Tort reform has been tried in literally every state, in most cases more then once. It does not work.
Your little anecdote actually hints at the real problem. Somebody in that system could have said "hey let's re-sterilize that $150 plastic tube and re-use it," but nobody had an incentive to reduce the cost. Most patients aren't paying themselves. the ones that do will prefer a more expensive option that sounds better ("Manufacturer part just for you," sounds a lot better then "re-using this other dude's tube, but it's totally ok because we ran it through a dishwasher and then microwaved it"). Insurers have some reason to control costs, but very little ability because if the hospital says "fuck you blue cross," blue cross is gonna lose business. Moreover they don't want to be known as the company that forces customers to re-use some guys tube. The hospital is kicking the cost back to the insurer. Most finance guys in the system probably welcomed that letter from the malpractice insurer that forced them to spend $150 on that part. It allowed them to bitch about lawyers, justify raising prices, and finance guys are notorious for using increased revenue as a justification for increased administrative expenses (ie: they get a raise).
The reason you see all those greedy assholes at health care business meetings is that health care is a great place to be a greedy asshole. You can get damn near whatever price you want for damn near anything.
Left-wing economists tend to think the solution to the problem is more centralization in the business. If the government published one price list that everyone had to use it would be very difficult to charge $150 for a $0.50 part. If one insurer had control of the market they could just have told the hospital "Sorry, we're not paying $150 for a $0.50 part." Evidence that this works is generally taken from foreign countries, which have much smaller price increases. But states with concentrated insurance markets also have better costs. The greedy assholes can still get away with a lot, but at least there's some central system capable of noticing and responding to their BS.
Evidence that this works is decent. The Canadians are almost as fat as us and drink more, they spend less, and their Docrtors can't charge more then the official fee schedule. The UK is even cheaper, despite being arguably less healthy (they ain't skinny, and you haven't seen a drunk until you've seen a Brit drunk in his homeland), probably because there's even more governmental control. Their system is basically Stalinist. Everyone in the system is a government employee. In the US when the president talks about increasing Federal control of the sector cost increases level out. It happened for both Clinton and Obama.
Right-wing economists want everyone to pay more of their costs. They think that if people knew the true cost of procedures they'd negotiate $150 parts away. The problem with this is that a) there are very few real world examples of this working, and b) it's hard to see how some ordinary person would ever know the reason his procedure was so expensive was the $150 part.
Bullshit. Every treaty a president has signed (but has not been ratified) is an official policy of the President, and is therefore perfectly valid to the extent that the President is allowed to set policy. So the Kyoto Treaty was law until Bush II took over. In the US System this doesn't mean much because the President's ability to set policy entirely by himself is limited, but the treaty is still US Law to that limited extent.
With ACTA in US Law the actual treaty is totally irrelevant. This is because Obama can do everything in ACTA citing powers that have nothing to do with ACTA. Most of the things you hate about ACTA were passed in '08 as part of the PRO-IP Act. You ain't getting out of PRO-IP Act violations by claiming some treaty that didn't exist when the Act was passed needs to be ratified for it to be valid.
Your plan had very few similarities to the one the OP had. A minimum 20% of his premiums were being used for profit/administration, whereas you were probably under 5%. He was in the individual market, which is completely different from the employer market. Moreover all your experiences basically happened under ObamaCare, because the ObamaCare system is RomneyCare and has been the law in MA for more then a decade.
The $8,895 number is mostly older folks. A $50k hip replacement, plus a blood pressure medication, plus visits to a heart specialist, etc. adds up fast. The 50-65 age group really kills the US in expenses. They don't have Medicare yet and they have expensive medical treatments, so a lot of them are in the US individual insurance market, which pays world-record amounts for damn near every medical procedure, and then needs 20-30% of premiums for administrative stuff. OTOH Medicare proper pays very low rates because they have monopoly power ("Oh you don't like our price list Dr. Sanders? I guess you'll never have a patient older then 65 ever again.") and due to economies of scale has administrative costs well under 5%.
That's why the OP's individual plan was so cheap. They knew that a 30-something guy in decent health wasn't gonna get sick, so they know they would only spend money on him if he got hit by a truck. OTOH your plan is in the group market (either large group or small group), and it's cheaper then retail because your company probably has a lot of 20 and 30-somethings who don't actually use their insurance much. Moreover since one insurance agent can deal with multiple companies, and each company can have thousands of people on it's plan, administration is almost as cheap as Medicare. The OP needed an agent who knew his name, and talked to him a couple times a year, and that guy needed to be paid, so a much higher proportion of his premium went to administration.
Something just occurred to me about your wife's company dropping her insurance. Under the employer health exclusion her health insurance premiums aren't taxable. Anything else she gets as part of her job -- company car, life insurance, etc. -- is taxable. Here's how the math works. I'll use typical-ish numbers because I don't have the real ones. This is just to show why it's better for a company to spend money on health insurance then salaries.
Let's say your wife stayed single, made $40k, and had insurance of $10k. The company spent $50k on her, and she paid taxes on precisely $30k (the exemption this year was $3,900 and standard deduction was $6,100, she uses her exemption so she doesn't pay income tax on precisely $10k, most years the math isn't that neat). Checking out the tax table, she would have owed $4,058. In other words the company spent $50k on her, and she only got $45,942 of value out of it after federal taxes.
The penalty is $2k, and the company eats that and gives the other $8k as salary. Now we have $48k in income, minus $10k, is $38k taxable income. That's $5,435 in taxes. So the company spent the exact same amount, but your wife only gets $42,565 value.
In other words they didn't cut their expenses by a single penny, but your wife's take-home earnings went down $3,377. To make up a) the hike in taxes from earning the insurance premium as cash, and the $2k penalty they'd have to spend thousands more on your wife.
And they have to make it up to your wife or she'll quit, because very few people take a $3,377 pay cut and stays.
Total US Health Spending is $8,895 per person. If your insurer charges you less either they think you won't cost that much, or they're idiots who will go bankrupt real soon now.
In your case the former is more likely. The fine art of figuring out how much an insuree will cost is called "Underwriting," and if you only paid $100 a month your state probably lets it's insurers do a hell of a lot of that shit. They don;t tell you they're giving you a discount for being male, and young; because they figure you might not like finding out they'd charge your sister/girlfriend/crush loads more in case she gets pregnant. They're definitely not telling you about any youth discount, because you know that in 10 years you ain't getting that discount. You know all those horror stories about people who got cancer and their rates tripled, or the insurer refused to pay their bill because they hadn't mentioned a mole on their application? Those mostly come from plans like yours.
Under ObamaCare a lot of that underwriting is illegal. They can do some age-based discrimination, pardon me under-writing, but a lot less then before. They also can't charge women extra to cover pregnancy costs. Which means that they have to get the money from somebody, and currently that somebody is you. Most people in your situation get substantial subsidies to cover the difference, but there are people who are self-employed, young, male, and make too much to get the subsidy.
So, in the short term ObamaCare screwed you and people like you. But in the long-term it's probably gonna be good for you. I guarantee you that at some point in your life you will be 50, and only a fool charges a 50-year-old man $100 a month for insurance that actually pays for medical care. Adding your wife to your old $100 a month plan would probably have increased the cost a lot because she's a woman of childbearing age, and wives have a much higher pregnancy risk then girlfriends.
As for your wife's new insurance, keep in mind that your wife can always switch jobs. If they go for the fine they'll save money, but they'll also have very pissed off people, a lot will probably leave, and it'll mostly be their top people who do leave because idiots who've been over-promoted have trouble finding work at the same level in other companies. So if they do go for the fine they'll almost have to give her a substantial raise to cover the insurance premium or lose lots of their employees.
And, for the record, if God had come down from Heaven in March of 2010 and made me Dictator I would not have passed ObamaCare. I would have passed a universal MediCare bill. One of the things I hate about the current system for paying medical bills is that it's so fucking complicated that you can't understand why one person would get charged very little money for insurance without putting literally weeks into researching the damn issue. Which in turn means that if somebody changes the system it's very difficult to tell any individual American what this will do to his bills, because odds are that even if he knows the technical vocabulary to describe his policy he isn't using the words right. You can say "In general most people will see reduced bills because the subsidy will cover some of it," but you can't get much more specific. It would be so much easier if Obama'd just fire the entire insurance industry, and the medical Billing Specialists, and all the other finance weenie parasites that have managed to get themselves good jobs in health care without doing anything that actually involves medical care.
But that couldn't have gotten through the Senate IRL, so we're stuck with a half-assed compromise that simplifies some things, complicates others, and is generally a pain in the ass.
And this is exactly the kind of BS I was talking about.
I said nothing about who should care one way or the other about the debt. I said that the people who aren't in the very top tenth of the country don't give a shit about it. And they don't. I challenge you to find one poll in the past 50 years where the number one issue for most Americans has been the national debt. A real poll, not a push-poll from some activist outfit with an anti-government agenda. Good luck. It doesn't even make the top two economic issues very often (jobs always beat it, and if there's a recession on growth also beats it).
