would figure out not to attach everything to the internet. Why the card readers needed to be connected to anything but an internal network (with no internet connection to that) is a bad security model to begin with.
Because you need to connect the card reader to the credit card company network which is no internal to Target or any other retailer. If you don't have a real time connection to the merchant service provider you cannot authorize the purchase. You can do it over a phone line but that is much slower. Storing credit card data locally with a merchant is generally a REALLY bad idea if it isn't actually necessary. Merchants generally have little to no expertise in data security and there are plenty of examples to prove it.
He hasn't released all of it. That's the only thing keeping him alive.
Doubtful. The NSA knows what information he had access to and what he has released. They will have to take the same security measures either way because they have to assume the information will be released if it hasn't already. They also have to assume the information either is or will become public.
No, they aren't. There always are patients, who could be kept alive at high costs but without much, if any, prospect of recovering.
True... though I'm lost as to how you think that is somehow ethical.
Once the government becomes the single payer — which is what Obama and you dream about — the decision will be the government's.
Really? Then explain to me how it is that everyone over the age of 65 isn't immediately put to death the first time they catch a cold by the government since people on medicare (everyone over 65 in the US) ARE on a single payer system. Or how it doesn't work like that in any country that has a single payer system (which is most of them). After all you apparently believe that "death panels" exist - astonish me. Oh that's right, back here on Earth things don't really work like that. [/sarcasm] Medical decisions are largely left to the doctors and health care professionals and while reimbursement rates might change, the option to treat will not. Doctors often have to fight with insurance companies to get reimbursed for treatment but they ALWAYS have the option to treat and they usually can get reimbursed if the treatment really is medically necessary. My wife is a doctor and I see her practice do it every day.
Apparently you've forgotten that people vote (especially older people) which is why politicians are absolutely loathe to make changes to medicare, even when it is a good idea to do so. Do you really think that anyone who actually, in real life, promoted the government deciding when people should die would remain in office for long? Seriously, you have an absurdly cynical view of how the world works.
Meanwhile, even the NYT is profiling lefty professionals who are quite surprised to learn that Obamacare means they pay more and get less.
Some people always were going to end up paying more any time you make adjustments in the rules. This is no big surprise unless you weren't paying attention or are just plain dumb. When you shift coverage around the risk pools are going to change and some people are going to end up paying more than before, particularly if they had an unusually good deal. Some will get better pricing others will have to pay a bit more. Most will end up somewhere in the middle.
On the other hand, in my company virtually all of my employees (except for myself) are going to end up paying less than they were before for similar or better coverage. In rough numbers my company was paying around $500/month for each employee on our plan and the company picked up half that cost ($250 to the company, $250 to the employee) for an HMO plan roughly equivalent to a gold or silver plan. The plans our employees are signing up for get them similar coverage (sometimes better) and their out of pocket expense is usually about 2/3 of what they were paying before. Better still, our company no longer has to kick in anything so the company wins too. (We would kick in but due to some of the rules regarding company contributions we cannot this year - hope to next year) In my case I'm paying just slightly more than before but now I can use a Health Savings Account and have a PPO instead of an HMO.
How are you going to get 00 gauge wires to connect to something as small as a USB connector?
Heh. Yeah, I think that might be a tad outside the connector design parameters... You could perhaps design a custom version of the connector with extra beefy contacts that might work. Would be a fun (if pointless) engineering exercise.
Gotta admit, that would be fantastic to see... briefly.
Most every successful business makes money so if you want to contract out police work such as traffic speed enforcement, that contractor _has_ to make money.
Government is not supposed to be in the business of making money from violations of the law regardless of whether it is contracted or not. This is no better than when the police department goes out to meet a revenue quota by issuing speeding tickets at the end of the month. It is unethical and really not much more than state sponsored extortion.
Holy crap. That would make me leery about using really cheap cables.
