True, but so far (the numbers are small, so don't extrapolate too literally) EV fires appear to be contained and not kill people, while gas vehicle fires destroy entire vehicles and fairly often kill people.
Doubling the Tesla numbers (since they've been sold in the last 6 months) is still 0.000286 0.000523 . So while three fires sounds dramatic, it sounds like the same number of gas cars would have had six car fires in the same amount of time.
It's a mater of degree, I suppose. The vast majority of writers vote, engage in political debate, etc., but most of them have the sense not to go out of their way to offend the public that they depend on for a living. Personally, I draw a distinction between an artist's political actions as a private individual (and voting, engaging in debate, etc.) and someone's crossing a line into becoming a public political figure. And when Scott is in the leadership of an anti-gay political action committee, raising $millions to actively lobby the government to change laws, he's not just a guy with opinions that I disagree with, he's become a political activist. And because he's chosen to devote himself to such a divisive goal, he's going to suffer a negative reaction.
I should also say, I do personally know Scott, and many other writers, as I was lucky enough to hang out with a group of SF writers in college, met many others, and keep in touch with some of them since, including Scott. And they're all very interesting to talk with, with a wide range of political (and other) perspectives. And I *love* having debates with people I disagree with. Heck, I've had such debates with Scott - as a Mormon Church Elder and descendent of Brigham Young, and an SF writer, there's a lot interesting to discuss with him.
Note that I'm not talking about censoring - I don't think that the government should prevent Scott from writing his political rants, etc. But if what he does is highly public and deeply offensive, and he makes his living selling his writing to the public, he shouldn't be surprised that the public might end up deeply offended enough to choose not to buy his products any more. Scott has the right to his political rants, and to help lead NOM, fund and fundraise for causes I oppose, etc., but when he's that overtly political, I have the right to choose not to buy what he's selling.
The problem that I have with Scott isn't that he personally has political positions that I disagree with. There are lots of people I disagree with that whose work I buy.
The problem that I have with Scott is that he's actively working for a political agenda that I find reprehensible. He's not just posting huge, insulting, racist and homophobic political rants, though that's bad enough. He is on the board of NOM, a group I find reprehensible, and actively campaigns for them, and contributes time and money to their political action campaigns that pay politicians to undermine gay rights. So while as an American he can have any political opinion he likes, when he's actively promoting and funding anti-gay laws that (IMO) harm millions of Americans, he's crossed the line from private to public, and it's fair game for people who object to his political activities to boycot his products.
It's a shame, really. Scott used to be a sweet, gentle man. It makes me wonder what's happened to him to turn him into a vicious homophobe. I know that he's had some pretty horrible personal challenges. But whatever the cause, even though I love the story he wrote decades ago, I can't support what he's dedicated his life to these days. SMH.
More than that, I, Robot was actually written as a movie that had nothing to do with Isaac Asimov or I, Robot. The studio bought the name I, Robot and tacked it on, and they renamed one of the characters Susan Calvin. Ick.
We certainly contributed work and code to FOSS projects, used the software intensively, filed bug reports, contributed fixes to relevant projects, improved documentation, helped other users in forums/newsgroups, and happily paid for professional services when we needed help. That's pretty much the FOSS deal.
But don't think that FOSS developers are all starving working for free. The large majority of developers that are the core of most FOSS projects are paid to do so, because their employer wants that project to succeed. Sometimes it's because the company needs the problem solved and is happy giving the solution away - I have done that many times, giving away utilities that we wrote that seemed of general value. Often it's because the company is in the business of providing support and professional services for FOSS (e.g. Red Hat, Alfresco, MySQL, too many others to name). And sometimes the software is free as a marketing strategy to block a competitor (e.g. MySQL vs. SQL Server). So it's free software because that's strategically in the interests of the company driving the project for it to be free. And that's many large, successful FOSS projects. There are of course some projects that are driven by volunteers, and there are independent contributors to many projects, and that's wonderful. But IBM, Apple, Google, Oracle, Red Hat, etc., all pay armies of developers to work on FOSS projects that we all benefit from. And they do so for their own strategic reasons. So, if Oracle invests heavily in MySQL to keep people from using to SQL Server, I am happy using MySQL.:-)
The question is who you want to pay, and what you want the cost model to be. That is, if it's something with both an FOSS and COTS option.