As for the debt in policy terms. I'm 33. I cannot remember a year in which anyone I knew said their top problem was inflation, because Reagan and Volcker licked stagflation back when I was a toddler. It seems to me that giving up something I want (and if you support the VA, the DoD, Social Security, and medicare you want the vast majority of Federal spending) to stop a problem that has not actually been a problem since I was four is probably not a wise use of government resources. In fact it seems to me that a lack of inflation is the major current economic problem, because if Apple's $160 Billion cash hoard was shrinking by 7% a year due to inflation they'd probably find something productive for it to do, rather then sitting on it.
It further seems to me that the logical way to prevent inflation caused by deficits, in the middle of a recession; is not gut programs that allow people to survive the recession, but to raise taxes on the masters of the universe who caused the damn thing.
If you're black, and to you freedom is literally something granted by an Unconstitutional Executive order enforced by an army of jackbooted thugs paid for by a then-unconstitutional income tax; and the biggest failure in freedom since then can be traced to the Federal government getting said Army out of the law-enforcement business; you're probably a lot more worried about NYC's stop-and-frisk then anything the NSA does. In the experience of people you know and love the Federal government is not a very good tool of mass oppression, but your brother was definitely denied a college education because the NYPD found out he was a pothead and drug-convicted people are totally ineligible for all forms of student aid. You don't disagree with the premise that the NSA should be stopped, or that Obama should not have done that shit, but OTOH the people worried about it don't seem to have noticed that the Appeals Court back-pedelled in their criticism of the Judge who threw it out.
Most liberals understand that once the US gets involved in a war, and picks a side, we don't get to leave until that side is done with us. If we did in the future nobody would want us as an ally, which would have very uncomfortable implications for democracy in places like the former Soviet Union. We don't like that we're still in Afghanistan, but we're not blaming Obama for that. The folks who do blame Obama tend to be the same people who always hate the President because opposing someone in power is something they just do.
Last I saw his Approval rating among liberals was high 70s. I suspect what's going on is that you mostly interact with college-educated, white, millennials, who are comfortably well off. In that group the people who talk almost never say anything nice about a politician. They get into massive bitch-fests. It also includes a lot of people who honestly think opposing powerful people is the entire point of freedom. If Obama had waved a magic wand and convinced the Taliban to become pacifists, not used any drones, etc. they'd be complaining about ACTA. If he hadn't done that they'd have convinced themselves he could fix climate change by Executive Order, and they'd be complaining about that.
Let me put it to you this way: Canada is culturally very similar to us. It's got a similar electoral system that rewards only the most popular guy in the district, meaning that it's generally political suicide to run on a non-major-party ticket. They have one right-wing party. They have three speaking left-wing parties splitting the anti-Tory vote. So the Tories dominate. And if you point out that this is stupid to any English Canadian leftist he will respond by claiming that the other two left-wing parties are either a) posers, or b) splitters; and that the current world of Stephen Harper crushing left-wing dreams is infinitely superior to a world where his party leader is the number two or three person in a left wing coalition. Quite a few will go on to imply that a coalition led by his party leader would be fatally flawed due to it's inclusion of anyone from the other two.
Well, here is the distinction between your regular Joe-Shmo Republican, and your elected official Republican: The guy on the street is all for business. The guys in office are for whatever makes them richer. There is a similar gap on the Democrat side, too. Your regular Democrat on the street wants the type of socialism that gives a hand up to the poor. The Democrats in office want the type of socialism that gives the guys in power more money. This is why this whole left-right thing is stupid- the guys on the street both want to see their fellow man prosper. The guys in office want to further themselves. But they tell you it's right vs left so that you fight amongst yourself instead of stopping them from passing selfish laws.
They're not that cynical.
What happens is that the people who actually show up in every election, call their elected officials, make small donations to their favored candidates, etc. are almost all from a very specific upper-middle-class background. Since tghe politicians themselves come from that same socio-economic class they aren't surprised when all the people they talk to demand action on the deficit, despite the fact polls almost always say most Americans think the deficit is less important then multiple other issues.
If you have an intricate governmental structure, with multiple branches, true bicameralism, Congressman who frequently fight the leadership, huge districts of 750k people, etc. you give the people who can organize themselves lots of power over the people who can't. There's a lot going on and it all matters, which means unless you have multiple observers in DC feeding you info on what Congressman Dingell is doing on the Energy Committee you are gonna get played by the guy who does. That means you need an organization to vet the guy, and money to pay that guy.
That's a lot more likely to happen for the 9-5, enough money to save for retirement and have disposable income crowd. That's why they get to dominate things. If this was the UK or Canada, and you could follow national politics without knowing dozens of names and having some understanding of whether a disagreement between Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn is a big deal on a particular issue; and you only had to vote once every three to five years (instead of twice every two years -- if you actually want to matter in US Politics the local party primary is orders of magnitude more important than that BS in November); and there was only one political branch (which prevents Byzantine political disputes between the branches)...
Are you kidding? I help run a small business and I am starting one myself. I am an independent, but it is recent policy changes from the current administration that has been strangling us. We have had to lay-off employees in preparation for the ACA changes. This admin has done more to strengthen big business and make life harder for entrepreneurs than I have ever seen. I have voted for both liberals and conservatives, but I will be very hard-pressed to vote for a liberal again after so many lies and broken promises.
And how would you have gotten insurance as an entrepreneur before the ACA's Exchange?
The answer is pretty simple. There are two possibilities:
1) You're young, with no kids, no expensive females in the household, and can convince the agent you have no pre-existing medical conditions. You will get insurance.
2) You wouldn't have insurance.
I'm very skeptical of anyone who says they "had to lay off" employees due to the ACA. IRL I've seen companies blame the ACA because they fired people and they thought they could make Obama look like a bad guy, and I've seen them hire more part-timers so they could get their 33-hour guys down to 29. I have never seen a company that actually fired people. The Act simply does not increase your per-employee cost that way.
Money doesn't vote directly, but it definitely impacts the process. Instead of talking about the issues most people want to talk about (ie: should the minimum wage go up?), you end up discussing what some billionaire out-state wants you to discuss (ie: ObamaCare).
One of the things I hate about America is that the entire is designed so that the top 10% of income or so dominate the conversation. It should be noted that British equivalent of the lower nobility (the gentry) was about this proportion of the country. The last time most Americans gave a shit about the national debt I was in grade school, but the Gentry care about it a lot, so the last 3-4 years have been wasted with ridiculous arguments about which programs that ordinary Americans (ie: not the fucking gentry) we cut. Nobody seems to have seriously considered raising taxes. Increasing the minimum wage has been popular for decades, but since the Gentry have economics textbooks proving that poor people starve to death when McDonald's raises prices it ain't happening. The Democrat5s are alittle better about this then the GOP, but even they all tend to be members of the gentry themselves.
Whenever you criticize any aspect of the system that allows these people to totally dominate you're told that if most Americans wanted power they'd just learn what a filibuster vote was themselves and then they'd be gentry too.
And now the fucking Supreme Court has decreed that money = speech, which means the Gentry have yet another tool they can use to bully the rezst of the country into going along with them.
I can kinda understand why somebody who only reads a couple articles a year would think ACTA is illegal, but it's not. Here''s why:
Any treaty is legally binding on the US in the term of the guy who signed. However that doesn't mean much. It just means that, to the extent the President has the ability to order things, his orders complying with the Treaty are fine. So if Obama signed a treaty that said "Justin Bieber shall be fed to the badgers, and the Ambassador Bridge international crossing will be closed every May," the Treaty would be legally valid for Obama's term. Since Obama can't order people to be fed to badgers Bieber would be fine. Since he can order his border patrol to not let anyone you ain't using the Ambassador Bridge in May. If he wanted to close the Bridge in 2017 he'd have to get the Treaty ratified by the Senate, or convince his successor to sign the treaty, or just convince his successor to write an Executive Order. Since the government doesn't have the Constitutional authority to feed people to badger's, the Bieber bit of the treaty would never be valid no matter how often the Senate voted on it.
If the Treaty involves some change to US Law it's valid in the sense that it's binding on the US when the Senate ratifies it. It's not valid in the sense that you have to obey the damn thing until Congress passes a law complying with the Treaty. So if some treaty insisted we ban cigarettes you could still smoke until the House and Senate pass a bill banning cigarettes. In a lot of ways ratification is actually be a waste of time, because you'd need 67 Senators, whereas passing the statute only requires 50 (assuming the VP agrees with the Treaty). If the President signs the treaty on Monday, 35 Senators say "fuck you, we smoke" on Tuesday, and 50 Senators, the VP, and the House ban by statute the damn things on Wednesday, then cigarettes still get banned.
The enforcement mechanism in most treaties is other countries bitching when they're not complied with. Obama knows he's gonna comply with ACTA because our laws already comply with ACTA. He can sign it, which makes it binding on the US, but he doesn't need to have it ratified.
So, let me understand your point better. You're saying that you believe what Apple publishes on its own security mechanism?
Don't be silly.
Apple is monopolistic, greedy, and power-hungry. As a non-Apple source of power they do not particularly like the government. Particularly the law enforcement bits, which a) cost them money and b) stop them from monopolizing further.
Most importantly Apple isn't stupid. They make money by making consumers happy. They make approximately $0 from making law enforcement happy. Therefore they have literally no reason to lie in something like this. There's no reason for them to do it. At all. Their job is to make money. Paying for back doors, and engineers to use said back doors, is literally the opposite of what Apple is supposed to do.
