Global Climate Change is a change in the global climate, with is a broad, long-term change. The impact on a specific region or time period isn't global climate, it's regional weather, which is only very loosely correlated to the global climate.
Arguing that the weather recently in the east coast of the US is fine, so you don't care about global climate change, is like arguing that your chair is comfortable so you don't care that the house is on fire. Sure, you're fine right now where you are, but it's not going to stay that way forever. And ignoring what's going on around you is a bad long-term plan.
"People complain about the security procedures but if someone was able to hijack or blowup a plane the very same complainers would be howling about not having enough security"
People aren't complaining about security, they're complaining about things that don't improve security, but which do make travel an absurd hassle. Taking our shoes off, not carrying liquids, etc., don't prevent any significant threats. Both measures would detect attempted attacks that were both detected and stopped other ways when they were attempted, and both of which would have failed even if they'd not been stopped - the "liquid explosives" take hours to process during which time the attacker would have to be locked in the bathroom doing chemistry with the liquids, and the shoe bomb and the underwear bomb would have badly injured the attacker but not destroyed the plane.
Things that really improve security are measures that countries that take air travel security seriously take, with Israel the obvious example. A good start would be actually putting an Air Marshall on every flight, and to actually understand who the fliers are and interrogate anyone suspicious, which require real effort - they'd have to train tens of thousands of agents to put one on each flight daily. They likely have under 5,000 now, to cover 87K flights a day, so odds are there's no Air Marshal on any given flight. And there aren't trained detectives talking to fliers to pick out suspicious people - there are checklists given to "lowest cost bid" contractors. But they'd rather talk about security than do anything difficult or expensive, so Air Marshals are out. And, amazingly enough, they've been _cutting_ the number of Air Marshals.
So instead they funnel money into expensive equipment of marginal value (but profits for vendors, and lowest-cost-bid "agents" can operate them). So we get no security, but we get hassles.
The most absurd part is that the people working in "security" are all following orders, and appear to think that what they're doing improves security somehow.
The United States was formed specifically not to be just another country, but to hold itself to a higher standard. And it did so. When the US was just an idea, and our soldiers were fighting the most powerful country on the planet, we didn't justify torture.
“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775
If our current leadership has lost sight of the point of forming the United States, they need to be held to a higher standard, and replaced by leaders who respect the principles of the country.
The fundamental problem is that they're over-billing, the problem is that they've got a monopoly on a utility, generally with extremely weak oversight. So, as happens for hundreds of years, they use their control to extract money from everyone else. That's why it's a terrible idea to run utilities as unregulated, for-profit corporations. That's why whenever monopoly utilities are deregulated the prices go up while quality of service goes down. Competition only works if there is real competition.
Competition doesn't magically solve everything - that's why there should be both competition and legally defined minimum standards.
Compare it to food safety. Back before there was an FDA, food companies would often sell unsafe and even deadly food, because it was profitable to do so. And competition didn't stop them. What was effective is laws making it illegal to use unsafe practices in food production, combined with audits and penalties. And competition serves to improve things above that level, so that some food companies do better than the legally mandated minimum for food safety. Of course, it's not perfect, but it's far, far better than the horrors of the pre-FDA food supply. So now people have a right to know what's in the food they eat, and that there's basic minimum level of safety in food production. And those had to be made laws because food manufacturers didn't do either of those things, even with the magic of competition.
Similarly, the Net Neutrality is a law that says that when you buy an internet connection you can get to the whole internet and your ISP won't corrupt your network connection to increase their profits. That seems pretty obviously a good thing, which I suspect is why pretty much every major technology company supports it.
It looks a lot like Ivee (http://www.helloivee.com) which was Kickstarted a while back. Ivee costs much less, and integrates with home automation gear (Hue, Nest, etc.), which is useful. It doesn't stream internet audio, though. So it'll be interesting to see how they compete.
It runs on top of AD, and provides standards-based SSO for users. It works nicely with Google Apps.
