Defamation laws, as far as I see, only cover the negatives, not the positives. You can have all the fake praise you like, as long as there's no fake complaint. Statements of "our service is great" are not the same as "my experience was terrible" -- there's an expectation that vague statements from a company may be misleading (bluster) while not really wrong in a verifiable sense, but with specific customer stories, we expect them to be accurate, fact-based. Ads may use actors, but they generally have fine-print identifying them as interpretations of, re-enactments of, or syntheses of multiple, actual customer letters.
Whether the reviews are true or not may very well depend on the identity of the supposed reviewer. If it's in the form of "they destroyed my carpet", the cleaning service could either try to prove that this has not happened to any customers ever, or that this review did not come from a customer to whom it actually happened. If it's not a real customer, then it's probably a competitor, and at that point, it's very much libel -- purposefully spreading lies for the purpose of damaging someone else's reputation. Reviews like this really do matter to a small business. If they reveal the identities and discover it was a real customer and a real experience, there's nothing legally they could do to remove it, because it wouldn't be libel, and would be protected. But they also can't do anything about it now, until they prove it's false, which requires them to reveal identities.
The alternate solution might be for all review systems to say "this review is anonymous [better: not a verified identity], so the person being reviewed really has no opportunity to face his accuser, so you should take this with a really big grain of salt". And maybe not even count it in the averaged star-rating. And then you've just killed their business model, because the identity/registration stuff is such a hurdle.
Amazing that when they run this kind of automated tool on a project of this importance and breadth, this is... the only vulnerability it found?
This doesn't invalidate "many eyes" at all (as some are claiming here) -- the fact that a bunch of reviewers didn't find this one bug is unfortunate, but if "many eyes" had really failed, I would have expected automation to find dozens or hundreds of bugs.
Really? Because I'm pretty sure the standard conservative argument is that if you create an obstacle, people will always "find a way", and in fact you should purposefully do so. Don't give them food or shelter, and they'll magically educate and empower themselves.
Yes, it's really amazing we haven't yet declared ourselves mentally ill, for putting people first. I mean, really -- minimum wages? Food and shelter? Safety regulations? Non-discrimination in the workplace? Civil rights? Healthcare? Are we nuts?!?
I have no problem with the idea of the ACA being a first step in a long series toward single-payer healthcare. I doubt it'll happen, because it's too controversial and it wouldn't make sense to risk everything when we've gotten this far. But hey, maybe. And I don't mind, either. There's nothing scary about it.
But I do have a problem with the idea that making a non-functioning healthcare.gov was all part of a master-plan. I do love how we can have two narratives: that the administration is so incompetent they would allow something like this to happen, OR, it's all part of their super-genius plan to take us to medicare-for-all but LOOK like bumbling idiots along the way. That anyone should pick the latter concerns me greatly.
So, to put a timeline to your prediction: how long should we wait to see if the healthcare.gov failure was really just a front to take us to single-payer "as the fix"? 6 months? Because any longer than that, and they wouldn't be able to keep the supposed charade up, they'd have to fix the site or implement single-payer. If your answer is on the order of 10 years, then you're talking about an entirely different political game, not about healthcare.gov.
What's more, UnitedHealth Group is one of the largest health-insurance companies in the country and spent millions lobbying for ObamaCare. The insurance giant's purchase of QSSI in 2012 raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill, but the tech firm nevertheless kept the job of building the data hub for the ObamaCare Web site where consumers buy the new mandatory health-insurance plans.
Yes, we're talking about huge players and huge deals. This is no different from Raytheon, Boeing, etc. Big players spend big bucks, and big players get picked for big projects -- and very often there's little or no competition at the scale they're operating at. It is not necessary to assume bribery or corruption, to see how this would happen.
But I'll take your bet that this is all a conspiracy to bring about single-payer healthcare. You've made a prediction, now we'll sit back and observe you being wrong.
For those wondering about the link between MUMPS and government healthcare, my vague recollections from years ago when I worked as a developer for health + insurance software: the old MUMPS language included its own looks-like-all-in-memory database system (essentially just a recursive map of string to object, either a value or another map -- the JSON comparison is fair) which made serialization simple. The language got used to build some early health IT systems, including the one for the VA (VistA) and its IHS derivative (RPMS). That stuff's available for free, by the way, through FOIA. The projects have sufficient inertia that they still use the same data-store (at least at the API level). InterSystems Caché, for example, is a MUMPS-compatible database with some relational features (and SQL parsing) thrown on top. They bill themselves as post-relational, but yeah, it's a network database pretending to be a relational database. It kind of makes sense to continue using network databases for health data -- in a privacy-conscious world, it's not insane to isolate patient data into a document-oriented storage system, because you're not planning to relate data willy-nilly. We were somewhat frustrated that the HL7 interchange format tended to assume things were hierarchical, where we had seen potential graphs and coded for them -- but nobody wanted our better-related data. They prefer to re-enter the data in each place, and prevent things from being synchronized -- it protects the data from unexpected changes. So if all the systems and agencies you're integrating with have this attitude anyway, and you're constantly worried about data-interchange, I can see how you might come to the conclusion that a document-oriented, XML-backed storage engine would be a good idea.
Meanwhile Dawkins is so confident of the *truth* of his extrapolatory creation myth that he feels the need to call believers of any other extrapolatory creation myth "deluded"... while the details of his myth get rewritten every 5-10 years.