Moreover, if they did they'd almost certainly be caught. There are literally millions of local cops in the US. Each and every one of those guys will probably test some aspect of Apple's claims sometime in the next month, because an awful lot of Americans have iPhones. And if any one of those millions of guys has a twitter account and agrees with geeks on privacy rules then we'll all know about it tomorrow.
Given that pork-eating flight school students turned out to be Islamist terrorists, I'd have to say the answer is no.
I hate to spoil your snark, but Islam, like Judaism, has a prohibition against eating pork. So you could argue that *not* eating bacon is a possible warning sign of terrorist potential...
That's why the snark is funny. Pork-eating Islamist is by definition a contradiction, yet that shit actually happened.
There is nothing that is so completely innocent that it would not be possible to draw a link between said activity and terrorism. If you could find such an activity the terrorists would immediately start doing it as cover.
I'm not saying the feds need to investigate all people all the time, but if you think there's some activity that is so virtuous and innocent that no Federal official should ever spend a couple months figuring out how it could be abused, you are are mistaken.
Our success at preventing domestic terror attacks is usually credited partly to our ability to stop the terrorists from sending each-other money.
Uhm, what success? AFAIK, the only "terrorist plot" in the US that the government has prevented was that one where the idiots thought that if they blew up a fuel pipe at JFK, they could get an explosion all along that pipeline. Obviously, they didn't comprehend that for an explosion to happen, you need fuel *and* oxygen...
That's kinda the point.
We had one set of attacks that required a fairly large amount of cash ($100k or so, IIRC) and happened, then we implemented these controls and all attacks have either been a) so physically impossible that their "perpetrators" should probably not be prosecuted, or b) very small beans.
I'll admit it's not a conclusive point, Bush's Iraq War was a tragic mistake but it also drew a generation of terrorists to the place, in many ways the S11 attack was largely luck, etc.
But, unfortunately for us, the real world doesn't allow for controlled experiments. So all the data we have is that there was an absolutely terrible attack, then we did some shit, and there hasn't been another one. The Shit We Did (SWD) probably did something good, but proving conclusively which element of SWD worked is impossible.
That said, it is equally impossible for the skeptics of SWD to actually prove their cases. It's not like they can go back in time, remove all money laundering-controls just for Kansas City, and see whether terrorism happens. Therefore when something that changes SWD we should probably have both sides present their cases. This new study will probably be the pro SWD, anti-BTC as money-laundering side. Presumably the pro-BTC and anti-government geeks at Slashdot will present the other side with enthusiasm, just as soon as they have something to rebut.
BTC is specifically designed so that government's can't trace it, or interdict the cash-flow. This means the anti-terror cops damn well better have a plan for if AQ starts a major BTC mining operation.
No, bitcoin is *not* designed to be untraceable. In fact, thanks to the blockchain, it's actually a lot easier to trace than normal cash. What's hard is taking the information from the blockchain, and connecting it to a specific individual or group. So it's pretty anonymous, but once a given wallet has been associated with someone like AQ, anyone monitoring the blockchains could extract a heck of a lot of info about where their money is coming from and going to.
So it's not untraceable, it's just almost impossible to figure out which humans a) sent the money, and b) received the money? I believe that is the dictionary definition of "untraceable."
In other words let's assume AQ has an IQ above room temperature. They have $15k from some wealthy-ass Arab Sheik. They create a new wallet. They buy $15k BTC. They can now either a) send their guy the wallet ph
"Most people" being not crazy didn't help on S11. When there are 6-7 billion of us even a tiny minority of idiots is hundreds of millions of people.
There are not 6-7 billion domestic terrorist in any country on Earth. I'll leave it as an excersize to the reader why that might be.
Moreover since the military are some of the people who say anti-money-laundering initiatives help prevent terrorism, you're implying the military actually gets paid based on the volume of transactions in the international finance system. It doesn't.
I'm asking who's making the claim. "The military" is still too vague, especially with zero evidence provided.
Let me google that for you. An Army report explicitly linking terrorism to money laundering good enough for you?
Probably not, seeing as you just demanded a source for something that is easily googled. You're probably a troll.
How much is the banking industry paying you to make BTC activists sound like jerks on the internet? Because they'd probably pay me more. You just don't have the talent required to be an effective jerk on the internet.
As how many have been stopped, that's a really dumb way for you to bring up the point.
Really? Asking for numbers to assess effectiveness is a dumb way of doing so? Then how do you propose it's assessed?
The answer is 100% of the attacks that involve spending more a grand.
And that's how many? Exactly speaking, or even as an order of magnitude figure?
Legally available firearms only cost more then $500 if you get a really nice one, which terrorists tend not to do, and pressure-cooker bombs are under $100. Congrats dummy, you just walked into that one. If you didn't suck at this you would have anticipated that argument, and claimed that no major attacks had been tried, and therefore my argument was ridiculous.
So what, exactly speaking, are you claiming here? That terrorist attacks don't actually require a lot of money, so money transfers aren't really that important to terrorists, so watching money transfers is pointless from anti-terrorism point of view?
If you were literate, which is doubtful given your inability to google anything, you could probably figure this out yourself.
Big attacks require multi-thousand budgets. That hasn't happened.
Frankly you're so bad at this I'm already half-convinced you're an anti-BTC agent provocateur.
I'm entirely convinced that you're an idiot. The only question remains whether you genuinely lack intelligence, or just can't bear to be shown wrong on the Internet.
"Idiot?" You're not even good at ad hominem.
You do realize there are entire staffs of people in the military whose entire job is to figure out "what happens if potential opponent x does this thing that nobody thinks he'll ever do?"
It's called contingency planning, and since the real world is fucking weird it's really useful. For example who would have predicted that Ukraine would break up in February?
So yes, I'd say the odds that Al Qaeda actually use BTC mining to get rich are fairly low. But that doesn't mean I don't want a couple $80k analysts to look into the question for a few months. And that's all this report is saying will happen.
Moreover it doesn't imply that a) future terrorist opponents won't be mining the latest altcoin, or b) AQ won't simply buy some BTC on a shady exchange, put it on a wallet, and mail the thumb-drive to DC.
That's all nice and good. But it still doesn't address my point: Al-Qaeda can't compete against miners who put their money on their mini
Our success at preventing domestic terror attacks is usually credited partly to our ability to stop the terrorists from sending each-other money.
"Usually credited" by whom? People who have a vested interest in stopping people from sending each other money without going through them?
For that matter, how many "domestic terror attacks" have been stopped lately? Or is it simply that most people aren't crazy enough to want to blow up their own home?
"Most people" being not crazy didn't help on S11. When there are 6-7 billion of us even a tiny minority of idiots is hundreds of millions of people.
Moreover since the military are some of the people who say anti-money-laundering initiatives help prevent terrorism, you're implying the military actually gets paid based on the volume of transactions in the international finance system. It doesn't.
As how many have been stopped, that's a really dumb way for you to bring up the point. The answer is 100% of the attacks that involve spending more a grand. Legally available firearms only cost more then $500 if you get a really nice one, which terrorists tend not to do, and pressure-cooker bombs are under $100. Congrats dummy, you just walked into that one. If you didn't suck at this you would have anticipated that argument, and claimed that no major attacks had been tried, and therefore my argument was ridiculous.
Frankly you're so bad at this I'm already half-convinced you're an anti-BTC agent provocateur.
BTC is specifically designed so that government's can't trace it, or interdict the cash-flow. This means the anti-terror cops damn well better have a plan for if AQ starts a major BTC mining operation.
Starting a BTC mining operation requires capital. Al-Qaeda is unlikely to outcompete miners who are in it for money, not if it keeps blowing its nest egg away.
You do realize there are entire staffs of people in the military whose entire job is to figure out "what happens if potential opponent x does this thing that nobody thinks he'll ever do?"
It's called contingency planning, and since the real world is fucking weird it's really useful. For example who would have predicted that Ukraine would break up in February?
So yes, I'd say the odds that Al Qaeda actually use BTC mining to get rich are fairly low. But that doesn't mean I don't want a couple $80k analysts to look into the question for a few months. And that's all this report is saying will happen.
Moreover it doesn't imply that a) future terrorist opponents won't be mining the latest altcoin, or b) AQ won't simply buy some BTC on a shady exchange, put it on a wallet, and mail the thumb-drive to DC.
Given that pork-eating flight school students turned out to be Islamist terrorists, I'd have to say the answer is no.
Our success at preventing domestic terror attacks is usually credited partly to our ability to stop the terrorists from sending each-other money. BTC is specifically designed so that government's can't trace it, or interdict the cash-flow. This means the anti-terror cops damn well better have a plan for if AQ starts a major BTC mining operation.
The thing about democracy that's really really hard for most people to understand is that calling it rule "by the people" is a major over-simplification. "By the people" implies that almost every policy has majority support from those people. that doesn't happen for a variety of reasons:
1) The people don't really know what they want on a massive variety of issues. For example if you ask a poll about whether we should be a) reducing the deficit or b) cutting taxes the people always always always choose c) both. They do this because they are convinced we spend $150 Billion on NASA, $400 Billion on foreign aid, etc.; which means we could do that shit simply by firing NASA and insisting all future Pakistani aid only be silver-plated (rather then gold). The only "solution" to this problem is elect a bunch of people (aka: Congress) who base their number on the actual budget figures, rather then what a moderately intelligent amateur would infer from watching news reports.