It's a bit complex to set up, but there are articles like http://www.huggill.com/2012/01... . Basically, ADFS is a SAML Identity Provider and Google Apps is a SAML Service Provider. So when users go to log into Google using your domain, they are redirected to ADFS to log in, which validates them against AD, then redirects them back to Google. Then when they access any other service that you have SSO with, the user doesn't have to re-authenticate.
You can do the same thing with Ping Federate. If nothing else, you can get quotes from both. But if you get educational pricing from MS, ADFS is likely cheaper. ADFS doesn't cost anything (other than paying for the servers and OS) - the expensive part is buying the AD CALs for everyone doing SSO, which you already have.
Exactly. A watered down, overpriced reform is still better than how things were.
If it helps, that's how the UK got the NHS - they were forced by the Doctors to "stuff their mouths with gold" to overcome their objections. And the result is much more effective than the US healthcare system.
As to your theory that Republicans never wanted to implemented it federally, luckily there's documented history. In his book published in early 2010, Romney, after reviewing the success of health care in Massachusetts, wrote, “We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country.” A few years later, in the paperback, the line had been deleted.
"obamacare is failing by every measure except for enrollment (which doesnt mean jack shit in reality)" - more BS. First, Republicans were claiming for a year that the gauge of success of Obamacare was enrollment, and that if fewer than 7m people enrolled the plan would collapse. Once 10m people enrolled, suddenly the claims of the previous year "doesnt mean jack shit in reality"?! Really?
If you want some more metrics, how about 37m more people covered (kids, working poor, etc.), $billions refunded to consumers who had been getting ripped off by insurance companies (whose waste level is now capped at 20%). And healthcare costs are going up at only 2-3% annually, compared to 7-9% annually for decades before this. And insurance companies can no longer bankrupt people by throwing them off the plans that they've been paying for, just because they need the coverage.
So really, if it "fucking sucks" what would you prefer, that could have passed over united Republican opposition? Single Payer, while clearly better in every way, wasn't an option as long as Lieberman's vote was needed to pass health care reform. And if you're proposing going back to how things were - tell me how you're going to cover the $1.5 trillion higher cost? And explain why in return for massively higher costs, we'd get worse coverage, and 37M people losing coverage completely.
Republicans were the ones doing the negotiating. Remember, they held out the promise of votes until the end, which is why the Democrats were negotiating with them, implemented dozens of Republican proposals, etc. Nothing was hidden from Republicans - they were the ones in the middle of the negotiations.
What Pelosi said was that the bill was still being negotiated, and that until negotiations were done we wouldn't know what the result of the negotiations was. Too complex for you?
Sure. Only mandatory insurance Nixon's proposal, and Romney's, and numerous other Republicans over the years, because only by making it mandatory does it work for the insurance companies. It only became "un-American" when Obama endorsed their proposal.
Under ACA, all health insurance covers preventative medicine 100%, before the deductible. So the plan you're describing doesn't exist.
As for healthcare costing as much as leasing a nice car, well, OK. Prices were going up faster before ACA, so at least the costs are better than they would have been. But you're right - healthcare in the US is absurdly over-priced. It'd be good to really fix the underlying problem - making everything for-profit and fee-for-service, with insurance companies in the middle to maximize waste while minimizing health care being provided, is a horrible, horrible mess. But apparently the obvious solution, which the voters support (i.e. expand Medicare to everyone) is inconceivable to Congress for some reason.
Nice theory. In reality, "While some larger firms who have to provide insurance for employees come 2015 are cutting back employee hours to part-time to avoid paying for their health coverage, others like Walmart have moved tens of thousands of workers from part-time to full-time to embrace the law. Also, many smaller firms will be able to hire more workers due to their ability to provide them with better benefits at cheaper rates." So the total impact is, at worst a fraction of a percent of workers losing coverage.
And for employers that cut hours to avoid providing healthcare benefits, I don't have much sympathy. They're cutting their costs a tiny bit, in order to increase their employee's costs much more, which IMO is pretty obnoxious.
Actually, since ACA passed, healthcare costs have gone up more slowly than any time decades - 2-3% instead of the 7-9%. And everyone benefits from the reforms limiting insurance company waste, etc.