Yes. And it's justified. (a) just because two things are extrapolatory doesn't mean they are supported by equivalent qualities of models nor quantities of data. (b) the Bible is not extrapolatory. it just states. (c) the details of Big Bang and Evolution may get rewritten constantly, but:
(1) it's just the details
(2) even if it were rewritten wholesale, because of new discoveries, at least it would be based on observation, modeling, hypothesis, peer review, and all the other trappings of actual science and search for truth, not mere attachment to passed-down mythology (d) if you think creation myths don't get rewritten, please think again. see the catholic church, for example, for how religion will eventually change its tune when overwhelmed with facts and logic. it takes a lot, sure, but eventually they'll give way. baptists? they invent whole new myths (around the Flood, for example) to explain anything and everything -- but they're still having to change their story, too, to survive.
Yes, I know, don't feed the trolls... but seriously. You may apples and oranges look identical.
I'm so sorry that, at some point (Reagan,) we made the decision that humans should be taken care of, no matter what. We're not animals, after all. It's a dog-eat-dog world, but for %^@* sake, let's compete for wealth and such, not for basic survival. We mandated that hospitals treat any and all, and then they spread the costs around.
When we did so, and discovered that people in fact aren't all self-reliant future-predicting money-saving accident-preventing weather-controlling disease-resistant beings, and that we were having to cover costs at a later stage and greater expense than really necessary, yeah. We decided to push back a little, and ask people to contribute up-front to their statistically likely healthcare costs, for which we're all (one way or another) on the hook for.
This is, if anything, more of a personal-responsibility push than before, which I would have expected conservatives to favor. We have a safety net (you'll get healthcare no matter what) but by golly, we're tired of moochers. If you can pay, then pay. There are some things you can control about your health -- but there are an awful lot you can't, and for you to claim you know you won't need certain care is fairly ridiculous. Cancer? Car accident? Plague outbreak? You don't have enough data, nor enough of an immediate feedback loop, to plan properly for those eventualities. And unless you're willing to be left to rot and die on the side of the road, I don't accept your claim of self-reliance. It's all fine and good until bad shit happens.
Sure, your policy covers some gender-based services you clearly won't use, for the sake of simplicity, so we can compare plans and make informed decisions. The actual cost to you of having insurance coverage for services you know you won't need is really quite low, because it's spread across everyone, and you're getting benefits that others won't use. This isn't a savings plan, you're not paying into a silo, it's insurance. Same thing with paying taxes to pay, in general, for care for the poor. It's not a silo, it's an insurance plan for all citizens, even you, in the eventuality that your best-laid-plans fail and you wind up on the street.
You're not paying for services you won't need, you're paying to be part of an insurance pool with thousands of other people who will all have different issues, and you're all sharing the cost. It's different.
No, blame falls entirely on the bad behavior of the Australian Signals Directorate and their lack of trustworthyness.
I don't think we should blame the intelligence agencies for this. You don't install sophisticated interception equipment hidden in architectural features of embassies all over the region, and operate them possibly for decades, without a fair amount of cooperation between branches of the government. The intelligence services did what they were told to do, and in that respect, were plenty trustworthy.
Back home, we can't really argue that the NSA was out-of-bounds. We elected officials, they passed laws, they appointed secret judges, they signed secret executive orders, and the agencies did everything within their power to gather intelligence that would help us or protect us. Citizens allowed this to happen (in theory -- assumes civilians are in-the-know), and I see the logic that would lead someone to try to get civilian attention with vandalism on charities and whatnot.
As a local in Oklahoma, which has also seen its share of quakes recently (and some studies have pointed to their statistical relationship to injection wells,) yes, some of us are concerned. Not all such sites are in the middle of nowhere and easily ignored -- there's a lot of oil & gas activity in and around cities, right in the middle of parking lots, behind neighborhoods, really anywhere it's profitable. Midwestern communities may not be as dense as what you east and west coasters consider "civilization", but it's still home to a lot of people who don't appreciate someone else's potential irresponsibility affecting their life, limb, or property.
It's not a fair deal to expect silence from the locals about safety just because oil & gas brought jobs to the area, while refusing to acknowledge the possibility of causation. That's not even a proper bribe.
And if we don't tease out the underlying mechanisms, there will be no guarantee against unsafe practices in and around cities. That only farmland and small towns have been affected, so far, could be dumb luck.
To the argument that these quakes would happen eventually anyway: yeah, maybe. Maybe not for thousands of years. Having them all happen now, while it might "get it out of the Earth's system", is no consolation to those affected in the here and now.
Fact-check: the "star trek set thing" concerned Keith Alexander's time at the Army's Intelligence and Security Command. Alexander is now head of the NSA, yes. And it was intelligence-related. It was not, however, the NSA.
The fact that it's a peer-to-peer LEGO marketplace didn't seem particularly important to point out, except this:
The product (almost entirely new and used LEGO bricks) is well known to both buyers and sellers, and the reviews are therefore only about the service provided (accuracy of parts, quality of shipping, timeliness, correct representation of the state of the product). There's little risk of someone posting a review about a seller complaining that a given piece is, in a generic sense, good or bad. Keeps the reviews on-topic.
For a system like Amazon, especially with their affiliated sellers, there's more risk of confusing cross-talk between the service & product reviews.