I run a custom cable manufacturing company (seriously, I really do) and I can make you a USB cable with whatever gauge wire you want. Won't be cheap but it will be robust.:-) A typical USB cable has two 24awg wires for power and the rest are 28awg or sometimes 26awg.
Class actions are gone, there is a binding arbitration clause in every single sales contract since the supreme court ruled they aren't unconscionable.
Class actions are not gone, merely more difficult. Furthermore binding arbitration clauses aren't always binding, particularly if the injured party (or their lawyers) have deep pockets. There will be at minimum some expensive nuisance lawsuits by someone. You can bet on it.
Because they didn't buy a show, they bought a license to stream it.
You are almost certainly correct but that doesn't make it any less disingenuous or wrong. It also won't stop the almost inevitable class action lawsuit from some ambulance chasing legal firm which in this case I might actually cheer for.
The article says that Amazon called it "accidental," and that access has already been restored for those who already bought it.
Accidental my shiney hiney. It was only "accidental" until either the PR or legal department found out about it. In any case this is EXACTLY why I do not own a Kindle. This isn't the first time this happened and the fact that they even have the ability to do this makes me pretty uncomfortable.
What's needed is less government intervention and more people shopping for normal health care to help drive down the costs.
That is nothing more than bald ideological nonsense in soundbite form with no actual details. The government HAS to be involved in medical care because the normal market forces do not work especially well. People are buying a product they don't understand well, from vendors who are very sophisticated, where it is typically paid for by someone else (insurance usually), and for which the customer (us) is in a very poor negotiating position (pay up or suffer/die). EVERYONE consumes health care and the only organization in a position to keep people from getting ripped off is the government. I don't have any great love of government but it serves a necessary role for some problems and public health happens to be one of them. There is not a single industrialized country on earth where the government does not play a very significant role in the health care industry. The notion that you are going to solve that problem by "less government intervention" (a meaningless soundbite) is frankly ridiculous. Let's hear your master plan for how market forces are magically going to come to the rescue if only the government would get out of the way.
Of course the typical collectivist response to this is "OMG you can't shop around when you're bleeding to death." Which is nothing but a straw man, because emergency and trauma care is a much smaller proportion.
It demonstrably is not a straw man. 50% of hospital admissions come through the Emergency Department. If you think that is a tiny portion of hospital revenue then you are delusional.
Even shopping around for the best price on a procedure would put tremendous amount of price pressure on the providers if more people did it.
That would be true if people were well educated consumers or if they had the ability or willingness to shop around. Unfortunately most people have an poor grasp of the nuances in treatment options or what constitutes a fair price. Many simply aren't interested in shopping around. When people are ill, they go to get treated to feel better. If you claim that you are going to go price shopping when you have an infection or nausea or a wound in need of prompt treatment, I'm going to call you a liar. Furthermore many people want to deal with a specific doctor that they trust and are unwilling to go price shopping even when it is an option.
"non-profit" hospitals abound in the U.S, yet they still charge almost the exact same rates as your evil "for-profit" ones.
Non-profit doesn't mean the organization does not intend to make a profit. It means the organization does not pay the profit out to shareholders but instead are obligated to plow them back into furthering the goals of the organization.
That’s a 26-percent profit margin, unheard of in any service industry other than hospitals.
The typical operating profit margin for hospitals is quite a bit lower that that - more like 3%. If those numbers you cited are accurate they are an exceptional performance compared to most. You see 25%+ profit margins in biotech and pharmaceuticals but margins for health care facilities (like hospitals) tend to be around 3%-6% in most cases. MD Anderson specializes in advanced cancer treatment so they are kind of an unusual case to begin with.
Yes it is, IF the bulb lasts for 20 years as advertized. A 60 watt equivalent LED will draw around 12-14 watts and is supposed to last over a decade. So that IS cheaper than a $1.00 incandescent you'll have to replace 10 times So yes it is cheap if you actually account for all the costs.
That light bulb is actually a 90% efficient heater -- that's why it's such an inefficient light source.