If you want to pay a vendor a fee, typically based on capacity + professional services, go that way.
If you want to use a FOSS technology, and pay only for professional services, go that way.
Generally I think the FOSS model is much better for customers, because: 1) The customer can scale the business without additional licensing costs. 2) The customer has the flexibility to choose any vendor (or internal staff) to do the work.
So, for example, my last startup grew to 70m users on FOSS software, with hundreds of servers, with only physical server, hosting and bandwidth costs (plus a small dev team, which I would need in any case). If I'd used a licensed OS, database, etc., that cost would have made my business not viable.
To clarify, the law as written covered everyone. The SCOTUS made one part of the law optional (medicare expansion to cover very poor people, not the state exchanges), and since the law was written with everyone's coverage covered/subsidized either in the exchanges or, for the very poor, medicare, the SCOTUS let states really screw their citizens by not expanding medicare to cover the very poor, who can't afford the exchanges.
The executive branch has the authority (granted by Congress) of delaying implementation of laws if there are implementation issues that require a delay to work out. It happens fairly often, though usually without the whining that's accompanying this instance. Which is odd, because it was Republicans asking for the delays, and causing the problems that lead to the delays, so it's nonsensical for them to complain about having been given the delay they asked for.
The waivers are a part of the ACA, to give states flexibility in how they implement healthcare reform, as long as they meet or exceed the targets for cost and coverage. And since Republicans were asking for the waivers via the mechanism defined in the ACA, I'm not sure how they'd justify complaining that they were given the waivers that they asked for. Or that it's somehow an exception to the ACA.
And the price support that Congressional staff is receiving for healthcare bought through the exchange is exactly the same as the price support that they are receiving for their current healthcare. Surely you're not arguing that people should lose their existing healthcare benefits from their employer.
So all of your examples of illegal acts are legal.
Care to try again? Perhaps after some more research...
It probably helps not to waste 30% of your healthcare spending on insurance company overhead, either in the cost of the insurance company (20%) or in the administrative cost to the healthcare providers trying to negotiate with and get paid (10%).
For what it's worth, the states that set up exchanges (i.e. that aren't incompetently run) are seeing huge drops in premiums, as much as 50% lower. And in Massachusetts where the exchanges have been running, health care costs have gone down for four years in a row now, while costs went up for everyone else.
The exchanges can't happen soon enough. If some states are stupid enough to force people to pay 2x as much for healthcare, people will figure it out soon enough and either move or elect competent leadership.
Actual payouts due to litigation is around 0.5% of medical spending. The money wasted by Doctors on malpractice insurance is far more, but you'd have to ask them why they agree to pay so much more than the expected cost of settling. I suppose it's a risk management issue - you're extremely unlikely to have a $10M settlement, but if you did you'd be happy to have paid $100K/year for insurance, even though if you averaged the settlements it'd be $5K/year/doctor. That kind of thinking is probably how the insurance companies are making so much money.:-)
Don't blame patients. In the real world, as confirmed by A/B studies, people don't use healthcare like a typical product, they use healthcare because they need it, and the price isn't relevant. In reality, the cost of healthcare being lower doesn't increase the consumption of healthcare. In fact, it's worse than that - it's the reverse. It turns out that high co-payments cause people to avoid preventative and early care, which "saves money" but it really means that problems grow into major, and much more expensive care which costs far more. The extreme case is people with no insurance, who put everything off until they end up in the ER, costing an order of magnitude more than a regular doctor.
In economic terms, the best way to lower the cost of healthcare is to eliminate the co-payments, so people go to the doctor more often, and are in better health which has lower total cost. As a rather nice side-effect, people are also healthier and live longer, which I hope nobody's opposed to.
The only argument for pushing the cost of healthcare onto patients is that it makes the insurance company's profit margins higher. Since they're making record profits, while delivering low-quality services extremely inefficiently, I wouldn't mind seeing their profits drop.
