How the hell does any of this reduce healthcare costs? Taxing medical devices will only add costs to the patients at the end. Increasing unreimbursed medical expenses will only leave people poorer after paying lots of money in medical costs. Making parents cover their childrens' insurance will only raise their premiums. Taxing health insurance providers will only raise the cost of insurance. (This is probably a rhetorical question, as you appear to be making the point that these will only raise costs.)
It's even more useful to compare costs with other countries, especially rich western European nations where the cost-of-living is even higher than here in the US. Here's an article about a guy who flew to Belgium to have a hip transplant done out-of-pocket because it was so much cheaper than doing it in the US, even though the artificial hip joint implant was made here in the US, but only cost maybe a thousand dollars in Belgium, whereas it costs $15,000 here in the US, which is what he paid to have the whole procedure done in Belgium, including airfare and a hospital stay!
Yes, $55K for an appendectomy sounds like a lot of money, but lots of people will rationalize it thinking "doctors are paid a lot and hospitals are expensive, so that must be a reasonable price for that", but it's simply not true, and you can tell because it doesn't cost anywhere near that to get the same thing done in western Europe, even though most things over there are a lot more expensive than they are here and the overall cost of living is much higher than most parts of the US. I don't know offhand what an appendectomy costs in Belgium, but if the NYT article is any indication, you can probably have it done there for less than $10K, including airfare.
No AWD, pathetic power, shitty handling, borderline ugly looks, bizarre dashboard, cheap materials, very limited battery only range, etc. This is not a car I would chose to go winter rallying in regardless of the choice of tires.
How exactly do "ugly looks", a "bizarre dashboard", cheap (interior I assume) materials, and a limited battery-only range affect winter driving? And "shitty handling" for that matter: when you drive a car in snow and ice, handling is not important, since you're supposed to be driving very slowly around corners. Even "pathetic power" isn't important: you're supposed to be driving slowly, not accelerating quickly. The only thing that matters in snow and ice is traction, and that's only affected by three things: tires, weight distribution, and number of driven wheels. Front-wheel drive cars are better than RWD for traction, though not as good as AWD, and Prius is FWD with a lot of weight in the front. So the only real problem with them is the tires, and that's easily solved with proper winter tires. And most importantly, this isn't any different from just about any other smallish FWD car out there today.
Sure he does. The analogy is unsatisfying because an analogy is being drawn between gravity and gravity. It just removed one space dimension.
That's because in the analogy, the rubber sheet is deformed by gravity's effects on the objects on it, causing the objects on that sheet to move differently than if the sheet weren't deformed. In our actual universe, according to Einstein's theory, spacetime itself is deformed by the mass of objects (not by gravity), leading to different motion that appears to us as gravity. So it's not really drawing an analogy between gravity and gravity, but rather "deformation of spacetime ("gravity") as an effect of mass (acting through some unknown mechanism)", and "deformation of a rubber sheet as an effect of mass (acting through the mechanism of gravity)".
No, it's not a perfect analogy. However, do you have a suggestion for a better analogy to illustrate this concept to laymen? This is the crux of the problem. Some pedants are complaining about the analogy, but they don't have anything better.
You're still left with trying to explain why the earth moves at all. In the ant analogy, it's because the ant walks, in other words exerts its will. In the rubber sheet analogy, the earth's gravity makes the ball move; if (as one post said) the earth's gravity represents time, then you still face the question of what makes the ball move from one moment to the next? Why can't it stay in the same place on the curved rubber sheet?
Isn't the Earth moving (I assume you mean in an orbit around the Sun, as well as its own spin) because it was set in motion that way from long ago? Presumably, the events of the Big Bang set everything into motion, which is why the stars and galaxies are moving away from each other over time. Things like planets orbiting stars are just side-effects of the force of gravity and other factors, sort of like how objects moving through water create small eddy currents.
On March 7, 2013 the Sun was for a short time the brightest Gamma source in the sky. This according to the Einstein theorists can only happen with a star that is collapsing into a black hole. The sun is still shining brightly and we haven't been sucked down a black hole yet. Wake up people these guys are wrong!