2) Issue saliance also matters. If 10% of your population are crazy assholes who'd start a civil war if you imposed an income tax, and 55% kinda wants an income tax (but would be ok with a VAT), then the democratic thing to do is a VAT.
3) In a system with checks and balances, powerful Congressman (in Canada you can;t run for re-election to the House without a piece of paper signed by your party leader, and party leaders have been known to tell their local party organizations "You will nominate Ruby Dhalla because she's really pretty and Indian which makes her a STAR CANDIDATE;" which tends to reduce the amount of power an individual MP wields without his leader's permission) passionate minorities don't have to run to the hills. They have a lot of powers they can use beyond that.
Parliamentary maneuvers the majority allows because the majority likes individual Congressman to have the right to those maneuvers? Things like those riders sneaked on? Perfectly Democratic if everyone has access to the same riders?
Treaties that have to be repeatedly killed by mass protest movements because the minority that supports them has been maneuvered into various important positions in the State Department? If the Majority wanted a State Department that responded directly to protests that way it should have a) insisted that all CISPA/SOPA people be fired, or b) gone for Unity of Powers and Responsible Government rather then Seperation of Powers and Checks and Balances.
He didn't say anything about "should." He talked about "does." You're dragging him into a theoretical argument on the ethics of a curated platform he didn't start, largely because you can't win the technical argument about reality.
Here's reality: since all malware is software, any computing platform that's designed to run as much software as possible will include more malware then a more restricted platform. That is the reality of the situation. Whether the trade-off is worth it probably depends on a lot of factors -- how much software is available on the restricted platform, how bad the malware is, how much more software is on the non-restricted platform, whether the very idea of letting some asshole in Cupertino curate your computing experience creepifies you, etc. The more control you have over your devices the more ability you have to fuck them up, and that's just reality.
I have no doubt these particular Malware problems will shrink as people get educated on these issues. But that doesn't mean that all Android Malware magically goes away, it just means that Android Malware morphs to something new and different.
When you're the big target somebody is gonna succeed in developing malware for your platform. Since Droid don't have an asshole who can just pull a bad app from the store, and then implement a mandatory update to the OS so that said bad app never runs again, Droids always gonna have objectively more hacking/malware/etc. then iOS. That's just the tradeoff google chose when they decided they'd go for the mass market, and make it easy for geeks to do whatever they wanted with their phones.
Android does not have a curated market, so it's relatively easy to get Malware out, and then when it gets detected there's no one guy who can say "everyone with this bugged app and auto-update on is safe." Now if iOS was still the dominant OS that wouldn't matter. All Malware authors would be spending all their time trying to crack that shit because there was nothing else worth cracking. It's somewhat analogous to that brief period when OS X had enough market share that people started caring about it, but also had worlds better security then those versions of Windows because it was a BSD flavor and Windows meant XP. Cracking BSD would have been fucking hard, and with all those pretty Windows boxes to infect why bother?
Since then MS has improved, so that Macs are only slightly more secure then Windows boxes, and OS X market share has improved. Now Macusers actually have to pay attention to security (FYI fellow Macusers: do NOT install MacKeeper. It is a scam. A scam that I see at least twice a month, which means some asshole keeps downloading the damn thing).
I have no idea whether iOS Malware with ever catch up with Android. It will probably depend on a bunch of factors: can Apple keep the AppStore monopoly, and stay successful at suppressing malware in said store? Does some clever googler figure out a magical way to make the freest phone OS much harder to abuse? Does Droid's market share remain so huge that bothering with non-Droid malware is a dumb business move?
That's what the Security Forces Squadron at the base is for. You don't get past them to the panel, which makes your simulated hardware system very incriminating evidence when they try your corpse.
Now if you have the ID/story to get past SF into the base in the first place, you still have to get into the missile silo. The one that's designed to be Armageddon-fucking-proof. So you aren't sneaking in through an access hatch. You have to convince someone to open the door. Then you have to find the place where the missileers are, which happens to be where all access hatches to the missile are, before you can even open the hatch.
So in other words you have to create a device that would be cool enough to be your Electrical Engineering dissertation, it has to be compatible with multiple systems that are extremely classified, and then you have to human engineer your way onto a base in front of dozens of people to even hook the damn thing up. Then you have tio accomplish whatever you want to accomplish while the guy is sitting there watching you, and monitoring his own systems. He's gonna notice he lost control when you hooked up your "diagnostic prototype" to the system, and if you don't unhook it he is duty-bound to kill your damn ass and unhook it himself.
Now let's say they were using a completely modern network of Open Source stuff. You still need the great story to get on-base, and in-building. But you don't need to be anywhere particularly interesting in the silo to get shit done. They let you in, then you let them forget about you, then you hook your laptop up to the network, and you can do whatever a normal hacker could do.
You can claim on the internet you could do the former. I sincerely doubt it. I doubt anyone, including the Russians, has an agent talented enough to walk onto to a US Nuclear base and convince the Airmen to let him/her hook something up and sit there while it destroys them. This human being simply does not exist.
OTOH, I have dealt with several hackers who were good enough at social engineering to get into a building once, and could wreak all kinds of havoc from it's network, provided they were familiar with the system.
This is the fucking air force. These people burn $100k jet fuel on an hour of flight time just to say they went Mach 2, bill Congress, and get fucking reimbursed. The fact that your pissant little bitch-group could not get replacement parts for an 8-in floppy has no relevance to determining whether these assholes can. They simply wrote into the contract "And you floppy-supplying bitches will supply spares for $X," back in 1967. Then they put $X in the budget. It's still in the budget, with a little bump for inflation. If they need their fucking spare parts and Floppy-Supplying-Bitches-Inc cannot deliver somebody's going to Federal fucking prison for defrauding the Federal fucking Government, and some other guy is gonna get rich with a short-order contract.
And let's look at your proposal: You're proposing the Air Force rip up that contract from 1967, replace with a new (and much more expensive contract). But the contract will still involve interfacing modern computers with 1960s tech because the whole fucking point of this missile silo is to tell a 1966-designed missile fucking commie city to level. You don't do that with USB. You don't want to upgrade the missile itself because if you do that you're making your missiles better, which means the Russians will think "Why the fuck would they make their missiles better if they didn't want to vaporize my sister?" In the Biz, we call that a bad thing. This also applies to many of the systems that relate to the missile, because if we are spending 2 million modernizing each silo, that's $900 million, and nobody except you is gonna believe we're spending $900 million on nuclear missiles and not improving the damn things.
So you're still gonna need some version of Floppy-Supplying-Bitches-Inc., you're gonna risk pissing off the Russians (and it's not like they're in a pacifist mood), and given that it's a government IT project odds are it doesn;t work at all until at least version 2.
AQ would probably love to have a guy in a silo. It would scare the shit out of me even if the MPs shot him 500 feet from the entrance. And they're quite familiar with the modern IT security cat and mouse game, because over most of the Middle East they are the mice. OTOH they got no clue what to do with floppies bigger then 3.5."
The Russians et al. could easily get through the security through obscurity by buying old parts on eBay and having electrical engineering PhDs analyze them, but then the Russians et al. could do that shit to almost anything we come up with. The Chinese would probably have detailed sepcs before the design was officially approved, and be more familiar with it then the Air Force by the time a non-beta version was implemented.
Any modern technology based on consumer-level stuff is just as easy to hack, because every goddamn cybercriminal spends 100% of his goddamn time hacking it.
Any specialized new technology would take years to develop, cost 50% more then anyone in the private sector would pay (this is the government), have to interface with a missile old enough to be most missileers' grandparents, and would almost certainly not work in version 1. I do not like the concept of "not working" and a nuclear-goddamn-missile silo. The juxtaposition is simply not harmonious.
She may actually have used a terminal for data entry, or research in the 70s; but she wouldn't have been saving to her personal floppy disk. She'd have been saving to a file in her space (highly unlikely), printing out hard copy (more likely), or hitting some "file" button to send it to her editor (most likely).
But she'd have no more clue which disks they used then a subsistence farmer from Mozambique. Her first exposure to disks would probably be reporting on the Apple II, which used Woz's famous new disk-drive-control circuits and 5 1/2" disks.
"You are the one cherry-picking," which I just said. It's interesting to note you still haven't tracked down my source. You really do suck at this research thing, don't you? Unless it's something you vaguely recall a libertarian spewing at you you just don't know it. Which means you really don't know jack about American slavery. Since the America of the slave-era is the one Libertarians think of as the "freest country ever," they aren't terribly likely to engage in long conversations about how South Carolina raped most of it's women until Abe Lincoln broke the Constitution and stopped that shit.
As for the slave diet, it can't be a good diet if the vast majority of the people on it are dead before retirement age. It has to be precisely calculated to be just enough to prevent starvation in a healthy person, but no more. It's designed to kill the unhealthy/old so that Master can pretend he's not an evil murderer. Which may not seem direct to you, but hey. You're a Libertarian, you're supposed to be obsessed with arguing fine ethical points and then decreeing that anyone who disagrees with you on any of those points is anti-freedom, which you then conflate with multiple historical movements that spent most of their time trying to kill each-other.