Actually, Republicans have been well documented (in their own writing) as knowing that if Americans ever got decent healthcare reform they'd vote for the party that gave it to them forever, dooming the Republicans to losing forever. That's why Republicans fought to hard to prevent health care reform, then negotiated like crazy to make it as complicated and ineffective as possible, and made sure that the major benefits were deferred until after the 2012 election (hoping to win the election and kill health care reform), and have voted 40+ times to repeal it. And at the state level, they've done everything they could to cause the exchanged to fail, such as waiting a year past the deadline to finally announce that they're not setting up state exchanges, and then (illegally) refusing to provide any data, specs, etc., to the people setting up the national exchange, trying to force the exchanges to fail through sabotage.
Given that, I'm pretty sure that you're wrong when you write that "Republican partisans believe that everyone will hate Obamacare once it actually exists".
Instead, I think that when the insurance companies demanded a delay, the White House agreed to it because that means that the insurance companies can't blame the white house for their failure to implement ACA. Admittedly they should have started implementing three years ago, and instead spend $billions trying to overturn the law instead of planning compliance. But if the insurance companies whine that they can't implement the law, and people's checks are screwed up, the blame would hit the law. So by giving the insurance companies the time they demanded, they lose the excuse to blame their incompetence on the ACA, and they (politically) have to deliver because they were given everything they said they needed. Yes, the cost of that deal was a year of people getting better healthcare, which sucks, but in the long run it'll help ACA be successfully implemented, so arguably a good political decision.
That doesn't make me like insurance companies any more, though.
Not cynical enough. In large, old companies there's software running key parts of the company that they don't have source code any more, or that they can't recompile because even with source they don't have the ancient compilers, etc., or if they have source and tools, nobody remembers the code and it's undocumented, etc. - all of which means that there's tons of code that's "frozen in time" and all they can do is write layers on top of it.
They'd love to blow the code up and rewrite it. The problem is the work required to reverse engineer whatever the code does. Keep in mind that they're heavily regulated, and whatever they're running now is approved. So if they blow it up and rewrite, they have to spend years figuring out what it all does well enough to recode it, then do so, then validate it as supporting every line of business under every ancient contract they've ever signed, then re-certify it with whoever approves their SOX/HIPPA/etc., stuff. And they have to do all of that while continuing to run the business, so both systems have to run in parallel, creating huge piles of extra work for everyone in the business, doing double entry, reconciling differences, etc. At infinite cost and business risk that nobody will sign off on.
So instead, they keep running ancient software, and writing layers on top of layers. It's horrible, but it's that way for a reason.
The Democratic and Republican Parties clearly differ in many clear and obvious ways. They may not be things you care about, but your ignoring all of the differences between the parties doesn't make them identical.
While Romney refused to ever release any documentation to support his "job creator" status, most people work out that he was responsible for more job loss than job creation. Staples, the one company he was in any way connected to that created a lot of jobs was an investment that he opposed, and the jobs created there were long after he was gone. I'd say that with Romney, while he looked like a successful businessman, the closer you look the slimier he is. For example, when he "saved" the Olympics, he did so by lobbying the government to bail out the Olympics, and (unethically) pressuring Bain business partners into sponsorship deals.
And don't even get me started on what he did in Massachusetts. The man has no scruples, ethics, or even sense of shame.
As an extreme example of this, I recall one year where a minor candidate was in the early primaries and debates, and the NY Times actually cropped him off the end of a photograph of the primary and didn't report on him at all. After that, he (loudly) made a point of standing in the middle in photographs. All I remember about him now is that he was Jewish and a strong supporter of indian rights - I can't even find him in Wikipedia or Google searches, because he was shut out of the national news. I only heard of him because I read local NY news where he got a little coverage.
I'll agree that voting in primaries is where you probably have the best leverage. There are the most candidates splitting the vote, and the smallest number of voters.
But not voting in the general election is stupid. All that does is guarantee that you have no influence at all over the election, because you've taken yourself out of the equation.