But aren't all scientific theories wrong to some point? They're just models to explain the universe that we observe and to make predictions. Do we have a better theory (or theories) than the Einstein group of theories? Newton's Laws are wrong, but we use them all the time because for most of the stuff we do (which doesn't involve atomic-scale things or smaller, or astrophysical stuff), they provide results which are close enough. They only really break down at the extremes, but for desigining airplanes and bridges, they work just fine.
in fact there is serious doubt that gravity as a force actually exists but may rather be cross product of EM field potential differentials.
Do you have a good citation for this? Not trying to be argumentative, I'd really like to read up more on this. Any idea if this would make it possible to artificially generate gravity with EM fields somehow? If we want to send humans to Mars or build a Moon base or whatever, electrically-generated gravity would be really useful.
It's just an analogy, these people are taking it much too far. OK, maybe it doesn't work perfectly (which is why it isn't called a "model"), after all, you're trying to use an analogy in 3 dimensions to explain behavior in what appears to be 4 dimensions. But if you don't like the analogy, do you have a better analogy to suggest? Does anyone? It's a good analogy because it's the best analogy we have to explain something we don't fully understand and can't directly observe (except the obvious effects of gravitational interaction; I mean that we can't directly observe the curvature of spacetime). An imperfect analogy is better than no analogy at all.
That shouldn't be hard. For most carmakers, you can buy all the parts at various places online. For instance, if you have an Acura, you can go to acuraoemparts.com (or maybe oemacuraparts.com) and look up diagrams and buy any part in the car. Rebuilding a transmission is entirely doable if you want to, but usually it's faster and easier to just buy a remanufactured unit.
Things in cars have not gotten any more complicated than in years past; in most cases, they've actually gotten simpler, except in the area of electronics. Servicing a car isn't any more difficult than in years past, and in fact it's frequently much simpler. The big thing that's changed is manufacturing technology: mechanical components can be manufactured to much tighter tolerances than before. The other thing that's changed is electronics: we now use small computers to control everything, instead of mechanical contraptions (like the Rube Goldberg-esque carburetors we used to use). The final thing that's changed is labor rates: they're through the roof, so no one wants to do anything that isn't super-fast, because it'll cost too much, compared to what it costs to just buy a new one (built extremely efficiently in a factory, frequently using a lot of automation).
The phenomenon you're seeing with car repair is twofold: shops don't want to spend much time on servicing anything because customers aren't going to pay $65-85/hour for you to dick around with a rebuild job you don't do frequently and probably aren't very good at, when you can just get a remanufactured unit from a specialty place for much less and bolt it in in a half-hour, and 2) lots of people (esp. backyard mechanics) have bought into this idiotic "everything's so complicated! I need a special computer just to change the oil!" bullshit which isn't remotely true.
Instead, he wasted precious time on disastrous health care reforms
I wish people would stop repeating this. It's not true. He wasted precious time on disastrous health insurance reforms. He (and the Democrats) didn't do shit when it comes to health care. Insurance companies do NOT provide any kind of health care. Try going to a Blue Cross/Blue Shield office and asking them for a medical procedure. Why this distinction matters is that the problem with our healthcare isn't so much the insurance, but the out-of-control costs for the care itself (ridiculously expensive hospital bills, compared to what it costs to get the same procedure done in western European private hospitals, for instance). Obamacare didn't do anything at all to fix the problem of these out-of-control costs, it just changed the rules for the insurance that most people use to pay for them, basically spreading the cost out to more people and increasing most peoples' monthly premiums greatly.
Government is only as good as the voters make it. So in our case, doing it with the government won't work either: you'll just get a project that's totally mismanaged and massively over-budget, and by the time the SHTF, the politicians who set things in motion and are to blame for the mess have already moved on, and the new politicians will blame their predecessors for everything that went wrong, no matter how true that really is, and the voters will buy it.
So, in your weird little world, if a new boss is hired at a company, and his employees do something stupid which costs the company business and customers, he shouldn't fire them because their division was around before he was hired, even though he's their boss?
And at the very top, the boss of them all, is Barack Obama. Why isn't anyone else naming him when this shit happens? What has he done to rein in these abuses? Nothing.
Now you're acting like multiple people, responding twice to my post in quick succession, even though you're obviously the same person. Again, I encourage you to seek psychological help as soon as possible.