We should be careful in building review systems, particularly "find stuff I will like" pages, to: - give low or zero-review items a chance, until it's fairly certain they are unwanted (wide margin of error, benefit of the doubt) - give irrelevant items a chance, purposefully breaking the relevant-items algorithm
People may have selected categories they like (or we may have determined them automatically) but as Daniel Tiger says, "you gotta try new foods, they might taste good!". It's far too easy to lock customers into buying more stuff like they've already bought, rather than helping them sample the offerings. A low but significant error-rate in the suggestions could boost overall sales, to everyone's benefit.
I'm subjected to a bit of this through that "facebook" thing. Suggested posts based on friends or friends-of-friends liking it? I've yet to see that return relevant stuff. That could be because I have too few friends (!), or because each person only "likes" a small fraction of what they actually find interesting, or because there's so much out there, that there's no reason to expect even two close friends, with similar interests, to both like the item (especially close in time to each other.) For something like Amazon reviews, where the count of possible products is so high, I would expect similar issues.
And besides, just because I'm friends with someone, doesn't mean we have similar tastes. Seems better to do something like Netflix does, essentially pigeon-holing individuals and products, and then grouping them up in the background to offer tailored results. Rather than "your friends like this", it's "people who usually like the same kinds of movies you do, found this one better than average". Implicit rather than explicit relationships between reviewers.
Crowd-sourced reviews suffer from at least the following issues: - reviews by people who have no business reviewing (Amazon.com) - reviews only by people who feel strongly about it (Amazon.com, app stores) - aggregate ratings based on averages, not presented as histograms (amazon.com and app stores have started adding this in the "details", but it's still gameable) - changes to reviews over time are not obvious
I'd like to share how, despite its many problems, Bricklink does a fairly good job on this particular topic. As a buyer or a seller, you are heavily encouraged (it's part of the workflow) to rate every single transaction. There are no reviews that are not based on experience, and each experience is rated only once. While a total count of reviews is shown, there's no other aggregate value shown that could be misleading -- by the time you see the reviews, they're already broken into a simple histogram (good, bad, neutral) for comparison. They also do a sort of log(t) rating system on the reviews: they're broken up into current-month, current-year, and all previous years combined. So you can tell if things have recently taken a turn for the worse, or someone's tried to fix an image problem by actually improving. History is not lost, but for a potential buyer, recent history is highlighted.
I'd like for reviews (Bricklink, Amazon, etc.) to be broken up into aspects -- the product itself, customer service, shipping, etc. But I recognize that by asking more questions, you raise the barrier to entry, and you'll get less (and much more biased) data. I see far too many 1-star reviews on Amazon not as a result of the product itself, but of the shipping or customer service.
I kind of feel sorry for app developers who embed a "rate my app" feature directly in the app. It feels gimmicky, it feels like they're trolling for 5-star reviews, and yet it kind of makes sense -- try to hit up every user with the question, even if they wouldn't have naturally thought to bother, and do so after they've started using the app, so you get a fairer opinion. But mixed with in-store reviews, and the ugliness of "rate me 5 stars, get bonus stuff for free" offers... ugh.
I'm new to the APK troll phenomenon (seems it's not new though?). I'm guessing this is supposed to be the same APK referenced at http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/ ? I really do have to wonder if the real Alexander appreciates anonymous ass-hats besmirching his good name by trolling under his initials... I assume there's a template file involved, to make sure the troll doesn't forget the post scriptum. I wonder what else goes into it? Browser plugins to assist with converting to uppercase? They should sell a "how to be APK" kit...
The ACA requires insurance companies to take everyone, even those with preconditions. It also requires them to pay out at least 80% of their revenue as medical payments, capping their administrative and profit margins. While 20% isn't great, it's better than some insurance companies have been doing, and it's a start.
What will it take to prove to you that the current "debacle" is not intended to make everyone hate insurance companies? What will you say when things start running smoothly in a few days or a few weeks? Do you need surveys re: public approval-ratings of the medical insurance industry, to detect a sudden shift? (I couldn't find any such survey results, sadly.)
I don't see how anyone would argue that single-payer solves the fraud issue. There's no obvious mechanism for it. I don't see how anyone would accept that argument, either. I therefore don't see how that would be the natural progression of things.
Even other socialist (nearly communist!) countries with single-payer health insurance systems, don't turn their doctors and hospitals into government employees and government institutions. (Example: France.) Maybe they should, I don't know. But we would have to seriously alter our pace of change to possibly overtake and surpass them in the way you're suggesting. And with our gridlock, I'm just not seeing it.
There are probably others, maybe even some more recent, but here's the GAO's report on the lessons we could learn from the Canadian health system, which parts we might consider importing, including cost comparisons. This is from 1991. http://archive.gao.gov/d20t9/144039.pdf
You're really not giving me much to work with, there.
Single-payer was the original goal for the Democrats, yes. They dropped that rather quickly as it was clearly unpalatable to the Republicans. Instead we went with a Romney-care type of plan, already setup in Massachusetts. The individual mandate to buy at least catastrophic insurance with tax breaks to help people acquire it, were proposed by Mark Pauly and endorsed by the Heritage Foundation, during the 90's fight over Clinton's attempted healthcare reform, and was sufficiently popular to attract republican co-sponsors at the time. They didn't dream up the ACA, but some of the exact things we complain about now, were already being considered then, and in much better light.
So this is a compromise, of sorts. It's been hard-fought to get this far. With Republican calls to repeal & replace, do you really expect the Democrats to make any headway on pushing forward to single-payer? We've come this far; any attempt to push further would in fact jeopardize the gains.