And voting for a non-viable candidate in the general election is worse that stupid, because rather than having no effect on the outcome of the election, you're actually helping whoever you like least win the general election, because you failed to vote for the viable candidate you preferred between the two.
See Bush v. Gore if you forget that people wasting votes on non-viable candidates can throw the election to their least favored candidate. How's that work out?
If you really see absolutely no difference between the two leading candidates your analysis is fine. I'll point out, however, that a bunch of people claiming that they believed that in 2000 lead to Bush being President instead of Gore, and in polls they actually preferred Gore to Bush by a wide margin, so voting for the third party lead to the election of a (in your terms) more evil candidate. Just sayin'.
People like you, who don't understand math or the electoral system, are who caused Bush to be elected instead of Gore.
So here's how it works: whoever gets the most votes wins (in each state). So your vote only matters if it affects the selection of who comes in first. When there are two candidates who are relatively close, voting for a distant third is effectively a vote against whichever of the two leading candidates you like more, because the only affect you had on the two leading candidates is that you failed to vote for the one you supported between the two.
In the case of Bush v. Gore, Nader supporters strongly supported Gore over Bush, but voted for Nader as their first choice. If they'd ignored Nader and voted for a viable candidate instead, that would have given Gore the Presidency. So by voting for Nader, those voters threw the election to Bush, who was those voter's third choice, when they should have optimized the outcome by voting for Gore and at least getting their second choice.
It's a shame they don't teach math better in schools. Or civics.
And what about the abuses that were documented, such as analysis using the PRISM system to read their wife's emails because they suspected an affair, analysts passing around recordings of sexual phone calls, etc.? Did they not happen? Or were they not abuses?
What scares me about these programs is that the eliminate the requirement to negotiate between independent parties who serve as a check on each other. For example, if the police want someone's email, they have to get a warrant and go to the ISP and ask for the email, and they only get what the ISP agrees is reasonable. And since the ISP's incentive is to protect their customers, they push back on unreasonable/illegal warrants. And if they can't across, it goes to court where a judge (and perhaps jury) can decide based on the law. And the law, and the entire process, is public so abuses can be identified and called out.
Instead the government has access to everything automatically, bypassing the ISP, the need for a warrant, the law, courts, etc.
Yes, there's a secret court making secret rulings, and creating secret laws, with no congressional or public oversight, and with companies affected by the secret laws forbidden to discuss it. That's no basis for legitimate law, that's creepy un-American lunacy, and it's an embarrassment that it was ever proposed, much less agreed to by Congress (admittedly in the 9/11 panic).
If there's a "silver lining" to all of this, it's that the universal revulsion at the government's betrayal of our trust might possibly lead to politicians being forced to do something about it. Or we might get lucky and find a judge who's read the Constitution and cares about it more than avoiding offending powerful scared men.
Perhaps it's time for mail clients to make a comeback.
With end-to-end encryption, such as PGP, GPG or S/MIME, users control their own security and don't have to trust anyone in between, so all the ISPs could know (and leak to whoever wants to spy on their users) is the email addresses in the routing, not the email contents. These problems were all solved many years ago. Sure, mail clients aren't as convenient as webmail, but if there's a concerted attack by our ISPs on our private communications, the least we can do is fight back.
There are secure mail clients for pretty much every OS. So no easy browser access, but that's the cost of controlling your own communications.
You don't understand what Lytro did. It's not about depth of field, it's about capturing the light rays (i.e. in different directions) rather than one set of pixels. One of the things you can do with that is alter depth of field, but you can also alter focus, so you're focusing nearer or further, or shifting perspective to look behind things. But since the Lytro is capturing light across a large sensor, not from two points, you can shift up/down/left/right and by variable amounts, not just flip between left and right eye view. So you can argue that you'd rather have the resolution without the refocusing, depth of field, perspective shift, etc., made possible by having the lightfield. But you should at least understand what you're saying you don't want.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but so far (the numbers are small, so don't extrapolate too literally) EV fires appear to be contained and not kill people, while gas vehicle fires destroy entire vehicles and fairly often kill people.