Sorry, but this is BS. While I don't deny there may be some scamming going on, what you're suggesting is akin to saying, "don't use the internet, it's 100% spam" because you get some spam emails from Nigerians once in a while.
I've been on dozens of Meetup hikes and other events. None of them were "spam", organized by real estate agents, or anything of the kind. Did you look to see how long the groups you joined had been in existence? Did they have any comments posted by other members? Most decent groups have been around for years, have dozens or hundreds of members, tons of comments about the hikes (or other events), lots of information to go along with the events (such as GPS coordinates of the trailhead, tips including what to bring or not to bring, whether pets are allowed or not, etc.
Sounds like you're just really bad at spotting scams. And why would you even stick around for 30 minutes of a salesperson's spiel if you thought you were attending a free hiking event? Did you meet at a trailhead? Your entire post just sounds ridiculous.
Nope, American. I live in the northeast in a 1930-vintage wood-frame house, and my AP is 2.4GHz. I hadn't considered 5GHz or steel beams when I wrote that, which apparently are some significant factors for some people. Not much stucco around here, thankfully (that shit looks horrible), and the houses here all tend to be similar to this one: fairly old and all-wood. The kitchen here is at the opposite end of the house from where my AP is located, so the kitchen appliances aren't really a factor, though I don't notice any problems when I use my laptop in there either. The water heater and boiler are in the basement, so they don't block any places.
the last one that did was WinXP which was depreciated
Sorry, you can't depreciate WinXP on your tax forms.
As for your article, it's mostly right, but the problem with malware on Linux (not Android) is that there's too much diversity. One of the comments after that article said it best:
The security of Linux is always mentioned as a good reason to switch. And in fact, I still agree with that argument. I believe that Linux itself is definitely much more secure (note how these vulnerabilities are in Gnome and KDE, not in Linux itself). There is noticably less malware out for Linux. There are several reasons for that:
* Linux as the core OS is more secure.
* There is much more diversity in the potentially more vulnerable desktop environments.
* Linux has a smaller market share.
The second point is often overlooked: Whatever works on one version of Linux doesn't work on the other. Linux has a small market share, but those who run Gnome and KDE have an even smaller percentage of that, and so on. And servers, which don't run a desktop component, are very secure indeed.
Unlike other platforms, with Linux, users could be running several different things. This is more true today than in 2009, when this article was written. Back then, there were only KDE and Gnome2, with others having very little usage. Now, there's KDE, Gnome3, Unity, MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE, and several others (most of this caused by the Unity and Gnome3 dual debacles, forcing people to flee to or create new alternatives). On top of that, there's different distros. So something that might work on one may not work on another. The article's author even mentioned Thunar (the XFCE file manager), as it flags desktop launchers as potential malware; there's nothing stopping other file managers from doing the same thing, and who knows, maybe some do by now.
Android is a little different since there's only one Android (though it does get some different "skins" from the handset makers, like TouchWiz and HTC Sense) (though it does have a few different versions, not different from Windows with its XP, Vista, 7, and 8). It also has a huge marketshare in mobile phones, unlike desktop Linux which has a rather small marketshare (as best as anyone can tell, since there's no reliable way to count Linux users since it's usually installed after-the-fact, unlike Windows/MacOS). It really isn't worth it for a malware writer to target Linux and hope they get one of the less-savvy users (grandma whose grandson set up her computer with Ubuntu because he was sick of getting called over to fix her Windows computer so often) when they can target the Big Two instead.
That won't work: it requires too much honesty and information from all the participants. People are famous for lying on online dating sites: men always say they're 2 inches taller than they are, and women always minimize how fat they are (by calling themselves "curvy" instead of "obese") and lie about their age. If the dating site can't even get honest information about peoples' physical characteristics and ages, how do you expect to get honest feedback about dates from participants? The guy who stood up a woman is going to lie about it and say she didn't show up, while she says she was stood up; which one is the dating site supposed to believe? If the guy says the woman was neurotic, and she says he was arrogant and abusive, who do you believe? And then there's the whole liability angle: if you get feedback from participants, and then post this ("1 previous date says this person attempted to rape her"), you're just asking for a libel lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
How the hell does any of this reduce healthcare costs? Taxing medical devices will only add costs to the patients at the end. Increasing unreimbursed medical expenses will only leave people poorer after paying lots of money in medical costs. Making parents cover their childrens' insurance will only raise their premiums. Taxing health insurance providers will only raise the cost of insurance. (This is probably a rhetorical question, as you appear to be making the point that these will only raise costs.)