Did I ever say I was Socialist by ANY definition of the term? It's a pretty meaningless term because it has been adopted by so many different movements, and a large proportion of the population insists on using it to refer to anyone who disagrees with them on the tiniest little matter, so almost everyone is socialist by some definition or other; but I haven't given you anything but that I'm left-wing economically on this thread. Did I ever say I would be eager to get into the new Communist government? Hell no. I said I don't make much (and I don't -- $14k last year, probably $25k this year), and that CPUSA would treat me as either a) a fellow-traveler who can be trusted with important government work, or b) a potential opponent who should be shot like Trotsky. Which means my choices are being shot, or an entry-level gig replacing one of the thousands of Federal Bureaucrats they have just actually shot.
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Tort reform has been tried in literally every state, in most cases more then once. It does not work.
Your little anecdote actually hints at the real problem. Somebody in that system could have said "hey let's re-sterilize that $150 plastic tube and re-use it," but nobody had an incentive to reduce the cost. Most patients aren't paying themselves. the ones that do will prefer a more expensive option that sounds better ("Manufacturer part just for you," sounds a lot better then "re-using this other dude's tube, but it's totally ok because we ran it through a dishwasher and then microwaved it"). Insurers have some reason to control costs, but very little ability because if the hospital says "fuck you blue cross," blue cross is gonna lose business. Moreover they don't want to be known as the company that forces customers to re-use some guys tube. The hospital is kicking the cost back to the insurer. Most finance guys in the system probably welcomed that letter from the malpractice insurer that forced them to spend $150 on that part. It allowed them to bitch about lawyers, justify raising prices, and finance guys are notorious for using increased revenue as a justification for increased administrative expenses (ie: they get a raise).
The reason you see all those greedy assholes at health care business meetings is that health care is a great place to be a greedy asshole. You can get damn near whatever price you want for damn near anything.
Left-wing economists tend to think the solution to the problem is more centralization in the business. If the government published one price list that everyone had to use it would be very difficult to charge $150 for a $0.50 part. If one insurer had control of the market they could just have told the hospital "Sorry, we're not paying $150 for a $0.50 part." Evidence that this works is generally taken from foreign countries, which have much smaller price increases. But states with concentrated insurance markets also have better costs. The greedy assholes can still get away with a lot, but at least there's some central system capable of noticing and responding to their BS.
Evidence that this works is decent. The Canadians are almost as fat as us and drink more, they spend less, and their Docrtors can't charge more then the official fee schedule. The UK is even cheaper, despite being arguably less healthy (they ain't skinny, and you haven't seen a drunk until you've seen a Brit drunk in his homeland), probably because there's even more governmental control. Their system is basically Stalinist. Everyone in the system is a government employee. In the US when the president talks about increasing Federal control of the sector cost increases level out. It happened for both Clinton and Obama.
Right-wing economists want everyone to pay more of their costs. They think that if people knew the true cost of procedures they'd negotiate $150 parts away. The problem with this is that a) there are very few real world examples of this working, and b) it's hard to see how some ordinary person would ever know the reason his procedure was so expensive was the $150 part.
Bullshit. Every treaty a president has signed (but has not been ratified) is an official policy of the President, and is therefore perfectly valid to the extent that the President is allowed to set policy. So the Kyoto Treaty was law until Bush II took over. In the US System this doesn't mean much because the President's ability to set policy entirely by himself is limited, but the treaty is still US Law to that limited extent.
With ACTA in US Law the actual treaty is totally irrelevant. This is because Obama can do everything in ACTA citing powers that have nothing to do with ACTA. Most of the things you hate about ACTA were passed in '08 as part of the PRO-IP Act. You ain't getting out of PRO-IP Act violations by claiming some treaty that didn't exist when the Act was passed needs to be ratified for it to be valid.
Your plan had very few similarities to the one the OP had. A minimum 20% of his premiums were being used for profit/administration, whereas you were probably under 5%. He was in the individual market, which is completely different from the employer market. Moreover all your experiences basically happened under ObamaCare, because the ObamaCare system is RomneyCare and has been the law in MA for more then a decade.
The $8,895 number is mostly older folks. A $50k hip replacement, plus a blood pressure medication, plus visits to a heart specialist, etc. adds up fast. The 50-65 age group really kills the US in expenses. They don't have Medicare yet and they have expensive medical treatments, so a lot of them are in the US individual insurance market, which pays world-record amounts for damn near every medical procedure, and then needs 20-30% of premiums for administrative stuff. OTOH Medicare proper pays very low rates because they have monopoly power ("Oh you don't like our price list Dr. Sanders? I guess you'll never have a patient older then 65 ever again.") and due to economies of scale has administrative costs well under 5%.
That's why the OP's individual plan was so cheap. They knew that a 30-something guy in decent health wasn't gonna get sick, so they know they would only spend money on him if he got hit by a truck. OTOH your plan is in the group market (either large group or small group), and it's cheaper then retail because your company probably has a lot of 20 and 30-somethings who don't actually use their insurance much. Moreover since one insurance agent can deal with multiple companies, and each company can have thousands of people on it's plan, administration is almost as cheap as Medicare. The OP needed an agent who knew his name, and talked to him a couple times a year, and that guy needed to be paid, so a much higher proportion of his premium went to administration.
Something just occurred to me about your wife's company dropping her insurance. Under the employer health exclusion her health insurance premiums aren't taxable. Anything else she gets as part of her job -- company car, life insurance, etc. -- is taxable. Here's how the math works. I'll use typical-ish numbers because I don't have the real ones. This is just to show why it's better for a company to spend money on health insurance then salaries.
Let's say your wife stayed single, made $40k, and had insurance of $10k. The company spent $50k on her, and she paid taxes on precisely $30k (the exemption this year was $3,900 and standard deduction was $6,100, she uses her exemption so she doesn't pay income tax on precisely $10k, most years the math isn't that neat). Checking out the tax table, she would have owed $4,058. In other words the company spent $50k on her, and she only got $45,942 of value out of it after federal taxes.
The penalty is $2k, and the company eats that and gives the other $8k as salary. Now we have $48k in income, minus $10k, is $38k taxable income. That's $5,435 in taxes. So the company spent the exact same amount, but your wife only gets $42,565 value.
In other words they didn't cut their expenses by a single penny, but your wife's take-home earnings went down $3,377. To make up a) the hike in taxes from earning the insurance premium as cash, and the $2k penalty they'd have to spend thousands more on your wife.
And they have to make it up to your wife or she'll quit, because very few people take a $3,377 pay cut and stays.
Total US Health Spending is $8,895 per person. If your insurer charges you less either they think you won't cost that much, or they're idiots who will go bankrupt real soon now.
In your case the former is more likely. The fine art of figuring out how much an insuree will cost is called "Underwriting," and if you only paid $100 a month your state probably lets it's insurers do a hell of a lot of that shit. They don;t tell you they're giving you a discount for being male, and young; because they figure you might not like finding out they'd charge your sister/girlfriend/crush loads more in case she gets pregnant. They're definitely not telling you about any youth discount, because you know that in 10 years you ain't getting that discount. You know all those horror stories about people who got cancer and their rates tripled, or the insurer refused to pay their bill because they hadn't mentioned a mole on their application? Those mostly come from plans like yours.
Under ObamaCare a lot of that underwriting is illegal. They can do some age-based discrimination, pardon me under-writing, but a lot less then before. They also can't charge women extra to cover pregnancy costs. Which means that they have to get the money from somebody, and currently that somebody is you. Most people in your situation get substantial subsidies to cover the difference, but there are people who are self-employed, young, male, and make too much to get the subsidy.
So, in the short term ObamaCare screwed you and people like you. But in the long-term it's probably gonna be good for you. I guarantee you that at some point in your life you will be 50, and only a fool charges a 50-year-old man $100 a month for insurance that actually pays for medical care. Adding your wife to your old $100 a month plan would probably have increased the cost a lot because she's a woman of childbearing age, and wives have a much higher pregnancy risk then girlfriends.
As for your wife's new insurance, keep in mind that your wife can always switch jobs. If they go for the fine they'll save money, but they'll also have very pissed off people, a lot will probably leave, and it'll mostly be their top people who do leave because idiots who've been over-promoted have trouble finding work at the same level in other companies. So if they do go for the fine they'll almost have to give her a substantial raise to cover the insurance premium or lose lots of their employees.
And, for the record, if God had come down from Heaven in March of 2010 and made me Dictator I would not have passed ObamaCare. I would have passed a universal MediCare bill. One of the things I hate about the current system for paying medical bills is that it's so fucking complicated that you can't understand why one person would get charged very little money for insurance without putting literally weeks into researching the damn issue. Which in turn means that if somebody changes the system it's very difficult to tell any individual American what this will do to his bills, because odds are that even if he knows the technical vocabulary to describe his policy he isn't using the words right. You can say "In general most people will see reduced bills because the subsidy will cover some of it," but you can't get much more specific. It would be so much easier if Obama'd just fire the entire insurance industry, and the medical Billing Specialists, and all the other finance weenie parasites that have managed to get themselves good jobs in health care without doing anything that actually involves medical care.