Which is 100% USELESS except during the day in the dead of winter. In fact during the summer you have to use your AC to remove that heat and thus incur additional cost that more than makes up for any savings in the winter. In the summer all of that 90% is waste heat and it is pretty annoying to heat your house with a light bulb when you want it dark. Not to mention that electric heat is relatively expensive compared available alternatives.
If you're talking heat output, the lightbulb would be 90%, not 10%
Not for 3/4 of the year (i.e. spring, summer or fall) it would not be. A lightbulb just generates waste heat most of the time. They also are pretty useless for heating when you want it to be dark at the same time as you are generating heat, like oh, when you want to sleep. There is a reason we decouple our heat sources from our light sources.
and a lot of people have older furnaces that are fairly inefficient.
Even a clunky old inefficient furnace is still more efficient than any incandescent light bulb. If you have a badly insulated house or a shitty furnace, a light bulb isn't going to fix that problem for you.
Really, and when was the incadescent ban put to a vote of the people?
Right because putting things like that to a popular vote in a republic is a really sane way to govern. There are lots of things that aren't entirely popular that are still the right thing to do. Banning needlessly inefficient technologies when there are reasonable alternatives available is one of them.
The power consumption advantages are often nullified by the mortality rate of modern lighting if your power fluctuates as it does in many rural and semi-rural areas. I demand reliability.
So put in a whole house surge protector and use some battery backups on sensitive electronics. I live in a semi-rural area and I took the extra steps to ensure that my power is reliable instead of constantly dealing with the aggravation and cost of replacing light bulbs needlessly.
BTW incandescent bulbs are nice for heating my well pump house and chicken coop.
So get a halogen. They pump off lots of heat and will still be sold. Or get a heat lamp.
I live in Wisconsin, seriously, that "waste" heat is NOT wasted!
Blah blah, I live up north too. Let's see, should I heat my house with a 95% efficient furnace or a 10% efficient light bulb? Boy that's a tough one...
So, around 10,000 homicides by gun EVERY YEAR, plus around 20,000 suicides by gun EVERY YEAR.
A tragedy to be sure though it's a bit more nuanced than that. A HUGE percentage of those homicides are gang and drug related.
How in the world do Americans become accustomed to such carnage?
There were 35,000 deaths in automobile accidents last year but we're not about to take cars off the road. I'm in more danger from dying every time I get behind the wheel than I ever am from firearms, particularly if I stay out of certain gang infested areas and don't get involved in the drug trade. In fact statistically speaking I'm at more risk in a car than I am from suicide by gun. If we are talking about drug related deaths there were 40,000 deaths from poisoning and medical use of legal and illegal drugs. None of these causes of death hold a candle to the biggies like heart disease and cancer.
I guess it's true; we suck at putting things in perspective.
I would say so. Things that are more likely to kill me in the US than a gun: cars, heart attack, diabetes, cancer, stroke, accidents, influenza and pneumonia. Homicides aren't even in the top 15 causes of death. That's not to say it isn't a tragedy but we're talking about perspective here. Comparatively speaking it is a minor risk which becomes extremely minor if you stay away from certain areas and activities.
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Card everyone makes it much simpler than having to make a guess.
Doesn't make it a good policy. Simple one-size-fits-all policies that do not allow for common sense are rarely a good idea. I would never anyone to scan my driver's license to buy a game. That is simply none of their business. I might show it to them for security purposes for my credit card but they only get to look, nothing more.
Well, Wachovia was eventually eaten by Wells Fargo. They did return my money after about two weeks - it just took going through their fraud investigation stuff.
But that is the problem. With a credit card you don't have to recover anything. While in most cases you will get the money back from debit card fraud you still are out the cash in the mean time and there is some chance you won't get it back at all.
You'd think people would figure out not to attach everything to the internet. Why the card readers needed to be connected to anything but an internal network (with no internet connection to that) is a bad security model to begin with.