It's even more useful to compare costs with other countries, especially rich western European nations where the cost-of-living is even higher than here in the US. Here's an article about a guy who flew to Belgium to have a hip transplant done out-of-pocket because it was so much cheaper than doing it in the US, even though the artificial hip joint implant was made here in the US, but only cost maybe a thousand dollars in Belgium, whereas it costs $15,000 here in the US, which is what he paid to have the whole procedure done in Belgium, including airfare and a hospital stay!
Yes, $55K for an appendectomy sounds like a lot of money, but lots of people will rationalize it thinking "doctors are paid a lot and hospitals are expensive, so that must be a reasonable price for that", but it's simply not true, and you can tell because it doesn't cost anywhere near that to get the same thing done in western Europe, even though most things over there are a lot more expensive than they are here and the overall cost of living is much higher than most parts of the US. I don't know offhand what an appendectomy costs in Belgium, but if the NYT article is any indication, you can probably have it done there for less than $10K, including airfare.
Studded tires are illegal in many places.
No AWD, pathetic power, shitty handling, borderline ugly looks, bizarre dashboard, cheap materials, very limited battery only range, etc. This is not a car I would chose to go winter rallying in regardless of the choice of tires.
How exactly do "ugly looks", a "bizarre dashboard", cheap (interior I assume) materials, and a limited battery-only range affect winter driving? And "shitty handling" for that matter: when you drive a car in snow and ice, handling is not important, since you're supposed to be driving very slowly around corners. Even "pathetic power" isn't important: you're supposed to be driving slowly, not accelerating quickly. The only thing that matters in snow and ice is traction, and that's only affected by three things: tires, weight distribution, and number of driven wheels. Front-wheel drive cars are better than RWD for traction, though not as good as AWD, and Prius is FWD with a lot of weight in the front. So the only real problem with them is the tires, and that's easily solved with proper winter tires. And most importantly, this isn't any different from just about any other smallish FWD car out there today.
Sure he does. The analogy is unsatisfying because an analogy is being drawn between gravity and gravity. It just removed one space dimension.
That's because in the analogy, the rubber sheet is deformed by gravity's effects on the objects on it, causing the objects on that sheet to move differently than if the sheet weren't deformed. In our actual universe, according to Einstein's theory, spacetime itself is deformed by the mass of objects (not by gravity), leading to different motion that appears to us as gravity. So it's not really drawing an analogy between gravity and gravity, but rather "deformation of spacetime ("gravity") as an effect of mass (acting through some unknown mechanism)", and "deformation of a rubber sheet as an effect of mass (acting through the mechanism of gravity)".
No, it's not a perfect analogy. However, do you have a suggestion for a better analogy to illustrate this concept to laymen? This is the crux of the problem. Some pedants are complaining about the analogy, but they don't have anything better.
You're still left with trying to explain why the earth moves at all. In the ant analogy, it's because the ant walks, in other words exerts its will. In the rubber sheet analogy, the earth's gravity makes the ball move; if (as one post said) the earth's gravity represents time, then you still face the question of what makes the ball move from one moment to the next? Why can't it stay in the same place on the curved rubber sheet?
Isn't the Earth moving (I assume you mean in an orbit around the Sun, as well as its own spin) because it was set in motion that way from long ago? Presumably, the events of the Big Bang set everything into motion, which is why the stars and galaxies are moving away from each other over time. Things like planets orbiting stars are just side-effects of the force of gravity and other factors, sort of like how objects moving through water create small eddy currents.
On March 7, 2013 the Sun was for a short time the brightest Gamma source in the sky. This according to the Einstein theorists can only happen with a star that is collapsing into a black hole. The sun is still shining brightly and we haven't been sucked down a black hole yet. Wake up people these guys are wrong!
