You failed basic economics? Of course, insurance companies aren't interested in lowering your bills, but they are interested in competing for your business. So, the companies that spend "five billion in adds [sic]" that they can save you 15% are the companies that don't have your business and want it, and they are getting it by telling you that you can get a better price from them. It's called a market economy, and it does lower your insurance rates, not because the companies "are interested in it", but because competition forces them to. See, the beauty of market economies is that they force companies to do things that they don't want to do, and they do this much more effectively than any regulation or other scheme could.
Another 64% said computers were not capable of the same quality of decision-making as human drivers
That's probably true when the person is rested and alert. But computers win because they make decisions consistently over time, don't get drunk, don't get tired, don't get angry, don't eat, don't get sick and don't break up with their girlfriends, all factors that hurt human decision making, and that are probably involved in causing most accidents.
Yes, defense should only be in the national interest as well, which means that a lot of the US troops overseas should be withdrawn. But the misuse of the US military is a bipartisan problem. In fact, everything the federal government does should be in the national interest; if there is no clear and compelling reason for the federal government to do it, with objective, rational, and measurable outcomes to support it, the federal government should not do it. And if the outcomes aren't achieved, the programs should be eliminated; most federal programs do not achieve their outcomes.
Actually, having spent many years in Europe on and off, I can tell you from first hand experience that the kind of bigotry, arrogance, and ignorance "somersault" exhibits is indeed common and widespread in Europe.
Actually, my comment was about proper federal powers. I know such subtleties of US political discussions are lost on anti-American nationalists like you.
The weird thing is that even those getting fucked over by the US government are sometimes still so proud and patriotic, and so against anything that may be perceived as being too "communist".
It's quite amusing that you exhibit far more of the faults that you accuse Americans of having.
I'm very happy to live in Europe.
And I hope you and people like you stay there. I really do.
The system is fine for what it was intended for: electing a weak federal government primarily concerned with defense and interstate commerce. The system is "a broken mess" for the kind of all-encompassing nanny state progressives want to create; but there is no political system that ever works for that purpose.
The whole point is: you can't "fix the system", you need to stop trying to achieve the impossible instead and limit the harm that "the system" can cause.
BlueStrat didn't put up a "straw man" and didn't support the other "side". He correctly pointed out that the political left is hypocritical and ineffective in achieving the goals it purports to achieve. You're putting up the straw man by responding as if any criticism of the left automatically implies support for their political opponents.
I don't want to change the size of government. I want the people to take back control of government.
The term "take back" erroneously implies that the people ever had control of government. We never did. The US government used to suck much more than it does today. What's different is that it was much smaller and hence it didn't matter much how much it sucked. That's why fiscal conservatives advocate returning to that state of affairs.
One can debate whether small government is a good thing. But in that debate, let's be clear about the positions: small government is a known quantity and represents something that we used to have, with all its known pluses and minuses. It's your vision of "big government controlled by the people" that is the religious pie-in-the-sky idea that has never worked well anywhere on earth.
Peaceful protest is all well and good - but as long as people continue to work, and the government knows there will be no violent uprising, why would they care?
They care because we have something called the "ballot box" and "elections". And peaceful protest is all our laws guarantee you can engage in.
If you want to counteract automation, you're welcome to buy hand-tailored clothes, custom-made furniture, employ a personal cook, and buy a custom-made car. You can even have books custom-rebound in expensive leather covers. Those are the kinds of things people used to do in order to create employment.
Unless you're filthy rich, of course, you'll find that many things that we now take for granted will become luxuries to you that you can only afford after years of saving, but, hey, you will help reduce "personnel reduction consequences".
Anybody who expects peer review to let through only correct papers doesn't understand peer review. Science editors, of all people, should understand that, given the many bogus and fraudulent papers they have published over the years.