So by those numbers, the Teslas are much less likely to catch fire than other cars.
> 15000 fires / 28700000 gas cars =0.000523
> 3 fires / 21000 Teslas = 0.000143
Doubling the Tesla numbers (since they've been sold in the last 6 months) is still 0.000286 0.000523 . So while three fires sounds dramatic, it sounds like the same number of gas cars would have had six car fires in the same amount of time.
It's a mater of degree, I suppose. The vast majority of writers vote, engage in political debate, etc., but most of them have the sense not to go out of their way to offend the public that they depend on for a living. Personally, I draw a distinction between an artist's political actions as a private individual (and voting, engaging in debate, etc.) and someone's crossing a line into becoming a public political figure. And when Scott is in the leadership of an anti-gay political action committee, raising $millions to actively lobby the government to change laws, he's not just a guy with opinions that I disagree with, he's become a political activist. And because he's chosen to devote himself to such a divisive goal, he's going to suffer a negative reaction.
I should also say, I do personally know Scott, and many other writers, as I was lucky enough to hang out with a group of SF writers in college, met many others, and keep in touch with some of them since, including Scott. And they're all very interesting to talk with, with a wide range of political (and other) perspectives. And I *love* having debates with people I disagree with. Heck, I've had such debates with Scott - as a Mormon Church Elder and descendent of Brigham Young, and an SF writer, there's a lot interesting to discuss with him.
Note that I'm not talking about censoring - I don't think that the government should prevent Scott from writing his political rants, etc. But if what he does is highly public and deeply offensive, and he makes his living selling his writing to the public, he shouldn't be surprised that the public might end up deeply offended enough to choose not to buy his products any more. Scott has the right to his political rants, and to help lead NOM, fund and fundraise for causes I oppose, etc., but when he's that overtly political, I have the right to choose not to buy what he's selling.
The problem that I have with Scott isn't that he personally has political positions that I disagree with. There are lots of people I disagree with that whose work I buy.
The problem that I have with Scott is that he's actively working for a political agenda that I find reprehensible. He's not just posting huge, insulting, racist and homophobic political rants, though that's bad enough. He is on the board of NOM, a group I find reprehensible, and actively campaigns for them, and contributes time and money to their political action campaigns that pay politicians to undermine gay rights. So while as an American he can have any political opinion he likes, when he's actively promoting and funding anti-gay laws that (IMO) harm millions of Americans, he's crossed the line from private to public, and it's fair game for people who object to his political activities to boycot his products.
It's a shame, really. Scott used to be a sweet, gentle man. It makes me wonder what's happened to him to turn him into a vicious homophobe. I know that he's had some pretty horrible personal challenges. But whatever the cause, even though I love the story he wrote decades ago, I can't support what he's dedicated his life to these days. SMH.
More than that, I, Robot was actually written as a movie that had nothing to do with Isaac Asimov or I, Robot. The studio bought the name I, Robot and tacked it on, and they renamed one of the characters Susan Calvin. Ick.
We certainly contributed work and code to FOSS projects, used the software intensively, filed bug reports, contributed fixes to relevant projects, improved documentation, helped other users in forums/newsgroups, and happily paid for professional services when we needed help. That's pretty much the FOSS deal.
But don't think that FOSS developers are all starving working for free. The large majority of developers that are the core of most FOSS projects are paid to do so, because their employer wants that project to succeed. Sometimes it's because the company needs the problem solved and is happy giving the solution away - I have done that many times, giving away utilities that we wrote that seemed of general value. Often it's because the company is in the business of providing support and professional services for FOSS (e.g. Red Hat, Alfresco, MySQL, too many others to name). And sometimes the software is free as a marketing strategy to block a competitor (e.g. MySQL vs. SQL Server). So it's free software because that's strategically in the interests of the company driving the project for it to be free. And that's many large, successful FOSS projects. There are of course some projects that are driven by volunteers, and there are independent contributors to many projects, and that's wonderful. But IBM, Apple, Google, Oracle, Red Hat, etc., all pay armies of developers to work on FOSS projects that we all benefit from. And they do so for their own strategic reasons. So, if Oracle invests heavily in MySQL to keep people from using to SQL Server, I am happy using MySQL. :-)
The question is who you want to pay, and what you want the cost model to be. That is, if it's something with both an FOSS and COTS option.