But aren't all scientific theories wrong to some point? They're just models to explain the universe that we observe and to make predictions. Do we have a better theory (or theories) than the Einstein group of theories? Newton's Laws are wrong, but we use them all the time because for most of the stuff we do (which doesn't involve atomic-scale things or smaller, or astrophysical stuff), they provide results which are close enough. They only really break down at the extremes, but for desigining airplanes and bridges, they work just fine.
in fact there is serious doubt that gravity as a force actually exists but may rather be cross product of EM field potential differentials.
Do you have a good citation for this? Not trying to be argumentative, I'd really like to read up more on this. Any idea if this would make it possible to artificially generate gravity with EM fields somehow? If we want to send humans to Mars or build a Moon base or whatever, electrically-generated gravity would be really useful.
It's just an analogy, these people are taking it much too far. OK, maybe it doesn't work perfectly (which is why it isn't called a "model"), after all, you're trying to use an analogy in 3 dimensions to explain behavior in what appears to be 4 dimensions. But if you don't like the analogy, do you have a better analogy to suggest? Does anyone? It's a good analogy because it's the best analogy we have to explain something we don't fully understand and can't directly observe (except the obvious effects of gravitational interaction; I mean that we can't directly observe the curvature of spacetime). An imperfect analogy is better than no analogy at all.
That shouldn't be hard. For most carmakers, you can buy all the parts at various places online. For instance, if you have an Acura, you can go to acuraoemparts.com (or maybe oemacuraparts.com) and look up diagrams and buy any part in the car. Rebuilding a transmission is entirely doable if you want to, but usually it's faster and easier to just buy a remanufactured unit.
Things in cars have not gotten any more complicated than in years past; in most cases, they've actually gotten simpler, except in the area of electronics. Servicing a car isn't any more difficult than in years past, and in fact it's frequently much simpler. The big thing that's changed is manufacturing technology: mechanical components can be manufactured to much tighter tolerances than before. The other thing that's changed is electronics: we now use small computers to control everything, instead of mechanical contraptions (like the Rube Goldberg-esque carburetors we used to use). The final thing that's changed is labor rates: they're through the roof, so no one wants to do anything that isn't super-fast, because it'll cost too much, compared to what it costs to just buy a new one (built extremely efficiently in a factory, frequently using a lot of automation).
The phenomenon you're seeing with car repair is twofold: shops don't want to spend much time on servicing anything because customers aren't going to pay $65-85/hour for you to dick around with a rebuild job you don't do frequently and probably aren't very good at, when you can just get a remanufactured unit from a specialty place for much less and bolt it in in a half-hour, and 2) lots of people (esp. backyard mechanics) have bought into this idiotic "everything's so complicated! I need a special computer just to change the oil!" bullshit which isn't remotely true.
There's only one socialist-leaning person in Congress: Bernie Sanders. And he's not a Democrat.
Instead, he wasted precious time on disastrous health care reforms
I wish people would stop repeating this. It's not true. He wasted precious time on disastrous health insurance reforms. He (and the Democrats) didn't do shit when it comes to health care. Insurance companies do NOT provide any kind of health care. Try going to a Blue Cross/Blue Shield office and asking them for a medical procedure. Why this distinction matters is that the problem with our healthcare isn't so much the insurance, but the out-of-control costs for the care itself (ridiculously expensive hospital bills, compared to what it costs to get the same procedure done in western European private hospitals, for instance). Obamacare didn't do anything at all to fix the problem of these out-of-control costs, it just changed the rules for the insurance that most people use to pay for them, basically spreading the cost out to more people and increasing most peoples' monthly premiums greatly.
Government is only as good as the voters make it. So in our case, doing it with the government won't work either: you'll just get a project that's totally mismanaged and massively over-budget, and by the time the SHTF, the politicians who set things in motion and are to blame for the mess have already moved on, and the new politicians will blame their predecessors for everything that went wrong, no matter how true that really is, and the voters will buy it.
So, in your weird little world, if a new boss is hired at a company, and his employees do something stupid which costs the company business and customers, he shouldn't fire them because their division was around before he was hired, even though he's their boss?
You Obamabots really are a stupid lot.
No, those are the ones too stupid for TSA.