"Many locations don't check the ID - and don't match it against a database of voters that have already cast their vote" is incorrect. In all locations, you have to sign the poll, they check the signature, each voter can only vote once (because if they've already voted and signed, they can't vote again), and if you pretend to be someone you aren't the poll workers are likely to recognize that you're not their neighbor.
"You are forced to first register in order to be able to vote - a valid ID shall be sufficient." registering to vote isn't about checking ID - you have to establish residency, which means paying taxes, owning property, paying utility bills, being a citizen, etc., which you have to document and they check before adding you to the voter roll. They don't let random people add their names to the list!
The way I see it, not voting is effectively voting for whoever you hate most. That is, if the election is between A and B, and you prefer A but don't vote, B is better off because you didn't vote for A.
Same logic goes for voting for doomed third party candidates. They throw elections to the worst possible winner (i.e. most opposed to the third party candidate) fairly often, because they suck votes away from the less-opposed candidate.
Yeah, it's an artifact of the broken 'winner take all' system we use in the US. IRV voting is better. But as long as we're not using IRV voting, you have to vote for your favorite of the viable candidates, or you're helping the other guy (who you dislike more) win.
"If they voted and are not citizens, they've just committed a felony. ANYONE can create a database of that, and use it to bring pressure on law enforcement, employers, and so on."
They check citizenship before adding the name to the voter roll. They don't just add random names to the list of voters - they check that you're a citizen, own property or pay utility bills, pay taxes, etc., in the precinct. That's why actual voter fraud is nearly non-existent.
I've never seen this. Voting systems sometimes warn you that it's an "undervote" so that if you meant to vote but missed one you get a chance to do so. But I've never even heard of any system (and I've studied dozens) that prohibits undervoting. In fact, one of the basic test cases is verifying that you can cast a blank ballot.
"There are several studies that show preventative healthcare does NOT in fact save money."
Feel free to cite them, then. My doctors over the years have all been pretty emphatic that it's important (cheaper, and more effective) to get things diagnosed and treated as early as possible, rather than waiting until it's an emergency. In fact, I can't think of any cases where you'd be advised to put off going to a Doctor as long as possible.
If you actually read what I wrote, instead of picking a few words out of context and yelling, you'd have understood that I was talking about whether healthcare is provided without fees to patients, and that the cost of charging for healthcare the way we do in the US being more than the cost of providing healthcare, which is why single payer is so much more efficient.
The term "single payer" should give a clue - it's free to patients, in that there are no fees, insurance scams, etc., but that everyone pays for the healthcare system so that it's available when needed. You know, like police, fire, army, education, etc.
While I think that ACA is overly complex - as I said, single payer is far more effective and efficient - the previous system was so utterly horrible that ACA's already demonstrably much better than what was going on before. We all benefit from the cap on insurance company waste ($billions have been refunded to people who were being ripped off before), insurance companies can't cut people off just for getting sick, people can change jobs without fear of being shut out of healthcare, etc. And 10m people have healthcare coverage that didn't before. And healthcare costs are going up at 2-3% annually instead of the previous 7-9%, so costs are lower than they would have been.
Making sure that students can repay loans seems reasonable. So why should for-profit schools be required to hit targets for student ability to repay loans that non-profits can't hit? That seems unfair to target businesses for regulations based on their form of incorporation, rather than on the substance of what they do.
Really? It was the formal GOP healthcare reform plan for 30 years or so, since Nixon, then Clinton, pretty much whenever healthcare reform came up, they proposed the market/exchange plan. And when Romney implemented it, the Republicans *loved* it, and acclaimed it as proof that Republican policies worked. And they advocated expanding it at the Federal level.
Republicans didn't distance themselves from this plan, or come up with the "states rights" spin until Obama endorsed doing what the Republicans were planning.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point, perhaps intentionally.
Global Climate Change is a change in the global climate, with is a broad, long-term change. The impact on a specific region or time period isn't global climate, it's regional weather, which is only very loosely correlated to the global climate.