If you want to pay a vendor a fee, typically based on capacity + professional services, go that way.
If you want to use a FOSS technology, and pay only for professional services, go that way.
Generally I think the FOSS model is much better for customers, because:
1) The customer can scale the business without additional licensing costs.
2) The customer has the flexibility to choose any vendor (or internal staff) to do the work.
So, for example, my last startup grew to 70m users on FOSS software, with hundreds of servers, with only physical server, hosting and bandwidth costs (plus a small dev team, which I would need in any case). If I'd used a licensed OS, database, etc., that cost would have made my business not viable.
You do realize that you're using the Internet, don't you?
To clarify, the law as written covered everyone. The SCOTUS made one part of the law optional (medicare expansion to cover very poor people, not the state exchanges), and since the law was written with everyone's coverage covered/subsidized either in the exchanges or, for the very poor, medicare, the SCOTUS let states really screw their citizens by not expanding medicare to cover the very poor, who can't afford the exchanges.
Sucks to be poor in a "red" state.
Wrong on so many counts.
The executive branch has the authority (granted by Congress) of delaying implementation of laws if there are implementation issues that require a delay to work out. It happens fairly often, though usually without the whining that's accompanying this instance. Which is odd, because it was Republicans asking for the delays, and causing the problems that lead to the delays, so it's nonsensical for them to complain about having been given the delay they asked for.
The waivers are a part of the ACA, to give states flexibility in how they implement healthcare reform, as long as they meet or exceed the targets for cost and coverage. And since Republicans were asking for the waivers via the mechanism defined in the ACA, I'm not sure how they'd justify complaining that they were given the waivers that they asked for. Or that it's somehow an exception to the ACA.
And the price support that Congressional staff is receiving for healthcare bought through the exchange is exactly the same as the price support that they are receiving for their current healthcare. Surely you're not arguing that people should lose their existing healthcare benefits from their employer.
So all of your examples of illegal acts are legal.
Care to try again? Perhaps after some more research...
It probably helps not to waste 30% of your healthcare spending on insurance company overhead, either in the cost of the insurance company (20%) or in the administrative cost to the healthcare providers trying to negotiate with and get paid (10%).
For what it's worth, the states that set up exchanges (i.e. that aren't incompetently run) are seeing huge drops in premiums, as much as 50% lower. And in Massachusetts where the exchanges have been running, health care costs have gone down for four years in a row now, while costs went up for everyone else.
The exchanges can't happen soon enough. If some states are stupid enough to force people to pay 2x as much for healthcare, people will figure it out soon enough and either move or elect competent leadership.
Actual payouts due to litigation is around 0.5% of medical spending. The money wasted by Doctors on malpractice insurance is far more, but you'd have to ask them why they agree to pay so much more than the expected cost of settling. I suppose it's a risk management issue - you're extremely unlikely to have a $10M settlement, but if you did you'd be happy to have paid $100K/year for insurance, even though if you averaged the settlements it'd be $5K/year/doctor. That kind of thinking is probably how the insurance companies are making so much money. :-)
Don't blame patients. In the real world, as confirmed by A/B studies, people don't use healthcare like a typical product, they use healthcare because they need it, and the price isn't relevant. In reality, the cost of healthcare being lower doesn't increase the consumption of healthcare. In fact, it's worse than that - it's the reverse. It turns out that high co-payments cause people to avoid preventative and early care, which "saves money" but it really means that problems grow into major, and much more expensive care which costs far more. The extreme case is people with no insurance, who put everything off until they end up in the ER, costing an order of magnitude more than a regular doctor.
In economic terms, the best way to lower the cost of healthcare is to eliminate the co-payments, so people go to the doctor more often, and are in better health which has lower total cost. As a rather nice side-effect, people are also healthier and live longer, which I hope nobody's opposed to.