You might as well claim that states allow the reading of chicken entrails as evidence in court under Daubert, which would, of course, be utter nonsense. Daubert just says that it is up to the judge to determine whether evidence is admissible. In fact, that's not even what Daubert actually decided; Congress adopted the Federal Rules of Evidence which gave judges this power, and Daubert just ruled that they superseded the stricter prior Frye standard, so the court didn't even rule whether this was a good idea, but simply whether Congressional rules override common law.
Polygraph tests, of course, should be inadmissible in court and should be forbidden as part of police work. This is the job of Obama and Congress. Obama should have pushed regulations against their use in any part of the federal government, and Congress should outlaw them. The fact that Obama instead chooses to persecute people tells you where he actually stands on the issue of scientific evidence.
Things you shouldn't learn about in 2013 because they may mark you as a potential terrorist or criminal: metal working (gun making), electronics (bomb making), chemistry (bomb making, drugs), surveillance and forensics (espionage and evasion), networking (cyber terrorism), number theory and cryptography (espionage and evasion), data mining (espionage and economic crime), image processing (espionage), mechanical and civil engineering (sabotage and terrorism), molecular biology and microbiology (bioterrorism), and probably others.
You can't do science and engineering without learning how to potentially do bad things. We have three choices: (1) we accept the fact that technology has risks and live with the occasional loss, (2) we start living in a technologically advanced totalitarian society in which technology can only be used with the blessing of government, or (3) we revert to a less technologically advanced society. But we can't have both liberty and total safety; they are incompatible. Of those, I find (2) by far the worst choice, but it's what we're headed for right now
What's particularly disconcerting is that the so-called "liberal" in the White House with credentials of Constitutional scholarship has been advancing this agenda even faster than his "conservative" predecessor, all the while bemoaning the lack of interest in STEM education and making noises about "fixing" education.
So did European spy agencies, European war mongers, and European assassins, but Europeans are completely blind to that when they do it.
The NSA effort is particularly large scale, and is part of its international collaborative efforts with other nation's monitoring agencies.
And that's why Europeans are justified at venting their anger at the US instead of their own "monitoring agencies", who aid, support, and cooperate with the US? Yup, makes PERFECT sense.
The stuff you mention still doesn't add up to much. Obama may have gotten a $Trillion in stimulus. If you add in Bush's TARP program it's possibly up to $2 Trillion. But most of TARP got repaid, so it'll only cost $24 Billion. Over 9 years of budgets even the higher number's chump change.
Given that things are spiraling more and more out of control, everything is "chump change" in hindsight. But it wasn't chump change at the time.
But far worse than the monetary cost is the opportunity cost and the corruption that these programs engender: instead of requiring people (wall street bankers or home buyers) to live with the consequences of their dumb choices, they get bailed out with other people's money. Why should anybody pay any attention to anything they do anymore, why should they worry about risks they take, if they just get bailed out with other people's money anyway?
I'd put everyone in Medicare, increase the "maximum taxable earnings" in Social Security, reform the Higher Ed. system so that people can actually afford to pick the wrong school when they're 18, and seriously consider a new social program. It would give everyone $500 a month in income. It would be paid for mostly by new and increased taxes, but partly by reducing programs no longer needed (ie: Medicaid and ObamaCare are not necessary with universal Medicare, and Food Stamps don't make much sense when you're giving everyone $6k a year anyway).
So, what you want to do is tax people and then take that money to give it away to private medical providers, private educational providers, and other private corporations. Of course, those corporations you give the money to will lobby politicians heavily for getting a bigger and bigger chunk of taxes, and politicians won't be able to refuse them. In effect, you want what we already have, you just want to make it even worse by forcing people to transfer even more money to private corporations through taxes. You're the perfect little crony capitalist masquerading as a progressive.
If you want a progressive scheme that's actually sustainable, you can't take taxes and then redistribute them to private corporations as part of a pretend-market, you need to nationalize most services and regulate the rest heavily. That means nationalized health care providers under salaries, payments, and services determined by the government, the way it works in the UK. It means nationalized, public higher educational institutions, like in most of Europe. It means nationalized or strictly regulated pension plans guaranteed by the government with none of the tax breaks or support for individual retirement planning, again like in much of Europe. And when money gets tight (as it will when the baby boomers retire), services and payments must get automatically cut for everybody to keep everything in balance, like Europeans do; no more automatic adjustments for inflation or steadily growing retirement benefits.