I happen to think it would have been a better idea. It would have absolved religious employers from any paternalistic sense of responsibility for the use of "their" insurance dollars for contraceptions or abortion. It would be, in many ways, simpler to implement than what we're going through now. We already have several such systems at the state and federal level, we wouldn't be starting from scratch. But hey, we don't always get what we want, so too bad.
But would it be the end of the country? Many other OECD nations have such systems (but are also different from us in many other economic respects) and it hasn't killed them. It hasn't enslaved their population. It hasn't single-handedly killed their economy nor worsened their health. When we compare ourselves to them, we often forget that they are demographically and geographically different from us, and it's quite possible there's nothing we can do to stop the trend of resemblance, because it has more to do with aging populations and exhaustion of unexplored resources than it does whether we have single-payer insurance or not. I say that, knowing I'll still hear about what communist hell-holes every other country in the world really is. Even Canada. (Poor Canada.)
So, I don't see how we'll get there from here, and even if we do, I don't think it'll be the end of the world.
But more importantly, because this was the question you were purportedly answering, I don't see how the ACA is really just a cover-up, a front, a facade, a farce, a feint, a ploy to get us to single-payer insurance. You have not demonstrated -- nor even hinted at -- any such link. I'm not going to do your work for you, either. As they say about books: show, don't just tell.
I haven't seen anything indicating they have the ability to garnish wages to collect on the penalties. I'll wait for you to cite a source. Yes, they could use the lien system to force you to pay up using the proceeds from the sale of property. They wouldn't outright take your house though.
My point was that the default position is not a kind of slavery. In fact, you should remember the reason for our current approach to debt -- debtor's prisons and poor houses went terribly. We've already tried them. Putting people into slavery because they're indebted or poor only further impoverishes us all. It made it all too easy for the default situation to be slavery, when all else fails. We thankfully have a bankruptcy system, because we recognize that grinding people to dust for past failures isn't always the best way forward -- but it does have a knock-on effect, yes, as losses are forwarded and spread through the system.
So you have three options: a) put yourself in a position to receive aid from others b) sit exactly at the break-even point (hard to do because of conflicting laws and differing definitions of poverty line and sliding scales and whatnot) c) leave the country as we know it (leave, change the laws, or create your own country)
But again, the concept that we live in a very mildly socialist state is nothing new, certainly not related to the ACA. Even before the individual mandate, if you had sufficient income, you would pay taxes to the benefit of yourself and others. To avoid this, you still had to stay sufficiently low on the income scale. So... nothing new. That's the social contract we have in place today. I'm sorry you feel so abused, I'm happy for you that you're self-sufficient. Should you, someday, no longer be self-sufficient and need a helping hand, we won't hold a grudge.
Factually: (a) It is entirely possible for you to become a pauper in this nation, and not have to work to support anyone else. Society will instead try to lift you up. So if you don't like the idea of supporting others, you have an option, though an unpleasant one. We make it purposefully unpleasant so people will not want to stay in that state forever. (b) You do not face jail time over this. By law, the penalty for not carrying personal health insurance is only a tax liability, except here the IRS is not allowed to levy property, and may not file criminal charges (which would be required for jail time.) [1] (c) I'm asking how this is different from what we already do. The social contract by which we help support each other, by taxes or otherwise, has been in place for a century. I'm fine with arguments for a purely dog-eat-dog world (really, I'm okay with that), but that's not my question here.
[1] From the Congressional Research Service, copy-pasted from snopes.com: The Internal Revenue Code (IRC) limits the means the IRS may employ to collect the penalty established in the [PPACA]. First, the taxpayer is protected from either criminal prosecution or penalty for failure to pay the penalty. Second, the IRS is prohibited from either filing a notice of federal tax lien (NFTL) or levying any property in an effort to collect the penalty. There is no prohibition, however, on establishing a statutory lien against the taxpayer’s property. No additional limits are placed on the IRS using correspondence or phone calls, either through its own employees or through private collection agencies, in an effort to collect the amount owed. Additionally, no restriction was placed on the IRS's ability to use the refund offset as a means of collecting the amount due.
Those who are required to pay the penalty for failure to maintain minimum coverage but choose not to do so will be subject to increases in the amount owed due to interest and late payment penalties imposed on the penalty after it has been assessed by the IRS.
A taxpayer who chooses not to pay the required penalty may ultimately forfeit more than the amount of the penalty if that taxpayer is ever in the position of having an overpayment to the IRS for any reason, since the refund offset applies not only to overpayments shown on original tax returns, but also to any subsequent adjustments, for example an audit by the IRS that results in an overpayment. Further, as explained above, it is possible that the IRS could present its claim when property is being sold and collect both the original penalty amount along with accrued interest and applicable penalties
Then enlighten us all: what was the goal, how am I wrong? Show me what you see, so we can get on the same page. What feedback loops do you see? What subterfuge do you detect? What ulterior motives do you suspect? What slippery slope are we going down? You might be right, but you won't convince me with generalities.
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Defamation laws, as far as I see, only cover the negatives, not the positives. You can have all the fake praise you like, as long as there's no fake complaint. Statements of "our service is great" are not the same as "my experience was terrible" -- there's an expectation that vague statements from a company may be misleading (bluster) while not really wrong in a verifiable sense, but with specific customer stories, we expect them to be accurate, fact-based. Ads may use actors, but they generally have fine-print identifying them as interpretations of, re-enactments of, or syntheses of multiple, actual customer letters.