Arguing that the weather recently in the east coast of the US is fine, so you don't care about global climate change, is like arguing that your chair is comfortable so you don't care that the house is on fire. Sure, you're fine right now where you are, but it's not going to stay that way forever. And ignoring what's going on around you is a bad long-term plan.
"People complain about the security procedures but if someone was able to hijack or blowup a plane the very same complainers would be howling about not having enough security"
People aren't complaining about security, they're complaining about things that don't improve security, but which do make travel an absurd hassle. Taking our shoes off, not carrying liquids, etc., don't prevent any significant threats. Both measures would detect attempted attacks that were both detected and stopped other ways when they were attempted, and both of which would have failed even if they'd not been stopped - the "liquid explosives" take hours to process during which time the attacker would have to be locked in the bathroom doing chemistry with the liquids, and the shoe bomb and the underwear bomb would have badly injured the attacker but not destroyed the plane.
Things that really improve security are measures that countries that take air travel security seriously take, with Israel the obvious example. A good start would be actually putting an Air Marshall on every flight, and to actually understand who the fliers are and interrogate anyone suspicious, which require real effort - they'd have to train tens of thousands of agents to put one on each flight daily. They likely have under 5,000 now, to cover 87K flights a day, so odds are there's no Air Marshal on any given flight. And there aren't trained detectives talking to fliers to pick out suspicious people - there are checklists given to "lowest cost bid" contractors. But they'd rather talk about security than do anything difficult or expensive, so Air Marshals are out. And, amazingly enough, they've been _cutting_ the number of Air Marshals.
So instead they funnel money into expensive equipment of marginal value (but profits for vendors, and lowest-cost-bid "agents" can operate them). So we get no security, but we get hassles.
The most absurd part is that the people working in "security" are all following orders, and appear to think that what they're doing improves security somehow.
The United States was formed specifically not to be just another country, but to hold itself to a higher standard. And it did so. When the US was just an idea, and our soldiers were fighting the most powerful country on the planet, we didn't justify torture.
“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775
If our current leadership has lost sight of the point of forming the United States, they need to be held to a higher standard, and replaced by leaders who respect the principles of the country.
The fundamental problem is that they're over-billing, the problem is that they've got a monopoly on a utility, generally with extremely weak oversight. So, as happens for hundreds of years, they use their control to extract money from everyone else. That's why it's a terrible idea to run utilities as unregulated, for-profit corporations. That's why whenever monopoly utilities are deregulated the prices go up while quality of service goes down. Competition only works if there is real competition.
Competition doesn't magically solve everything - that's why there should be both competition and legally defined minimum standards.
Compare it to food safety. Back before there was an FDA, food companies would often sell unsafe and even deadly food, because it was profitable to do so. And competition didn't stop them. What was effective is laws making it illegal to use unsafe practices in food production, combined with audits and penalties. And competition serves to improve things above that level, so that some food companies do better than the legally mandated minimum for food safety. Of course, it's not perfect, but it's far, far better than the horrors of the pre-FDA food supply. So now people have a right to know what's in the food they eat, and that there's basic minimum level of safety in food production. And those had to be made laws because food manufacturers didn't do either of those things, even with the magic of competition.
Similarly, the Net Neutrality is a law that says that when you buy an internet connection you can get to the whole internet and your ISP won't corrupt your network connection to increase their profits. That seems pretty obviously a good thing, which I suspect is why pretty much every major technology company supports it.
Sorry, you're right. Ivee was $149 on Kickstarter, which is less than the $199 Echo. But now it's retailing for $199, same as Echo, My bad.
Funny, but not true - they actually shipped the units, and they work well.
It looks a lot like Ivee (http://www.helloivee.com) which was Kickstarted a while back. Ivee costs much less, and integrates with home automation gear (Hue, Nest, etc.), which is useful. It doesn't stream internet audio, though. So it'll be interesting to see how they compete.
If you run AD, you should probably run ADFS. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u...
It runs on top of AD, and provides standards-based SSO for users. It works nicely with Google Apps.