Because you need to connect the card reader to the credit card company network which is no internal to Target or any other retailer. If you don't have a real time connection to the merchant service provider you cannot authorize the purchase. You can do it over a phone line but that is much slower. Storing credit card data locally with a merchant is generally a REALLY bad idea if it isn't actually necessary. Merchants generally have little to no expertise in data security and there are plenty of examples to prove it.
He hasn't released all of it. That's the only thing keeping him alive.
Doubtful. The NSA knows what information he had access to and what he has released. They will have to take the same security measures either way because they have to assume the information will be released if it hasn't already. They also have to assume the information either is or will become public.
No, they aren't. There always are patients, who could be kept alive at high costs but without much, if any, prospect of recovering.
True... though I'm lost as to how you think that is somehow ethical.
Once the government becomes the single payer — which is what Obama and you dream about — the decision will be the government's.
Really? Then explain to me how it is that everyone over the age of 65 isn't immediately put to death the first time they catch a cold by the government since people on medicare (everyone over 65 in the US) ARE on a single payer system. Or how it doesn't work like that in any country that has a single payer system (which is most of them). After all you apparently believe that "death panels" exist - astonish me. Oh that's right, back here on Earth things don't really work like that. [/sarcasm] Medical decisions are largely left to the doctors and health care professionals and while reimbursement rates might change, the option to treat will not. Doctors often have to fight with insurance companies to get reimbursed for treatment but they ALWAYS have the option to treat and they usually can get reimbursed if the treatment really is medically necessary. My wife is a doctor and I see her practice do it every day.
Apparently you've forgotten that people vote (especially older people) which is why politicians are absolutely loathe to make changes to medicare, even when it is a good idea to do so. Do you really think that anyone who actually, in real life, promoted the government deciding when people should die would remain in office for long? Seriously, you have an absurdly cynical view of how the world works.
Meanwhile, even the NYT is profiling lefty professionals who are quite surprised to learn that Obamacare means they pay more and get less.
Some people always were going to end up paying more any time you make adjustments in the rules. This is no big surprise unless you weren't paying attention or are just plain dumb. When you shift coverage around the risk pools are going to change and some people are going to end up paying more than before, particularly if they had an unusually good deal. Some will get better pricing others will have to pay a bit more. Most will end up somewhere in the middle.
On the other hand, in my company virtually all of my employees (except for myself) are going to end up paying less than they were before for similar or better coverage. In rough numbers my company was paying around $500/month for each employee on our plan and the company picked up half that cost ($250 to the company, $250 to the employee) for an HMO plan roughly equivalent to a gold or silver plan. The plans our employees are signing up for get them similar coverage (sometimes better) and their out of pocket expense is usually about 2/3 of what they were paying before. Better still, our company no longer has to kick in anything so the company wins too. (We would kick in but due to some of the rules regarding company contributions we cannot this year - hope to next year) In my case I'm paying just slightly more than before but now I can use a Health Savings Account and have a PPO instead of an HMO.
How are you going to get 00 gauge wires to connect to something as small as a USB connector?
Heh. Yeah, I think that might be a tad outside the connector design parameters... You could perhaps design a custom version of the connector with extra beefy contacts that might work. Would be a fun (if pointless) engineering exercise.
Gotta admit, that would be fantastic to see... briefly.
Most every successful business makes money so if you want to contract out police work such as traffic speed enforcement, that contractor _has_ to make money.
Government is not supposed to be in the business of making money from violations of the law regardless of whether it is contracted or not. This is no better than when the police department goes out to meet a revenue quota by issuing speeding tickets at the end of the month. It is unethical and really not much more than state sponsored extortion.
Holy crap. That would make me leery about using really cheap cables.
I run a custom cable manufacturing company (seriously, I really do) and I can make you a USB cable with whatever gauge wire you want. Won't be cheap but it will be robust. :-) A typical USB cable has two 24awg wires for power and the rest are 28awg or sometimes 26awg.