Whether the reviews are true or not may very well depend on the identity of the supposed reviewer. If it's in the form of "they destroyed my carpet", the cleaning service could either try to prove that this has not happened to any customers ever, or that this review did not come from a customer to whom it actually happened. If it's not a real customer, then it's probably a competitor, and at that point, it's very much libel -- purposefully spreading lies for the purpose of damaging someone else's reputation. Reviews like this really do matter to a small business. If they reveal the identities and discover it was a real customer and a real experience, there's nothing legally they could do to remove it, because it wouldn't be libel, and would be protected. But they also can't do anything about it now, until they prove it's false, which requires them to reveal identities.
The alternate solution might be for all review systems to say "this review is anonymous [better: not a verified identity], so the person being reviewed really has no opportunity to face his accuser, so you should take this with a really big grain of salt". And maybe not even count it in the averaged star-rating. And then you've just killed their business model, because the identity/registration stuff is such a hurdle.
Amazing that when they run this kind of automated tool on a project of this importance and breadth, this is ... the only vulnerability it found?
This doesn't invalidate "many eyes" at all (as some are claiming here) -- the fact that a bunch of reviewers didn't find this one bug is unfortunate, but if "many eyes" had really failed, I would have expected automation to find dozens or hundreds of bugs.
Really? Because I'm pretty sure the standard conservative argument is that if you create an obstacle, people will always "find a way", and in fact you should purposefully do so. Don't give them food or shelter, and they'll magically educate and empower themselves.
Yes, it's really amazing we haven't yet declared ourselves mentally ill, for putting people first. I mean, really -- minimum wages? Food and shelter? Safety regulations? Non-discrimination in the workplace? Civil rights? Healthcare? Are we nuts?!?
I have no problem with the idea of the ACA being a first step in a long series toward single-payer healthcare. I doubt it'll happen, because it's too controversial and it wouldn't make sense to risk everything when we've gotten this far. But hey, maybe. And I don't mind, either. There's nothing scary about it.
But I do have a problem with the idea that making a non-functioning healthcare.gov was all part of a master-plan. I do love how we can have two narratives: that the administration is so incompetent they would allow something like this to happen, OR, it's all part of their super-genius plan to take us to medicare-for-all but LOOK like bumbling idiots along the way. That anyone should pick the latter concerns me greatly.
So, to put a timeline to your prediction: how long should we wait to see if the healthcare.gov failure was really just a front to take us to single-payer "as the fix"? 6 months? Because any longer than that, and they wouldn't be able to keep the supposed charade up, they'd have to fix the site or implement single-payer. If your answer is on the order of 10 years, then you're talking about an entirely different political game, not about healthcare.gov.
What's more, UnitedHealth Group is one of the largest health-insurance companies in the country and spent millions lobbying for ObamaCare.
The insurance giant's purchase of QSSI in 2012 raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill, but the tech firm nevertheless kept the job of building the data hub for the ObamaCare Web site where consumers buy the new mandatory health-insurance plans.
Yes, we're talking about huge players and huge deals. This is no different from Raytheon, Boeing, etc. Big players spend big bucks, and big players get picked for big projects -- and very often there's little or no competition at the scale they're operating at. It is not necessary to assume bribery or corruption, to see how this would happen.
But I'll take your bet that this is all a conspiracy to bring about single-payer healthcare. You've made a prediction, now we'll sit back and observe you being wrong.
That was childish, petty, mean-spirited and entirely out of line.
For those wondering about the link between MUMPS and government healthcare, my vague recollections from years ago when I worked as a developer for health + insurance software: the old MUMPS language included its own looks-like-all-in-memory database system (essentially just a recursive map of string to object, either a value or another map -- the JSON comparison is fair) which made serialization simple. The language got used to build some early health IT systems, including the one for the VA (VistA) and its IHS derivative (RPMS). That stuff's available for free, by the way, through FOIA. The projects have sufficient inertia that they still use the same data-store (at least at the API level). InterSystems Caché, for example, is a MUMPS-compatible database with some relational features (and SQL parsing) thrown on top. They bill themselves as post-relational, but yeah, it's a network database pretending to be a relational database.
It kind of makes sense to continue using network databases for health data -- in a privacy-conscious world, it's not insane to isolate patient data into a document-oriented storage system, because you're not planning to relate data willy-nilly. We were somewhat frustrated that the HL7 interchange format tended to assume things were hierarchical, where we had seen potential graphs and coded for them -- but nobody wanted our better-related data. They prefer to re-enter the data in each place, and prevent things from being synchronized -- it protects the data from unexpected changes. So if all the systems and agencies you're integrating with have this attitude anyway, and you're constantly worried about data-interchange, I can see how you might come to the conclusion that a document-oriented, XML-backed storage engine would be a good idea.
Meanwhile Dawkins is so confident of the *truth* of his extrapolatory creation myth that he feels the need to call believers of any other extrapolatory creation myth "deluded" ... while the details of his myth get rewritten every 5-10 years.
Yes. And it's justified.
(a) just because two things are extrapolatory doesn't mean they are supported by equivalent qualities of models nor quantities of data.
(b) the Bible is not extrapolatory. it just states.