It's a bit complex to set up, but there are articles like http://www.huggill.com/2012/01... . Basically, ADFS is a SAML Identity Provider and Google Apps is a SAML Service Provider. So when users go to log into Google using your domain, they are redirected to ADFS to log in, which validates them against AD, then redirects them back to Google. Then when they access any other service that you have SSO with, the user doesn't have to re-authenticate.
You can do the same thing with Ping Federate. If nothing else, you can get quotes from both. But if you get educational pricing from MS, ADFS is likely cheaper. ADFS doesn't cost anything (other than paying for the servers and OS) - the expensive part is buying the AD CALs for everyone doing SSO, which you already have.
Exactly. A watered down, overpriced reform is still better than how things were.
If it helps, that's how the UK got the NHS - they were forced by the Doctors to "stuff their mouths with gold" to overcome their objections. And the result is much more effective than the US healthcare system.
As to your theory that Republicans never wanted to implemented it federally, luckily there's documented history. In his book published in early 2010, Romney, after reviewing the success of health care in Massachusetts, wrote, “We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country.” A few years later, in the paperback, the line had been deleted.
"obamacare is failing by every measure except for enrollment (which doesnt mean jack shit in reality)" - more BS. First, Republicans were claiming for a year that the gauge of success of Obamacare was enrollment, and that if fewer than 7m people enrolled the plan would collapse. Once 10m people enrolled, suddenly the claims of the previous year "doesnt mean jack shit in reality"?! Really?
If you want some more metrics, how about 37m more people covered (kids, working poor, etc.), $billions refunded to consumers who had been getting ripped off by insurance companies (whose waste level is now capped at 20%). And healthcare costs are going up at only 2-3% annually, compared to 7-9% annually for decades before this. And insurance companies can no longer bankrupt people by throwing them off the plans that they've been paying for, just because they need the coverage.
So really, if it "fucking sucks" what would you prefer, that could have passed over united Republican opposition? Single Payer, while clearly better in every way, wasn't an option as long as Lieberman's vote was needed to pass health care reform. And if you're proposing going back to how things were - tell me how you're going to cover the $1.5 trillion higher cost? And explain why in return for massively higher costs, we'd get worse coverage, and 37M people losing coverage completely.
Republicans were the ones doing the negotiating. Remember, they held out the promise of votes until the end, which is why the Democrats were negotiating with them, implemented dozens of Republican proposals, etc. Nothing was hidden from Republicans - they were the ones in the middle of the negotiations.
What Pelosi said was that the bill was still being negotiated, and that until negotiations were done we wouldn't know what the result of the negotiations was. Too complex for you?
Sure. Only mandatory insurance Nixon's proposal, and Romney's, and numerous other Republicans over the years, because only by making it mandatory does it work for the insurance companies. It only became "un-American" when Obama endorsed their proposal.
Under ACA, all health insurance covers preventative medicine 100%, before the deductible. So the plan you're describing doesn't exist.
As for healthcare costing as much as leasing a nice car, well, OK. Prices were going up faster before ACA, so at least the costs are better than they would have been. But you're right - healthcare in the US is absurdly over-priced. It'd be good to really fix the underlying problem - making everything for-profit and fee-for-service, with insurance companies in the middle to maximize waste while minimizing health care being provided, is a horrible, horrible mess. But apparently the obvious solution, which the voters support (i.e. expand Medicare to everyone) is inconceivable to Congress for some reason.
And even with all of that Medicare is vastly more efficient, and has higher patient satisfaction rates, than private healthcare.
Nice theory. In reality, "While some larger firms who have to provide insurance for employees come 2015 are cutting back employee hours to part-time to avoid paying for their health coverage, others like Walmart have moved tens of thousands of workers from part-time to full-time to embrace the law. Also, many smaller firms will be able to hire more workers due to their ability to provide them with better benefits at cheaper rates." So the total impact is, at worst a fraction of a percent of workers losing coverage.
And for employers that cut hours to avoid providing healthcare benefits, I don't have much sympathy. They're cutting their costs a tiny bit, in order to increase their employee's costs much more, which IMO is pretty obnoxious.