But that couldn't have gotten through the Senate IRL, so we're stuck with a half-assed compromise that simplifies some things, complicates others, and is generally a pain in the ass.
And this is exactly the kind of BS I was talking about.
I said nothing about who should care one way or the other about the debt. I said that the people who aren't in the very top tenth of the country don't give a shit about it. And they don't. I challenge you to find one poll in the past 50 years where the number one issue for most Americans has been the national debt. A real poll, not a push-poll from some activist outfit with an anti-government agenda. Good luck. It doesn't even make the top two economic issues very often (jobs always beat it, and if there's a recession on growth also beats it).
As for the debt in policy terms. I'm 33. I cannot remember a year in which anyone I knew said their top problem was inflation, because Reagan and Volcker licked stagflation back when I was a toddler. It seems to me that giving up something I want (and if you support the VA, the DoD, Social Security, and medicare you want the vast majority of Federal spending) to stop a problem that has not actually been a problem since I was four is probably not a wise use of government resources. In fact it seems to me that a lack of inflation is the major current economic problem, because if Apple's $160 Billion cash hoard was shrinking by 7% a year due to inflation they'd probably find something productive for it to do, rather then sitting on it.
It further seems to me that the logical way to prevent inflation caused by deficits, in the middle of a recession; is not gut programs that allow people to survive the recession, but to raise taxes on the masters of the universe who caused the damn thing.
Depends on the liberal-leaning people.
If you're black, and to you freedom is literally something granted by an Unconstitutional Executive order enforced by an army of jackbooted thugs paid for by a then-unconstitutional income tax; and the biggest failure in freedom since then can be traced to the Federal government getting said Army out of the law-enforcement business; you're probably a lot more worried about NYC's stop-and-frisk then anything the NSA does. In the experience of people you know and love the Federal government is not a very good tool of mass oppression, but your brother was definitely denied a college education because the NYPD found out he was a pothead and drug-convicted people are totally ineligible for all forms of student aid. You don't disagree with the premise that the NSA should be stopped, or that Obama should not have done that shit, but OTOH the people worried about it don't seem to have noticed that the Appeals Court back-pedelled in their criticism of the Judge who threw it out.
Most liberals understand that once the US gets involved in a war, and picks a side, we don't get to leave until that side is done with us. If we did in the future nobody would want us as an ally, which would have very uncomfortable implications for democracy in places like the former Soviet Union. We don't like that we're still in Afghanistan, but we're not blaming Obama for that. The folks who do blame Obama tend to be the same people who always hate the President because opposing someone in power is something they just do.
Last I saw his Approval rating among liberals was high 70s. I suspect what's going on is that you mostly interact with college-educated, white, millennials, who are comfortably well off. In that group the people who talk almost never say anything nice about a politician. They get into massive bitch-fests. It also includes a lot of people who honestly think opposing powerful people is the entire point of freedom. If Obama had waved a magic wand and convinced the Taliban to become pacifists, not used any drones, etc. they'd be complaining about ACTA. If he hadn't done that they'd have convinced themselves he could fix climate change by Executive Order, and they'd be complaining about that.
Let me put it to you this way: Canada is culturally very similar to us. It's got a similar electoral system that rewards only the most popular guy in the district, meaning that it's generally political suicide to run on a non-major-party ticket. They have one right-wing party. They have three speaking left-wing parties splitting the anti-Tory vote. So the Tories dominate. And if you point out that this is stupid to any English Canadian leftist he will respond by claiming that the other two left-wing parties are either a) posers, or b) splitters; and that the current world of Stephen Harper crushing left-wing dreams is infinitely superior to a world where his party leader is the number two or three person in a left wing coalition. Quite a few will go on to imply that a coalition led by his party leader would be fatally flawed due to it's inclusion of anyone from the other two.
Well, here is the distinction between your regular Joe-Shmo Republican, and your elected official Republican: The guy on the street is all for business. The guys in office are for whatever makes them richer. There is a similar gap on the Democrat side, too. Your regular Democrat on the street wants the type of socialism that gives a hand up to the poor. The Democrats in office want the type of socialism that gives the guys in power more money. This is why this whole left-right thing is stupid- the guys on the street both want to see their fellow man prosper. The guys in office want to further themselves. But they tell you it's right vs left so that you fight amongst yourself instead of stopping them from passing selfish laws.
They're not that cynical.
What happens is that the people who actually show up in every election, call their elected officials, make small donations to their favored candidates, etc. are almost all from a very specific upper-middle-class background. Since tghe politicians themselves come from that same socio-economic class they aren't surprised when all the people they talk to demand action on the deficit, despite the fact polls almost always say most Americans think the deficit is less important then multiple other issues.
If you have an intricate governmental structure, with multiple branches, true bicameralism, Congressman who frequently fight the leadership, huge districts of 750k people, etc. you give the people who can organize themselves lots of power over the people who can't. There's a lot going on and it all matters, which means unless you have multiple observers in DC feeding you info on what Congressman Dingell is doing on the Energy Committee you are gonna get played by the guy who does. That means you need an organization to vet the guy, and money to pay that guy.
That's a lot more likely to happen for the 9-5, enough money to save for retirement and have disposable income crowd. That's why they get to dominate things. If this was the UK or Canada, and you could follow national politics without knowing dozens of names and having some understanding of whether a disagreement between Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn is a big deal on a particular issue; and you only had to vote once every three to five years (instead of twice every two years -- if you actually want to matter in US Politics the local party primary is orders of magnitude more important than that BS in November); and there was only one political branch (which prevents Byzantine political disputes between the branches)...
Are you kidding? I help run a small business and I am starting one myself. I am an independent, but it is recent policy changes from the current administration that has been strangling us. We have had to lay-off employees in preparation for the ACA changes. This admin has done more to strengthen big business and make life harder for entrepreneurs than I have ever seen. I have voted for both liberals and conservatives, but I will be very hard-pressed to vote for a liberal again after so many lies and broken promises.
And how would you have gotten insurance as an entrepreneur before the ACA's Exchange?
The answer is pretty simple. There are two possibilities:
1) You're young, with no kids, no expensive females in the household, and can convince the agent you have no pre-existing medical conditions. You will get insurance.
2) You wouldn't have insurance.
I'm very skeptical of anyone who says they "had to lay off" employees due to the ACA. IRL I've seen companies blame the ACA because they fired people and they thought they could make Obama look like a bad guy, and I've seen them hire more part-timers so they could get their 33-hour guys down to 29. I have never seen a company that actually fired people. The Act simply does not increase your per-employee cost that way.
Money doesn't vote directly, but it definitely impacts the process. Instead of talking about the issues most people want to talk about (ie: should the minimum wage go up?), you end up discussing what some billionaire out-state wants you to discuss (ie: ObamaCare).
One of the things I hate about America is that the entire is designed so that the top 10% of income or so dominate the conversation. It should be noted that British equivalent of the lower nobility (the gentry) was about this proportion of the country. The last time most Americans gave a shit about the national debt I was in grade school, but the Gentry care about it a lot, so the last 3-4 years have been wasted with ridiculous arguments about which programs that ordinary Americans (ie: not the fucking gentry) we cut. Nobody seems to have seriously considered raising taxes. Increasing the minimum wage has been popular for decades, but since the Gentry have economics textbooks proving that poor people starve to death when McDonald's raises prices it ain't happening. The Democrat5s are alittle better about this then the GOP, but even they all tend to be members of the gentry themselves.
Whenever you criticize any aspect of the system that allows these people to totally dominate you're told that if most Americans wanted power they'd just learn what a filibuster vote was themselves and then they'd be gentry too.
And now the fucking Supreme Court has decreed that money = speech, which means the Gentry have yet another tool they can use to bully the rezst of the country into going along with them.
I can kinda understand why somebody who only reads a couple articles a year would think ACTA is illegal, but it's not. Here''s why:
Any treaty is legally binding on the US in the term of the guy who signed. However that doesn't mean much. It just means that, to the extent the President has the ability to order things, his orders complying with the Treaty are fine. So if Obama signed a treaty that said "Justin Bieber shall be fed to the badgers, and the Ambassador Bridge international crossing will be closed every May," the Treaty would be legally valid for Obama's term. Since Obama can't order people to be fed to badgers Bieber would be fine. Since he can order his border patrol to not let anyone you ain't using the Ambassador Bridge in May. If he wanted to close the Bridge in 2017 he'd have to get the Treaty ratified by the Senate, or convince his successor to sign the treaty, or just convince his successor to write an Executive Order. Since the government doesn't have the Constitutional authority to feed people to badger's, the Bieber bit of the treaty would never be valid no matter how often the Senate voted on it.
If the Treaty involves some change to US Law it's valid in the sense that it's binding on the US when the Senate ratifies it. It's not valid in the sense that you have to obey the damn thing until Congress passes a law complying with the Treaty. So if some treaty insisted we ban cigarettes you could still smoke until the House and Senate pass a bill banning cigarettes. In a lot of ways ratification is actually be a waste of time, because you'd need 67 Senators, whereas passing the statute only requires 50 (assuming the VP agrees with the Treaty). If the President signs the treaty on Monday, 35 Senators say "fuck you, we smoke" on Tuesday, and 50 Senators, the VP, and the House ban by statute the damn things on Wednesday, then cigarettes still get banned.