(c) the details of Big Bang and Evolution may get rewritten constantly, but:
(1) it's just the details
(2) even if it were rewritten wholesale, because of new discoveries, at least it would be based on observation, modeling, hypothesis, peer review, and all the other trappings of actual science and search for truth, not mere attachment to passed-down mythology
(d) if you think creation myths don't get rewritten, please think again. see the catholic church, for example, for how religion will eventually change its tune when overwhelmed with facts and logic. it takes a lot, sure, but eventually they'll give way. baptists? they invent whole new myths (around the Flood, for example) to explain anything and everything -- but they're still having to change their story, too, to survive.
Yes, I know, don't feed the trolls ... but seriously. You may apples and oranges look identical.
I'm so sorry that, at some point (Reagan,) we made the decision that humans should be taken care of, no matter what. We're not animals, after all. It's a dog-eat-dog world, but for %^@* sake, let's compete for wealth and such, not for basic survival. We mandated that hospitals treat any and all, and then they spread the costs around.
When we did so, and discovered that people in fact aren't all self-reliant future-predicting money-saving accident-preventing weather-controlling disease-resistant beings, and that we were having to cover costs at a later stage and greater expense than really necessary, yeah. We decided to push back a little, and ask people to contribute up-front to their statistically likely healthcare costs, for which we're all (one way or another) on the hook for.
This is, if anything, more of a personal-responsibility push than before, which I would have expected conservatives to favor. We have a safety net (you'll get healthcare no matter what) but by golly, we're tired of moochers. If you can pay, then pay. There are some things you can control about your health -- but there are an awful lot you can't, and for you to claim you know you won't need certain care is fairly ridiculous. Cancer? Car accident? Plague outbreak? You don't have enough data, nor enough of an immediate feedback loop, to plan properly for those eventualities. And unless you're willing to be left to rot and die on the side of the road, I don't accept your claim of self-reliance. It's all fine and good until bad shit happens.
Sure, your policy covers some gender-based services you clearly won't use, for the sake of simplicity, so we can compare plans and make informed decisions. The actual cost to you of having insurance coverage for services you know you won't need is really quite low, because it's spread across everyone, and you're getting benefits that others won't use. This isn't a savings plan, you're not paying into a silo, it's insurance. Same thing with paying taxes to pay, in general, for care for the poor. It's not a silo, it's an insurance plan for all citizens, even you, in the eventuality that your best-laid-plans fail and you wind up on the street.
You're not paying for services you won't need, you're paying to be part of an insurance pool with thousands of other people who will all have different issues, and you're all sharing the cost. It's different.
No, blame falls entirely on the bad behavior of the Australian Signals Directorate and their lack of trustworthyness.
I don't think we should blame the intelligence agencies for this. You don't install sophisticated interception equipment hidden in architectural features of embassies all over the region, and operate them possibly for decades, without a fair amount of cooperation between branches of the government. The intelligence services did what they were told to do, and in that respect, were plenty trustworthy.
Back home, we can't really argue that the NSA was out-of-bounds. We elected officials, they passed laws, they appointed secret judges, they signed secret executive orders, and the agencies did everything within their power to gather intelligence that would help us or protect us. Citizens allowed this to happen (in theory -- assumes civilians are in-the-know), and I see the logic that would lead someone to try to get civilian attention with vandalism on charities and whatnot.
As a local in Oklahoma, which has also seen its share of quakes recently (and some studies have pointed to their statistical relationship to injection wells,) yes, some of us are concerned. Not all such sites are in the middle of nowhere and easily ignored -- there's a lot of oil & gas activity in and around cities, right in the middle of parking lots, behind neighborhoods, really anywhere it's profitable. Midwestern communities may not be as dense as what you east and west coasters consider "civilization", but it's still home to a lot of people who don't appreciate someone else's potential irresponsibility affecting their life, limb, or property.
It's not a fair deal to expect silence from the locals about safety just because oil & gas brought jobs to the area, while refusing to acknowledge the possibility of causation. That's not even a proper bribe.
And if we don't tease out the underlying mechanisms, there will be no guarantee against unsafe practices in and around cities. That only farmland and small towns have been affected, so far, could be dumb luck.
To the argument that these quakes would happen eventually anyway: yeah, maybe. Maybe not for thousands of years. Having them all happen now, while it might "get it out of the Earth's system", is no consolation to those affected in the here and now.
Fact-check: the "star trek set thing" concerned Keith Alexander's time at the Army's Intelligence and Security Command. Alexander is now head of the NSA, yes. And it was intelligence-related. It was not, however, the NSA.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/15/nsa-mind-keith-alexander-star-trek
TOR development was partially funded by the US Navy, not the NSA (at least officially.)
The fact that it's a peer-to-peer LEGO marketplace didn't seem particularly important to point out, except this:
The product (almost entirely new and used LEGO bricks) is well known to both buyers and sellers, and the reviews are therefore only about the service provided (accuracy of parts, quality of shipping, timeliness, correct representation of the state of the product). There's little risk of someone posting a review about a seller complaining that a given piece is, in a generic sense, good or bad. Keeps the reviews on-topic.
For a system like Amazon, especially with their affiliated sellers, there's more risk of confusing cross-talk between the service & product reviews.