Of course, you should be prepared for a massive cut in US economic growth rates and innovation as a result as well, bringing the US down to anemic European levels.
If you don't control the software itself, you can't be sure that there aren't backdoors. Even if there aren't backdoors when you start, they can always get introduced later.
If you're really concerned about this, put a server somewhere and use encrypted rsync or something similar. Even then, be aware that backdoors can still be pushed onto your machine with a software update.
oh and to clarify its illegal to snoop on your users even if you own the network.
Yes, but it is legal for many kinds of government agencies to snoop on your network in many European countries, without disclosure and without legal oversight. And that's a far bigger problem.
Explain to me the logic here, because to me it looks like the Europeans are shooting themselves in the foot while screaming "Look what you made me do! Now you'd better stop or I'm gonna do it again!"
"The Europeans" isn't actually a single group of people with a single agenda. Like "the Americans", it's composed of many different groups. One group, namely European politicians, gets a lot of coverage, and they find it advantageous to inflame anti-American sentiment to (1) get more attention and (2) push through legislation that otherwise wouldn't have much chance to be pushed through.
That's not a valid argument for this. The main problem is the complexity of getting all the insurance companies coordinated. Kneecap those bozos and the problem becomes much easier.
If you "kneecap" them, they are simply going to leave the market entirely. Remember that ACA still has a pretense of a free market.
Yes, yes, I know the argument. Government Death Panels. In the insurance industry, they are called Actuaries. See what a change in name can do even if they do the same job?
They don't do the same job at all. There is one "government death panel", I don't get to choose it, I have no influence over it, and it makes politically motivated decisions. There are many insurance companies with many actuaries and the actuaries make financially motivated decisions. In a free market, I can influence their decisions with money (by picking different coverage) and by choosing different companies.
And I'm not actually concerned with "government death panels" killing me, I'm concerned with "death panels" wasting large amounts of money for politically popular, or heavily lobbied for, but utterly useless, drugs and procedures, and then making me pay for it.
You mean like Medicare (single-payer) or the VA (government-run?) Both have high satisfaction ratings.
Of course they do: they take large amounts of money from one group of people and hand it to other people. It doesn't matter how inefficiently they do it, the recipients still gain. They are "satisfactory" in the same way Christmas presents are always "satisfactory".
But for a lot of work the cheapest bidder is mandated by law.
Yes, because otherwise we'd simply be wasting even more money for the same poor quality. Either the government needs to develop things like healthcare.gov in-house, with government employees, or it needs to leave it entirely to the market. Outsourcing such things doesn't work; it just amounts to massive corruption followed by massive blame shifting.
Obama's real failure vis-a-vis Wall Street and corporate America was the massive bailouts and stimulus he supported, and all the other crony capitalist gifts he has given them. These regulators couldn't successfully oversee an elementary school class, let alone "Wall Street banks", no matter how much money you stuff into their greedy, incompetent hands. This blame game over regulatory agency funding is a fig leaf for Obama's own massive failures.
Slashdot Mirror
You failed basic economics? Of course, insurance companies aren't interested in lowering your bills, but they are interested in competing for your business. So, the companies that spend "five billion in adds [sic]" that they can save you 15% are the companies that don't have your business and want it, and they are getting it by telling you that you can get a better price from them. It's called a market economy, and it does lower your insurance rates, not because the companies "are interested in it", but because competition forces them to. See, the beauty of market economies is that they force companies to do things that they don't want to do, and they do this much more effectively than any regulation or other scheme could.
That's probably true when the person is rested and alert. But computers win because they make decisions consistently over time, don't get drunk, don't get tired, don't get angry, don't eat, don't get sick and don't break up with their girlfriends, all factors that hurt human decision making, and that are probably involved in causing most accidents.