The enforcement mechanism in most treaties is other countries bitching when they're not complied with. Obama knows he's gonna comply with ACTA because our laws already comply with ACTA. He can sign it, which makes it binding on the US, but he doesn't need to have it ratified.
So, let me understand your point better. You're saying that you believe what Apple publishes on its own security mechanism?
Don't be silly.
Apple is monopolistic, greedy, and power-hungry. As a non-Apple source of power they do not particularly like the government. Particularly the law enforcement bits, which a) cost them money and b) stop them from monopolizing further.
Most importantly Apple isn't stupid. They make money by making consumers happy. They make approximately $0 from making law enforcement happy. Therefore they have literally no reason to lie in something like this. There's no reason for them to do it. At all. Their job is to make money. Paying for back doors, and engineers to use said back doors, is literally the opposite of what Apple is supposed to do.
Moreover, if they did they'd almost certainly be caught. There are literally millions of local cops in the US. Each and every one of those guys will probably test some aspect of Apple's claims sometime in the next month, because an awful lot of Americans have iPhones. And if any one of those millions of guys has a twitter account and agrees with geeks on privacy rules then we'll all know about it tomorrow.
Given that pork-eating flight school students turned out to be Islamist terrorists, I'd have to say the answer is no.
I hate to spoil your snark, but Islam, like Judaism, has a prohibition against eating pork. So you could argue that *not* eating bacon is a possible warning sign of terrorist potential...
That's why the snark is funny. Pork-eating Islamist is by definition a contradiction, yet that shit actually happened.
There is nothing that is so completely innocent that it would not be possible to draw a link between said activity and terrorism. If you could find such an activity the terrorists would immediately start doing it as cover.
I'm not saying the feds need to investigate all people all the time, but if you think there's some activity that is so virtuous and innocent that no Federal official should ever spend a couple months figuring out how it could be abused, you are are mistaken.
Our success at preventing domestic terror attacks is usually credited partly to our ability to stop the terrorists from sending each-other money.
Uhm, what success? AFAIK, the only "terrorist plot" in the US that the government has prevented was that one where the idiots thought that if they blew up a fuel pipe at JFK, they could get an explosion all along that pipeline. Obviously, they didn't comprehend that for an explosion to happen, you need fuel *and* oxygen...
That's kinda the point.
We had one set of attacks that required a fairly large amount of cash ($100k or so, IIRC) and happened, then we implemented these controls and all attacks have either been a) so physically impossible that their "perpetrators" should probably not be prosecuted, or b) very small beans.
I'll admit it's not a conclusive point, Bush's Iraq War was a tragic mistake but it also drew a generation of terrorists to the place, in many ways the S11 attack was largely luck, etc.
But, unfortunately for us, the real world doesn't allow for controlled experiments. So all the data we have is that there was an absolutely terrible attack, then we did some shit, and there hasn't been another one. The Shit We Did (SWD) probably did something good, but proving conclusively which element of SWD worked is impossible.
That said, it is equally impossible for the skeptics of SWD to actually prove their cases. It's not like they can go back in time, remove all money laundering-controls just for Kansas City, and see whether terrorism happens. Therefore when something that changes SWD we should probably have both sides present their cases. This new study will probably be the pro SWD, anti-BTC as money-laundering side. Presumably the pro-BTC and anti-government geeks at Slashdot will present the other side with enthusiasm, just as soon as they have something to rebut.
BTC is specifically designed so that government's can't trace it, or interdict the cash-flow. This means the anti-terror cops damn well better have a plan for if AQ starts a major BTC mining operation.
No, bitcoin is *not* designed to be untraceable. In fact, thanks to the blockchain, it's actually a lot easier to trace than normal cash. What's hard is taking the information from the blockchain, and connecting it to a specific individual or group. So it's pretty anonymous, but once a given wallet has been associated with someone like AQ, anyone monitoring the blockchains could extract a heck of a lot of info about where their money is coming from and going to.
So it's not untraceable, it's just almost impossible to figure out which humans a) sent the money, and b) received the money? I believe that is the dictionary definition of "untraceable."
In other words let's assume AQ has an IQ above room temperature. They have $15k from some wealthy-ass Arab Sheik. They create a new wallet. They buy $15k BTC. They can now either a) send their guy the wallet ph
There are not 6-7 billion domestic terrorist in any country on Earth. I'll leave it as an excersize to the reader why that might be.
I'm asking who's making the claim. "The military" is still too vague, especially with zero evidence provided.
Let me google that for you. An Army report explicitly linking terrorism to money laundering good enough for you?
Probably not, seeing as you just demanded a source for something that is easily googled. You're probably a troll.
How much is the banking industry paying you to make BTC activists sound like jerks on the internet? Because they'd probably pay me more. You just don't have the talent required to be an effective jerk on the internet.
Really? Asking for numbers to assess effectiveness is a dumb way of doing so? Then how do you propose it's assessed?
And that's how many? Exactly speaking, or even as an order of magnitude figure?
So what, exactly speaking, are you claiming here? That terrorist attacks don't actually require a lot of money, so money transfers aren't really that important to terrorists, so watching money transfers is pointless from anti-terrorism point of view?
If you were literate, which is doubtful given your inability to google anything, you could probably figure this out yourself.
Big attacks require multi-thousand budgets. That hasn't happened.
I'm entirely convinced that you're an idiot. The only question remains whether you genuinely lack intelligence, or just can't bear to be shown wrong on the Internet.
"Idiot?" You're not even good at ad hominem.
That's all nice and good. But it still doesn't address my point: Al-Qaeda can't compete against miners who put their money on their mini
"Usually credited" by whom? People who have a vested interest in stopping people from sending each other money without going through them?
For that matter, how many "domestic terror attacks" have been stopped lately? Or is it simply that most people aren't crazy enough to want to blow up their own home?
"Most people" being not crazy didn't help on S11. When there are 6-7 billion of us even a tiny minority of idiots is hundreds of millions of people.
Moreover since the military are some of the people who say anti-money-laundering initiatives help prevent terrorism, you're implying the military actually gets paid based on the volume of transactions in the international finance system. It doesn't.
As how many have been stopped, that's a really dumb way for you to bring up the point. The answer is 100% of the attacks that involve spending more a grand. Legally available firearms only cost more then $500 if you get a really nice one, which terrorists tend not to do, and pressure-cooker bombs are under $100. Congrats dummy, you just walked into that one. If you didn't suck at this you would have anticipated that argument, and claimed that no major attacks had been tried, and therefore my argument was ridiculous.
Frankly you're so bad at this I'm already half-convinced you're an anti-BTC agent provocateur.
Starting a BTC mining operation requires capital. Al-Qaeda is unlikely to outcompete miners who are in it for money, not if it keeps blowing its nest egg away.
You do realize there are entire staffs of people in the military whose entire job is to figure out "what happens if potential opponent x does this thing that nobody thinks he'll ever do?"
It's called contingency planning, and since the real world is fucking weird it's really useful. For example who would have predicted that Ukraine would break up in February?
So yes, I'd say the odds that Al Qaeda actually use BTC mining to get rich are fairly low. But that doesn't mean I don't want a couple $80k analysts to look into the question for a few months. And that's all this report is saying will happen.
Moreover it doesn't imply that a) future terrorist opponents won't be mining the latest altcoin, or b) AQ won't simply buy some BTC on a shady exchange, put it on a wallet, and mail the thumb-drive to DC.
Given that pork-eating flight school students turned out to be Islamist terrorists, I'd have to say the answer is no.
Our success at preventing domestic terror attacks is usually credited partly to our ability to stop the terrorists from sending each-other money. BTC is specifically designed so that government's can't trace it, or interdict the cash-flow. This means the anti-terror cops damn well better have a plan for if AQ starts a major BTC mining operation.
The thing about democracy that's really really hard for most people to understand is that calling it rule "by the people" is a major over-simplification. "By the people" implies that almost every policy has majority support from those people. that doesn't happen for a variety of reasons:
1) The people don't really know what they want on a massive variety of issues. For example if you ask a poll about whether we should be a) reducing the deficit or b) cutting taxes the people always always always choose c) both. They do this because they are convinced we spend $150 Billion on NASA, $400 Billion on foreign aid, etc.; which means we could do that shit simply by firing NASA and insisting all future Pakistani aid only be silver-plated (rather then gold). The only "solution" to this problem is elect a bunch of people (aka: Congress) who base their number on the actual budget figures, rather then what a moderately intelligent amateur would infer from watching news reports.
2) Issue saliance also matters. If 10% of your population are crazy assholes who'd start a civil war if you imposed an income tax, and 55% kinda wants an income tax (but would be ok with a VAT), then the democratic thing to do is a VAT.
3) In a system with checks and balances, powerful Congressman (in Canada you can;t run for re-election to the House without a piece of paper signed by your party leader, and party leaders have been known to tell their local party organizations "You will nominate Ruby Dhalla because she's really pretty and Indian which makes her a STAR CANDIDATE;" which tends to reduce the amount of power an individual MP wields without his leader's permission) passionate minorities don't have to run to the hills. They have a lot of powers they can use beyond that.