We should be careful in building review systems, particularly "find stuff I will like" pages, to:
- give low or zero-review items a chance, until it's fairly certain they are unwanted (wide margin of error, benefit of the doubt)
- give irrelevant items a chance, purposefully breaking the relevant-items algorithm
People may have selected categories they like (or we may have determined them automatically) but as Daniel Tiger says, "you gotta try new foods, they might taste good!". It's far too easy to lock customers into buying more stuff like they've already bought, rather than helping them sample the offerings. A low but significant error-rate in the suggestions could boost overall sales, to everyone's benefit.
I'm subjected to a bit of this through that "facebook" thing. Suggested posts based on friends or friends-of-friends liking it? I've yet to see that return relevant stuff. That could be because I have too few friends (!), or because each person only "likes" a small fraction of what they actually find interesting, or because there's so much out there, that there's no reason to expect even two close friends, with similar interests, to both like the item (especially close in time to each other.) For something like Amazon reviews, where the count of possible products is so high, I would expect similar issues.
And besides, just because I'm friends with someone, doesn't mean we have similar tastes. Seems better to do something like Netflix does, essentially pigeon-holing individuals and products, and then grouping them up in the background to offer tailored results. Rather than "your friends like this", it's "people who usually like the same kinds of movies you do, found this one better than average". Implicit rather than explicit relationships between reviewers.
Crowd-sourced reviews suffer from at least the following issues:
- reviews by people who have no business reviewing (Amazon.com)
- reviews only by people who feel strongly about it (Amazon.com, app stores)
- aggregate ratings based on averages, not presented as histograms (amazon.com and app stores have started adding this in the "details", but it's still gameable)
- changes to reviews over time are not obvious
I'd like to share how, despite its many problems, Bricklink does a fairly good job on this particular topic. As a buyer or a seller, you are heavily encouraged (it's part of the workflow) to rate every single transaction. There are no reviews that are not based on experience, and each experience is rated only once. While a total count of reviews is shown, there's no other aggregate value shown that could be misleading -- by the time you see the reviews, they're already broken into a simple histogram (good, bad, neutral) for comparison. They also do a sort of log(t) rating system on the reviews: they're broken up into current-month, current-year, and all previous years combined. So you can tell if things have recently taken a turn for the worse, or someone's tried to fix an image problem by actually improving. History is not lost, but for a potential buyer, recent history is highlighted.
I'd like for reviews (Bricklink, Amazon, etc.) to be broken up into aspects -- the product itself, customer service, shipping, etc. But I recognize that by asking more questions, you raise the barrier to entry, and you'll get less (and much more biased) data. I see far too many 1-star reviews on Amazon not as a result of the product itself, but of the shipping or customer service.
I kind of feel sorry for app developers who embed a "rate my app" feature directly in the app. It feels gimmicky, it feels like they're trolling for 5-star reviews, and yet it kind of makes sense -- try to hit up every user with the question, even if they wouldn't have naturally thought to bother, and do so after they've started using the app, so you get a fairer opinion. But mixed with in-store reviews, and the ugliness of "rate me 5 stars, get bonus stuff for free" offers... ugh.
I'm new to the APK troll phenomenon (seems it's not new though?). I'm guessing this is supposed to be the same APK referenced at http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/ ? I really do have to wonder if the real Alexander appreciates anonymous ass-hats besmirching his good name by trolling under his initials... I assume there's a template file involved, to make sure the troll doesn't forget the post scriptum. I wonder what else goes into it? Browser plugins to assist with converting to uppercase? They should sell a "how to be APK" kit...
For a look at what the Medicare fraud rates are, please see: ... goes to fraud".)
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/17/peter-roskam/rep-roskam-says-medicare-fraud-rate-8-10-percent/
(does not support "over 10%
For a comparison of public and private insurance fraud, you could start here:
http://www.renalbusiness.com/news/2009/06/fraud-prevalent-in-private-health-insurance.aspx
(private and public suffer about the same rates of fraud)
The ACA requires insurance companies to take everyone, even those with preconditions. It also requires them to pay out at least 80% of their revenue as medical payments, capping their administrative and profit margins. While 20% isn't great, it's better than some insurance companies have been doing, and it's a start.
What will it take to prove to you that the current "debacle" is not intended to make everyone hate insurance companies? What will you say when things start running smoothly in a few days or a few weeks? Do you need surveys re: public approval-ratings of the medical insurance industry, to detect a sudden shift? (I couldn't find any such survey results, sadly.)
I don't see how anyone would argue that single-payer solves the fraud issue. There's no obvious mechanism for it. I don't see how anyone would accept that argument, either. I therefore don't see how that would be the natural progression of things.
Even other socialist (nearly communist!) countries with single-payer health insurance systems, don't turn their doctors and hospitals into government employees and government institutions. (Example: France.) Maybe they should, I don't know. But we would have to seriously alter our pace of change to possibly overtake and surpass them in the way you're suggesting. And with our gridlock, I'm just not seeing it.
There are probably others, maybe even some more recent, but here's the GAO's report on the lessons we could learn from the Canadian health system, which parts we might consider importing, including cost comparisons. This is from 1991. http://archive.gao.gov/d20t9/144039.pdf
You're really not giving me much to work with, there.
Single-payer was the original goal for the Democrats, yes. They dropped that rather quickly as it was clearly unpalatable to the Republicans. Instead we went with a Romney-care type of plan, already setup in Massachusetts. The individual mandate to buy at least catastrophic insurance with tax breaks to help people acquire it, were proposed by Mark Pauly and endorsed by the Heritage Foundation, during the 90's fight over Clinton's attempted healthcare reform, and was sufficiently popular to attract republican co-sponsors at the time. They didn't dream up the ACA, but some of the exact things we complain about now, were already being considered then, and in much better light.