Actually, since ACA passed, healthcare costs have gone up more slowly than any time decades - 2-3% instead of the 7-9%. And everyone benefits from the reforms limiting insurance company waste, etc.
Want to try again with some facts?
I agree with most of your points, but
"Many locations don't check the ID - and don't match it against a database of voters that have already cast their vote" is incorrect. In all locations, you have to sign the poll, they check the signature, each voter can only vote once (because if they've already voted and signed, they can't vote again), and if you pretend to be someone you aren't the poll workers are likely to recognize that you're not their neighbor.
"You are forced to first register in order to be able to vote - a valid ID shall be sufficient." registering to vote isn't about checking ID - you have to establish residency, which means paying taxes, owning property, paying utility bills, being a citizen, etc., which you have to document and they check before adding you to the voter roll. They don't let random people add their names to the list!
The way I see it, not voting is effectively voting for whoever you hate most. That is, if the election is between A and B, and you prefer A but don't vote, B is better off because you didn't vote for A.
Same logic goes for voting for doomed third party candidates. They throw elections to the worst possible winner (i.e. most opposed to the third party candidate) fairly often, because they suck votes away from the less-opposed candidate.
Yeah, it's an artifact of the broken 'winner take all' system we use in the US. IRV voting is better. But as long as we're not using IRV voting, you have to vote for your favorite of the viable candidates, or you're helping the other guy (who you dislike more) win.
"If they voted and are not citizens, they've just committed a felony. ANYONE can create a database of that, and use it to bring pressure on law enforcement, employers, and so on."
They check citizenship before adding the name to the voter roll. They don't just add random names to the list of voters - they check that you're a citizen, own property or pay utility bills, pay taxes, etc., in the precinct. That's why actual voter fraud is nearly non-existent.
I've never seen this. Voting systems sometimes warn you that it's an "undervote" so that if you meant to vote but missed one you get a chance to do so. But I've never even heard of any system (and I've studied dozens) that prohibits undervoting. In fact, one of the basic test cases is verifying that you can cast a blank ballot.
"There are several studies that show preventative healthcare does NOT in fact save money."
Feel free to cite them, then. My doctors over the years have all been pretty emphatic that it's important (cheaper, and more effective) to get things diagnosed and treated as early as possible, rather than waiting until it's an emergency. In fact, I can't think of any cases where you'd be advised to put off going to a Doctor as long as possible.
If you actually read what I wrote, instead of picking a few words out of context and yelling, you'd have understood that I was talking about whether healthcare is provided without fees to patients, and that the cost of charging for healthcare the way we do in the US being more than the cost of providing healthcare, which is why single payer is so much more efficient.
The term "single payer" should give a clue - it's free to patients, in that there are no fees, insurance scams, etc., but that everyone pays for the healthcare system so that it's available when needed. You know, like police, fire, army, education, etc.
While I think that ACA is overly complex - as I said, single payer is far more effective and efficient - the previous system was so utterly horrible that ACA's already demonstrably much better than what was going on before. We all benefit from the cap on insurance company waste ($billions have been refunded to people who were being ripped off before), insurance companies can't cut people off just for getting sick, people can change jobs without fear of being shut out of healthcare, etc. And 10m people have healthcare coverage that didn't before. And healthcare costs are going up at 2-3% annually instead of the previous 7-9%, so costs are lower than they would have been.
Making sure that students can repay loans seems reasonable. So why should for-profit schools be required to hit targets for student ability to repay loans that non-profits can't hit? That seems unfair to target businesses for regulations based on their form of incorporation, rather than on the substance of what they do.
Really? It was the formal GOP healthcare reform plan for 30 years or so, since Nixon, then Clinton, pretty much whenever healthcare reform came up, they proposed the market/exchange plan. And when Romney implemented it, the Republicans *loved* it, and acclaimed it as proof that Republican policies worked. And they advocated expanding it at the Federal level.
Republicans didn't distance themselves from this plan, or come up with the "states rights" spin until Obama endorsed doing what the Republicans were planning.