Class actions are gone, there is a binding arbitration clause in every single sales contract since the supreme court ruled they aren't unconscionable.
Class actions are not gone, merely more difficult. Furthermore binding arbitration clauses aren't always binding, particularly if the injured party (or their lawyers) have deep pockets. There will be at minimum some expensive nuisance lawsuits by someone. You can bet on it.
Because they didn't buy a show, they bought a license to stream it.
You are almost certainly correct but that doesn't make it any less disingenuous or wrong. It also won't stop the almost inevitable class action lawsuit from some ambulance chasing legal firm which in this case I might actually cheer for.
The article says that Amazon called it "accidental," and that access has already been restored for those who already bought it.
Accidental my shiney hiney. It was only "accidental" until either the PR or legal department found out about it. In any case this is EXACTLY why I do not own a Kindle. This isn't the first time this happened and the fact that they even have the ability to do this makes me pretty uncomfortable.
The company went so far as to retroactively withdrawn the shows from Amazon, so that customers who have already paid for them no longer have access.
Can we say "class action lawsuit"? I knew you could...
Disney's PR flaks are going to be working some overtime this holiday season.
I am curious as to how it will "fix" the bugs getting smeared on the windscreen.
Heck I've never found a set of windshield wipers that truly solves this problem. Usually they just end up smearing bug guts all over.
What's needed is less government intervention and more people shopping for normal health care to help drive down the costs.
That is nothing more than bald ideological nonsense in soundbite form with no actual details. The government HAS to be involved in medical care because the normal market forces do not work especially well. People are buying a product they don't understand well, from vendors who are very sophisticated, where it is typically paid for by someone else (insurance usually), and for which the customer (us) is in a very poor negotiating position (pay up or suffer/die). EVERYONE consumes health care and the only organization in a position to keep people from getting ripped off is the government. I don't have any great love of government but it serves a necessary role for some problems and public health happens to be one of them. There is not a single industrialized country on earth where the government does not play a very significant role in the health care industry. The notion that you are going to solve that problem by "less government intervention" (a meaningless soundbite) is frankly ridiculous. Let's hear your master plan for how market forces are magically going to come to the rescue if only the government would get out of the way.
Of course the typical collectivist response to this is "OMG you can't shop around when you're bleeding to death." Which is nothing but a straw man, because emergency and trauma care is a much smaller proportion.
It demonstrably is not a straw man. 50% of hospital admissions come through the Emergency Department. If you think that is a tiny portion of hospital revenue then you are delusional.
Even shopping around for the best price on a procedure would put tremendous amount of price pressure on the providers if more people did it.
That would be true if people were well educated consumers or if they had the ability or willingness to shop around. Unfortunately most people have an poor grasp of the nuances in treatment options or what constitutes a fair price. Many simply aren't interested in shopping around. When people are ill, they go to get treated to feel better. If you claim that you are going to go price shopping when you have an infection or nausea or a wound in need of prompt treatment, I'm going to call you a liar. Furthermore many people want to deal with a specific doctor that they trust and are unwilling to go price shopping even when it is an option.
"non-profit" hospitals abound in the U.S, yet they still charge almost the exact same rates as your evil "for-profit" ones.
Non-profit doesn't mean the organization does not intend to make a profit. It means the organization does not pay the profit out to shareholders but instead are obligated to plow them back into furthering the goals of the organization.
That’s a 26-percent profit margin, unheard of in any service industry other than hospitals.
The typical operating profit margin for hospitals is quite a bit lower that that - more like 3%. If those numbers you cited are accurate they are an exceptional performance compared to most. You see 25%+ profit margins in biotech and pharmaceuticals but margins for health care facilities (like hospitals) tend to be around 3%-6% in most cases. MD Anderson specializes in advanced cancer treatment so they are kind of an unusual case to begin with.
12$ for a light bulb is not "cheap".