So this is a compromise, of sorts. It's been hard-fought to get this far. With Republican calls to repeal & replace, do you really expect the Democrats to make any headway on pushing forward to single-payer? We've come this far; any attempt to push further would in fact jeopardize the gains.
I happen to think it would have been a better idea. It would have absolved religious employers from any paternalistic sense of responsibility for the use of "their" insurance dollars for contraceptions or abortion. It would be, in many ways, simpler to implement than what we're going through now. We already have several such systems at the state and federal level, we wouldn't be starting from scratch. But hey, we don't always get what we want, so too bad.
But would it be the end of the country? Many other OECD nations have such systems (but are also different from us in many other economic respects) and it hasn't killed them. It hasn't enslaved their population. It hasn't single-handedly killed their economy nor worsened their health. When we compare ourselves to them, we often forget that they are demographically and geographically different from us, and it's quite possible there's nothing we can do to stop the trend of resemblance, because it has more to do with aging populations and exhaustion of unexplored resources than it does whether we have single-payer insurance or not. I say that, knowing I'll still hear about what communist hell-holes every other country in the world really is. Even Canada. (Poor Canada.)
So, I don't see how we'll get there from here, and even if we do, I don't think it'll be the end of the world.
But more importantly, because this was the question you were purportedly answering, I don't see how the ACA is really just a cover-up, a front, a facade, a farce, a feint, a ploy to get us to single-payer insurance. You have not demonstrated -- nor even hinted at -- any such link. I'm not going to do your work for you, either. As they say about books: show, don't just tell.
I haven't seen anything indicating they have the ability to garnish wages to collect on the penalties. I'll wait for you to cite a source.
Yes, they could use the lien system to force you to pay up using the proceeds from the sale of property. They wouldn't outright take your house though.
My point was that the default position is not a kind of slavery. In fact, you should remember the reason for our current approach to debt -- debtor's prisons and poor houses went terribly. We've already tried them. Putting people into slavery because they're indebted or poor only further impoverishes us all. It made it all too easy for the default situation to be slavery, when all else fails. We thankfully have a bankruptcy system, because we recognize that grinding people to dust for past failures isn't always the best way forward -- but it does have a knock-on effect, yes, as losses are forwarded and spread through the system.
So you have three options:
a) put yourself in a position to receive aid from others
b) sit exactly at the break-even point (hard to do because of conflicting laws and differing definitions of poverty line and sliding scales and whatnot)
c) leave the country as we know it (leave, change the laws, or create your own country)
But again, the concept that we live in a very mildly socialist state is nothing new, certainly not related to the ACA. Even before the individual mandate, if you had sufficient income, you would pay taxes to the benefit of yourself and others. To avoid this, you still had to stay sufficiently low on the income scale. So ... nothing new. That's the social contract we have in place today. I'm sorry you feel so abused, I'm happy for you that you're self-sufficient. Should you, someday, no longer be self-sufficient and need a helping hand, we won't hold a grudge.
Factually:
(a) It is entirely possible for you to become a pauper in this nation, and not have to work to support anyone else. Society will instead try to lift you up. So if you don't like the idea of supporting others, you have an option, though an unpleasant one. We make it purposefully unpleasant so people will not want to stay in that state forever.
(b) You do not face jail time over this. By law, the penalty for not carrying personal health insurance is only a tax liability, except here the IRS is not allowed to levy property, and may not file criminal charges (which would be required for jail time.) [1]
(c) I'm asking how this is different from what we already do. The social contract by which we help support each other, by taxes or otherwise, has been in place for a century. I'm fine with arguments for a purely dog-eat-dog world (really, I'm okay with that), but that's not my question here.
[1] From the Congressional Research Service, copy-pasted from snopes.com:
The Internal Revenue Code (IRC) limits the means the IRS may employ to collect the penalty established in the [PPACA]. First, the taxpayer is protected from either criminal prosecution or penalty for failure to pay the penalty. Second, the IRS is prohibited from either filing a notice of federal tax lien (NFTL) or levying any property in an effort to collect the penalty. There is no prohibition, however, on establishing a statutory lien against the taxpayer’s property. No additional limits are placed on the IRS using correspondence or phone calls, either through its own employees or through private collection agencies, in an effort to collect the amount owed. Additionally, no restriction was placed on the IRS's ability to use the refund offset as a means of collecting the amount due.
Those who are required to pay the penalty for failure to maintain minimum coverage but choose not to do so will be subject to increases in the amount owed due to interest and late payment penalties imposed on the penalty after it has been assessed by the IRS.
A taxpayer who chooses not to pay the required penalty may ultimately forfeit more than the amount of the penalty if that taxpayer is ever in the position of having an overpayment to the IRS for any reason, since the refund offset applies not only to overpayments shown on original tax returns, but also to any subsequent adjustments, for example an audit by the IRS that results in an overpayment. Further, as explained above, it is possible that the IRS could present its claim when property is being sold and collect both the original penalty amount along with accrued interest and applicable penalties
Then enlighten us all: what was the goal, how am I wrong? Show me what you see, so we can get on the same page. What feedback loops do you see? What subterfuge do you detect? What ulterior motives do you suspect? What slippery slope are we going down? You might be right, but you won't convince me with generalities.