The only argument for pushing the cost of healthcare onto patients is that it makes the insurance company's profit margins higher. Since they're making record profits, while delivering low-quality services extremely inefficiently, I wouldn't mind seeing their profits drop.
Actually, Republicans have been well documented (in their own writing) as knowing that if Americans ever got decent healthcare reform they'd vote for the party that gave it to them forever, dooming the Republicans to losing forever. That's why Republicans fought to hard to prevent health care reform, then negotiated like crazy to make it as complicated and ineffective as possible, and made sure that the major benefits were deferred until after the 2012 election (hoping to win the election and kill health care reform), and have voted 40+ times to repeal it. And at the state level, they've done everything they could to cause the exchanged to fail, such as waiting a year past the deadline to finally announce that they're not setting up state exchanges, and then (illegally) refusing to provide any data, specs, etc., to the people setting up the national exchange, trying to force the exchanges to fail through sabotage.
Given that, I'm pretty sure that you're wrong when you write that "Republican partisans believe that everyone will hate Obamacare once it actually exists".
Instead, I think that when the insurance companies demanded a delay, the White House agreed to it because that means that the insurance companies can't blame the white house for their failure to implement ACA. Admittedly they should have started implementing three years ago, and instead spend $billions trying to overturn the law instead of planning compliance. But if the insurance companies whine that they can't implement the law, and people's checks are screwed up, the blame would hit the law. So by giving the insurance companies the time they demanded, they lose the excuse to blame their incompetence on the ACA, and they (politically) have to deliver because they were given everything they said they needed. Yes, the cost of that deal was a year of people getting better healthcare, which sucks, but in the long run it'll help ACA be successfully implemented, so arguably a good political decision.
That doesn't make me like insurance companies any more, though.
Not cynical enough. In large, old companies there's software running key parts of the company that they don't have source code any more, or that they can't recompile because even with source they don't have the ancient compilers, etc., or if they have source and tools, nobody remembers the code and it's undocumented, etc. - all of which means that there's tons of code that's "frozen in time" and all they can do is write layers on top of it.
They'd love to blow the code up and rewrite it. The problem is the work required to reverse engineer whatever the code does. Keep in mind that they're heavily regulated, and whatever they're running now is approved. So if they blow it up and rewrite, they have to spend years figuring out what it all does well enough to recode it, then do so, then validate it as supporting every line of business under every ancient contract they've ever signed, then re-certify it with whoever approves their SOX/HIPPA/etc., stuff. And they have to do all of that while continuing to run the business, so both systems have to run in parallel, creating huge piles of extra work for everyone in the business, doing double entry, reconciling differences, etc. At infinite cost and business risk that nobody will sign off on.
So instead, they keep running ancient software, and writing layers on top of layers. It's horrible, but it's that way for a reason.
The Democratic and Republican Parties clearly differ in many clear and obvious ways. They may not be things you care about, but your ignoring all of the differences between the parties doesn't make them identical.
While Romney refused to ever release any documentation to support his "job creator" status, most people work out that he was responsible for more job loss than job creation. Staples, the one company he was in any way connected to that created a lot of jobs was an investment that he opposed, and the jobs created there were long after he was gone. I'd say that with Romney, while he looked like a successful businessman, the closer you look the slimier he is. For example, when he "saved" the Olympics, he did so by lobbying the government to bail out the Olympics, and (unethically) pressuring Bain business partners into sponsorship deals.
And don't even get me started on what he did in Massachusetts. The man has no scruples, ethics, or even sense of shame.
As an extreme example of this, I recall one year where a minor candidate was in the early primaries and debates, and the NY Times actually cropped him off the end of a photograph of the primary and didn't report on him at all. After that, he (loudly) made a point of standing in the middle in photographs. All I remember about him now is that he was Jewish and a strong supporter of indian rights - I can't even find him in Wikipedia or Google searches, because he was shut out of the national news. I only heard of him because I read local NY news where he got a little coverage.
I'll agree that voting in primaries is where you probably have the best leverage. There are the most candidates splitting the vote, and the smallest number of voters.