So you're alleging now that the TSA isn't part of the Department of Homeland Security, part of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government?
Yes, but -2 for insulting the Pakleds so horribly. The Pakleds are like Einstein compared to the TSA.
The army has learned that stupid soldiers aren't good soldiers.
So those too stupid for the Army are sent over to the TSA, right?
And at the very top, the boss of them all, is Barack Obama. Why isn't anyone else naming him when this shit happens? What has he done to rein in these abuses? Nothing.
Now you're acting like multiple people, responding twice to my post in quick succession, even though you're obviously the same person. Again, I encourage you to seek psychological help as soon as possible.
You obviously have severe psychological issues, and I encourage you to seek professional help immediately.
Sorry, but this is BS. While I don't deny there may be some scamming going on, what you're suggesting is akin to saying, "don't use the internet, it's 100% spam" because you get some spam emails from Nigerians once in a while.
I've been on dozens of Meetup hikes and other events. None of them were "spam", organized by real estate agents, or anything of the kind. Did you look to see how long the groups you joined had been in existence? Did they have any comments posted by other members? Most decent groups have been around for years, have dozens or hundreds of members, tons of comments about the hikes (or other events), lots of information to go along with the events (such as GPS coordinates of the trailhead, tips including what to bring or not to bring, whether pets are allowed or not, etc.
Sounds like you're just really bad at spotting scams. And why would you even stick around for 30 minutes of a salesperson's spiel if you thought you were attending a free hiking event? Did you meet at a trailhead? Your entire post just sounds ridiculous.
Nope, American. I live in the northeast in a 1930-vintage wood-frame house, and my AP is 2.4GHz. I hadn't considered 5GHz or steel beams when I wrote that, which apparently are some significant factors for some people. Not much stucco around here, thankfully (that shit looks horrible), and the houses here all tend to be similar to this one: fairly old and all-wood. The kitchen here is at the opposite end of the house from where my AP is located, so the kitchen appliances aren't really a factor, though I don't notice any problems when I use my laptop in there either. The water heater and boiler are in the basement, so they don't block any places.
the last one that did was WinXP which was depreciated
Sorry, you can't depreciate WinXP on your tax forms.
As for your article, it's mostly right, but the problem with malware on Linux (not Android) is that there's too much diversity. One of the comments after that article said it best:
Unlike other platforms, with Linux, users could be running several different things. This is more true today than in 2009, when this article was written. Back then, there were only KDE and Gnome2, with others having very little usage. Now, there's KDE, Gnome3, Unity, MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE, and several others (most of this caused by the Unity and Gnome3 dual debacles, forcing people to flee to or create new alternatives). On top of that, there's different distros. So something that might work on one may not work on another. The article's author even mentioned Thunar (the XFCE file manager), as it flags desktop launchers as potential malware; there's nothing stopping other file managers from doing the same thing, and who knows, maybe some do by now.
Android is a little different since there's only one Android (though it does get some different "skins" from the handset makers, like TouchWiz and HTC Sense) (though it does have a few different versions, not different from Windows with its XP, Vista, 7, and 8). It also has a huge marketshare in mobile phones, unlike desktop Linux which has a rather small marketshare (as best as anyone can tell, since there's no reliable way to count Linux users since it's usually installed after-the-fact, unlike Windows/MacOS). It really isn't worth it for a malware writer to target Linux and hope they get one of the less-savvy users (grandma whose grandson set up her computer with Ubuntu because he was sick of getting called over to fix her Windows computer so often) when they can target the Big Two instead.
That won't work: it requires too much honesty and information from all the participants. People are famous for lying on online dating sites: men always say they're 2 inches taller than they are, and women always minimize how fat they are (by calling themselves "curvy" instead of "obese") and lie about their age. If the dating site can't even get honest information about peoples' physical characteristics and ages, how do you expect to get honest feedback about dates from participants? The guy who stood up a woman is going to lie about it and say she didn't show up, while she says she was stood up; which one is the dating site supposed to believe? If the guy says the woman was neurotic, and she says he was arrogant and abusive, who do you believe? And then there's the whole liability angle: if you get feedback from participants, and then post this ("1 previous date says this person attempted to rape her"), you're just asking for a libel lawsuit.