Yes it is, IF the bulb lasts for 20 years as advertized. A 60 watt equivalent LED will draw around 12-14 watts and is supposed to last over a decade. So that IS cheaper than a $1.00 incandescent you'll have to replace 10 times So yes it is cheap if you actually account for all the costs.
If you have found a method to make a furnace, any source 95% efficient, you would be a very rich person.
The best modern furnaces are 98% efficient. Look it up.
That light bulb is actually a 90% efficient heater -- that's why it's such an inefficient light source.
Which is 100% USELESS except during the day in the dead of winter. In fact during the summer you have to use your AC to remove that heat and thus incur additional cost that more than makes up for any savings in the winter. In the summer all of that 90% is waste heat and it is pretty annoying to heat your house with a light bulb when you want it dark. Not to mention that electric heat is relatively expensive compared available alternatives.
If you're talking heat output, the lightbulb would be 90%, not 10%
Not for 3/4 of the year (i.e. spring, summer or fall) it would not be. A lightbulb just generates waste heat most of the time. They also are pretty useless for heating when you want it to be dark at the same time as you are generating heat, like oh, when you want to sleep. There is a reason we decouple our heat sources from our light sources.
and a lot of people have older furnaces that are fairly inefficient.
Even a clunky old inefficient furnace is still more efficient than any incandescent light bulb. If you have a badly insulated house or a shitty furnace, a light bulb isn't going to fix that problem for you.
Really, and when was the incadescent ban put to a vote of the people?
Right because putting things like that to a popular vote in a republic is a really sane way to govern. There are lots of things that aren't entirely popular that are still the right thing to do. Banning needlessly inefficient technologies when there are reasonable alternatives available is one of them.
The power consumption advantages are often nullified by the mortality rate of modern lighting if your power fluctuates as it does in many rural and semi-rural areas. I demand reliability.
So put in a whole house surge protector and use some battery backups on sensitive electronics. I live in a semi-rural area and I took the extra steps to ensure that my power is reliable instead of constantly dealing with the aggravation and cost of replacing light bulbs needlessly.
BTW incandescent bulbs are nice for heating my well pump house and chicken coop.
So get a halogen. They pump off lots of heat and will still be sold. Or get a heat lamp.
no CFLs made in the past five years come anywhere close to meeting their life expectancy – most of them burn out faster than incandescent bulbs.
And I'm sure you have something more than anecdotal data to back that assertion up right?
As of 2013 there is still no way to get a light bulb that combines the low cost and high quality of an incandescent.
The unit cost is low but since you have to buy about 1 per year AND pay a lot more for electricity, the actual cost is not less.
I live in Wisconsin, seriously, that "waste" heat is NOT wasted!
Blah blah, I live up north too. Let's see, should I heat my house with a 95% efficient furnace or a 10% efficient light bulb? Boy that's a tough one...
So, around 10,000 homicides by gun EVERY YEAR, plus around 20,000 suicides by gun EVERY YEAR.
A tragedy to be sure though it's a bit more nuanced than that. A HUGE percentage of those homicides are gang and drug related.
How in the world do Americans become accustomed to such carnage?
There were 35,000 deaths in automobile accidents last year but we're not about to take cars off the road. I'm in more danger from dying every time I get behind the wheel than I ever am from firearms, particularly if I stay out of certain gang infested areas and don't get involved in the drug trade. In fact statistically speaking I'm at more risk in a car than I am from suicide by gun. If we are talking about drug related deaths there were 40,000 deaths from poisoning and medical use of legal and illegal drugs. None of these causes of death hold a candle to the biggies like heart disease and cancer.
I guess it's true; we suck at putting things in perspective.
I would say so. Things that are more likely to kill me in the US than a gun: cars, heart attack, diabetes, cancer, stroke, accidents, influenza and pneumonia. Homicides aren't even in the top 15 causes of death. That's not to say it isn't a tragedy but we're talking about perspective here. Comparatively speaking it is a minor risk which becomes extremely minor if you stay away from certain areas and activities.