Parliamentary maneuvers the majority allows because the majority likes individual Congressman to have the right to those maneuvers? Things like those riders sneaked on? Perfectly Democratic if everyone has access to the same riders?
Treaties that have to be repeatedly killed by mass protest movements because the minority that supports them has been maneuvered into various important positions in the State Department? If the Majority wanted a State Department that responded directly to protests that way it should have a) insisted that all CISPA/SOPA people be fired, or b) gone for Unity of Powers and Responsible Government rather then Seperation of Powers and Checks and Balances.
He didn't say anything about "should." He talked about "does." You're dragging him into a theoretical argument on the ethics of a curated platform he didn't start, largely because you can't win the technical argument about reality.
Here's reality: since all malware is software, any computing platform that's designed to run as much software as possible will include more malware then a more restricted platform. That is the reality of the situation. Whether the trade-off is worth it probably depends on a lot of factors -- how much software is available on the restricted platform, how bad the malware is, how much more software is on the non-restricted platform, whether the very idea of letting some asshole in Cupertino curate your computing experience creepifies you, etc. The more control you have over your devices the more ability you have to fuck them up, and that's just reality.
I have no doubt these particular Malware problems will shrink as people get educated on these issues. But that doesn't mean that all Android Malware magically goes away, it just means that Android Malware morphs to something new and different.
When you're the big target somebody is gonna succeed in developing malware for your platform. Since Droid don't have an asshole who can just pull a bad app from the store, and then implement a mandatory update to the OS so that said bad app never runs again, Droids always gonna have objectively more hacking/malware/etc. then iOS. That's just the tradeoff google chose when they decided they'd go for the mass market, and make it easy for geeks to do whatever they wanted with their phones.
Android does not have a curated market, so it's relatively easy to get Malware out, and then when it gets detected there's no one guy who can say "everyone with this bugged app and auto-update on is safe." Now if iOS was still the dominant OS that wouldn't matter. All Malware authors would be spending all their time trying to crack that shit because there was nothing else worth cracking. It's somewhat analogous to that brief period when OS X had enough market share that people started caring about it, but also had worlds better security then those versions of Windows because it was a BSD flavor and Windows meant XP. Cracking BSD would have been fucking hard, and with all those pretty Windows boxes to infect why bother?
Since then MS has improved, so that Macs are only slightly more secure then Windows boxes, and OS X market share has improved. Now Macusers actually have to pay attention to security (FYI fellow Macusers: do NOT install MacKeeper. It is a scam. A scam that I see at least twice a month, which means some asshole keeps downloading the damn thing).
I have no idea whether iOS Malware with ever catch up with Android. It will probably depend on a bunch of factors: can Apple keep the AppStore monopoly, and stay successful at suppressing malware in said store? Does some clever googler figure out a magical way to make the freest phone OS much harder to abuse? Does Droid's market share remain so huge that bothering with non-Droid malware is a dumb business move?
That's what the Security Forces Squadron at the base is for. You don't get past them to the panel, which makes your simulated hardware system very incriminating evidence when they try your corpse.
Now if you have the ID/story to get past SF into the base in the first place, you still have to get into the missile silo. The one that's designed to be Armageddon-fucking-proof. So you aren't sneaking in through an access hatch. You have to convince someone to open the door. Then you have to find the place where the missileers are, which happens to be where all access hatches to the missile are, before you can even open the hatch.
So in other words you have to create a device that would be cool enough to be your Electrical Engineering dissertation, it has to be compatible with multiple systems that are extremely classified, and then you have to human engineer your way onto a base in front of dozens of people to even hook the damn thing up. Then you have tio accomplish whatever you want to accomplish while the guy is sitting there watching you, and monitoring his own systems. He's gonna notice he lost control when you hooked up your "diagnostic prototype" to the system, and if you don't unhook it he is duty-bound to kill your damn ass and unhook it himself.
Now let's say they were using a completely modern network of Open Source stuff. You still need the great story to get on-base, and in-building. But you don't need to be anywhere particularly interesting in the silo to get shit done. They let you in, then you let them forget about you, then you hook your laptop up to the network, and you can do whatever a normal hacker could do.
You can claim on the internet you could do the former. I sincerely doubt it. I doubt anyone, including the Russians, has an agent talented enough to walk onto to a US Nuclear base and convince the Airmen to let him/her hook something up and sit there while it destroys them. This human being simply does not exist.
OTOH, I have dealt with several hackers who were good enough at social engineering to get into a building once, and could wreak all kinds of havoc from it's network, provided they were familiar with the system.
Stop thinking like a goddamn civilian, civilian.
This is the fucking air force. These people burn $100k jet fuel on an hour of flight time just to say they went Mach 2, bill Congress, and get fucking reimbursed. The fact that your pissant little bitch-group could not get replacement parts for an 8-in floppy has no relevance to determining whether these assholes can. They simply wrote into the contract "And you floppy-supplying bitches will supply spares for $X," back in 1967. Then they put $X in the budget. It's still in the budget, with a little bump for inflation. If they need their fucking spare parts and Floppy-Supplying-Bitches-Inc cannot deliver somebody's going to Federal fucking prison for defrauding the Federal fucking Government, and some other guy is gonna get rich with a short-order contract.
And let's look at your proposal:
You're proposing the Air Force rip up that contract from 1967, replace with a new (and much more expensive contract). But the contract will still involve interfacing modern computers with 1960s tech because the whole fucking point of this missile silo is to tell a 1966-designed missile fucking commie city to level. You don't do that with USB. You don't want to upgrade the missile itself because if you do that you're making your missiles better, which means the Russians will think "Why the fuck would they make their missiles better if they didn't want to vaporize my sister?" In the Biz, we call that a bad thing. This also applies to many of the systems that relate to the missile, because if we are spending 2 million modernizing each silo, that's $900 million, and nobody except you is gonna believe we're spending $900 million on nuclear missiles and not improving the damn things.
So you're still gonna need some version of Floppy-Supplying-Bitches-Inc., you're gonna risk pissing off the Russians (and it's not like they're in a pacifist mood), and given that it's a government IT project odds are it doesn;t work at all until at least version 2.
He's not the only one.
AQ would probably love to have a guy in a silo. It would scare the shit out of me even if the MPs shot him 500 feet from the entrance. And they're quite familiar with the modern IT security cat and mouse game, because over most of the Middle East they are the mice. OTOH they got no clue what to do with floppies bigger then 3.5."
The Russians et al. could easily get through the security through obscurity by buying old parts on eBay and having electrical engineering PhDs analyze them, but then the Russians et al. could do that shit to almost anything we come up with. The Chinese would probably have detailed sepcs before the design was officially approved, and be more familiar with it then the Air Force by the time a non-beta version was implemented.
You got an alternative?
Any modern technology based on consumer-level stuff is just as easy to hack, because every goddamn cybercriminal spends 100% of his goddamn time hacking it.
Any specialized new technology would take years to develop, cost 50% more then anyone in the private sector would pay (this is the government), have to interface with a missile old enough to be most missileers' grandparents, and would almost certainly not work in version 1. I do not like the concept of "not working" and a nuclear-goddamn-missile silo. The juxtaposition is simply not harmonious.
She may actually have used a terminal for data entry, or research in the 70s; but she wouldn't have been saving to her personal floppy disk. She'd have been saving to a file in her space (highly unlikely), printing out hard copy (more likely), or hitting some "file" button to send it to her editor (most likely).
But she'd have no more clue which disks they used then a subsistence farmer from Mozambique. Her first exposure to disks would probably be reporting on the Apple II, which used Woz's famous new disk-drive-control circuits and 5 1/2" disks.
"You are the one cherry-picking," which I just said. It's interesting to note you still haven't tracked down my source. You really do suck at this research thing, don't you? Unless it's something you vaguely recall a libertarian spewing at you you just don't know it. Which means you really don't know jack about American slavery. Since the America of the slave-era is the one Libertarians think of as the "freest country ever," they aren't terribly likely to engage in long conversations about how South Carolina raped most of it's women until Abe Lincoln broke the Constitution and stopped that shit.
As for the slave diet, it can't be a good diet if the vast majority of the people on it are dead before retirement age. It has to be precisely calculated to be just enough to prevent starvation in a healthy person, but no more. It's designed to kill the unhealthy/old so that Master can pretend he's not an evil murderer. Which may not seem direct to you, but hey. You're a Libertarian, you're supposed to be obsessed with arguing fine ethical points and then decreeing that anyone who disagrees with you on any of those points is anti-freedom, which you then conflate with multiple historical movements that spent most of their time trying to kill each-other.
Did I ever say I was Socialist by ANY definition of the term? It's a pretty meaningless term because it has been adopted by so many different movements, and a large proportion of the population insists on using it to refer to anyone who disagrees with them on the tiniest little matter, so almost everyone is socialist by some definition or other; but I haven't given you anything but that I'm left-wing economically on this thread. Did I ever say I would be eager to get into the new Communist government? Hell no. I said I don't make much (and I don't -- $14k last year, probably $25k this year), and that CPUSA would treat me as either a) a fellow-traveler who can be trusted with important government work, or b) a potential opponent who should be shot like Trotsky.
Which means my choices are being shot, or an entry-level gig replacing one of the thousands of Federal Bureaucrats they have just actually shot.