But not voting in the general election is stupid. All that does is guarantee that you have no influence at all over the election, because you've taken yourself out of the equation.
And voting for a non-viable candidate in the general election is worse that stupid, because rather than having no effect on the outcome of the election, you're actually helping whoever you like least win the general election, because you failed to vote for the viable candidate you preferred between the two.
See Bush v. Gore if you forget that people wasting votes on non-viable candidates can throw the election to their least favored candidate. How's that work out?
If you really see absolutely no difference between the two leading candidates your analysis is fine. I'll point out, however, that a bunch of people claiming that they believed that in 2000 lead to Bush being President instead of Gore, and in polls they actually preferred Gore to Bush by a wide margin, so voting for the third party lead to the election of a (in your terms) more evil candidate. Just sayin'.
People like you, who don't understand math or the electoral system, are who caused Bush to be elected instead of Gore.
So here's how it works: whoever gets the most votes wins (in each state). So your vote only matters if it affects the selection of who comes in first. When there are two candidates who are relatively close, voting for a distant third is effectively a vote against whichever of the two leading candidates you like more, because the only affect you had on the two leading candidates is that you failed to vote for the one you supported between the two.
In the case of Bush v. Gore, Nader supporters strongly supported Gore over Bush, but voted for Nader as their first choice. If they'd ignored Nader and voted for a viable candidate instead, that would have given Gore the Presidency. So by voting for Nader, those voters threw the election to Bush, who was those voter's third choice, when they should have optimized the outcome by voting for Gore and at least getting their second choice.
It's a shame they don't teach math better in schools. Or civics.
And what about the abuses that were documented, such as analysis using the PRISM system to read their wife's emails because they suspected an affair, analysts passing around recordings of sexual phone calls, etc.? Did they not happen? Or were they not abuses?
What scares me about these programs is that the eliminate the requirement to negotiate between independent parties who serve as a check on each other. For example, if the police want someone's email, they have to get a warrant and go to the ISP and ask for the email, and they only get what the ISP agrees is reasonable. And since the ISP's incentive is to protect their customers, they push back on unreasonable/illegal warrants. And if they can't across, it goes to court where a judge (and perhaps jury) can decide based on the law. And the law, and the entire process, is public so abuses can be identified and called out.
Instead the government has access to everything automatically, bypassing the ISP, the need for a warrant, the law, courts, etc.
Yes, there's a secret court making secret rulings, and creating secret laws, with no congressional or public oversight, and with companies affected by the secret laws forbidden to discuss it. That's no basis for legitimate law, that's creepy un-American lunacy, and it's an embarrassment that it was ever proposed, much less agreed to by Congress (admittedly in the 9/11 panic).
If there's a "silver lining" to all of this, it's that the universal revulsion at the government's betrayal of our trust might possibly lead to politicians being forced to do something about it. Or we might get lucky and find a judge who's read the Constitution and cares about it more than avoiding offending powerful scared men.
Perhaps it's time for mail clients to make a comeback.
With end-to-end encryption, such as PGP, GPG or S/MIME, users control their own security and don't have to trust anyone in between, so all the ISPs could know (and leak to whoever wants to spy on their users) is the email addresses in the routing, not the email contents. These problems were all solved many years ago. Sure, mail clients aren't as convenient as webmail, but if there's a concerted attack by our ISPs on our private communications, the least we can do is fight back.
There are secure mail clients for pretty much every OS. So no easy browser access, but that's the cost of controlling your own communications.
You don't understand what Lytro did. It's not about depth of field, it's about capturing the light rays (i.e. in different directions) rather than one set of pixels. One of the things you can do with that is alter depth of field, but you can also alter focus, so you're focusing nearer or further, or shifting perspective to look behind things. But since the Lytro is capturing light across a large sensor, not from two points, you can shift up/down/left/right and by variable amounts, not just flip between left and right eye view. So you can argue that you'd rather have the resolution without the refocusing, depth of field, perspective shift, etc., made possible by having the lightfield. But you should at least understand what you're saying you don't want.