Yes, defense should only be in the national interest as well, which means that a lot of the US troops overseas should be withdrawn. But the misuse of the US military is a bipartisan problem. In fact, everything the federal government does should be in the national interest; if there is no clear and compelling reason for the federal government to do it, with objective, rational, and measurable outcomes to support it, the federal government should not do it. And if the outcomes aren't achieved, the programs should be eliminated; most federal programs do not achieve their outcomes.
Actually, having spent many years in Europe on and off, I can tell you from first hand experience that the kind of bigotry, arrogance, and ignorance "somersault" exhibits is indeed common and widespread in Europe.
Actually, my comment was about proper federal powers. I know such subtleties of US political discussions are lost on anti-American nationalists like you.
It's quite amusing that you exhibit far more of the faults that you accuse Americans of having.
And I hope you and people like you stay there. I really do.
The system is fine for what it was intended for: electing a weak federal government primarily concerned with defense and interstate commerce. The system is "a broken mess" for the kind of all-encompassing nanny state progressives want to create; but there is no political system that ever works for that purpose.
The whole point is: you can't "fix the system", you need to stop trying to achieve the impossible instead and limit the harm that "the system" can cause.
BlueStrat didn't put up a "straw man" and didn't support the other "side". He correctly pointed out that the political left is hypocritical and ineffective in achieving the goals it purports to achieve. You're putting up the straw man by responding as if any criticism of the left automatically implies support for their political opponents.
The term "take back" erroneously implies that the people ever had control of government. We never did. The US government used to suck much more than it does today. What's different is that it was much smaller and hence it didn't matter much how much it sucked. That's why fiscal conservatives advocate returning to that state of affairs.
One can debate whether small government is a good thing. But in that debate, let's be clear about the positions: small government is a known quantity and represents something that we used to have, with all its known pluses and minuses. It's your vision of "big government controlled by the people" that is the religious pie-in-the-sky idea that has never worked well anywhere on earth.
That's not a "strawman"; he's right.
They care because we have something called the "ballot box" and "elections". And peaceful protest is all our laws guarantee you can engage in.
Rousseff doesn't give a f*ck about whether the NSA spies on Americans and that's not what she was complaining about.
Rousseff was complaining about American surveillance of Brazilian diplomatic staff, and that makes her a hypocrite.
If you want to counteract automation, you're welcome to buy hand-tailored clothes, custom-made furniture, employ a personal cook, and buy a custom-made car. You can even have books custom-rebound in expensive leather covers. Those are the kinds of things people used to do in order to create employment.
Unless you're filthy rich, of course, you'll find that many things that we now take for granted will become luxuries to you that you can only afford after years of saving, but, hey, you will help reduce "personnel reduction consequences".
Anybody who expects peer review to let through only correct papers doesn't understand peer review. Science editors, of all people, should understand that, given the many bogus and fraudulent papers they have published over the years.
In different words, there's nothing to fix here.
You might as well claim that states allow the reading of chicken entrails as evidence in court under Daubert, which would, of course, be utter nonsense. Daubert just says that it is up to the judge to determine whether evidence is admissible. In fact, that's not even what Daubert actually decided; Congress adopted the Federal Rules of Evidence which gave judges this power, and Daubert just ruled that they superseded the stricter prior Frye standard, so the court didn't even rule whether this was a good idea, but simply whether Congressional rules override common law.
Polygraph tests, of course, should be inadmissible in court and should be forbidden as part of police work. This is the job of Obama and Congress. Obama should have pushed regulations against their use in any part of the federal government, and Congress should outlaw them. The fact that Obama instead chooses to persecute people tells you where he actually stands on the issue of scientific evidence.
Things you shouldn't learn about in 2013 because they may mark you as a potential terrorist or criminal: metal working (gun making), electronics (bomb making), chemistry (bomb making, drugs), surveillance and forensics (espionage and evasion), networking (cyber terrorism), number theory and cryptography (espionage and evasion), data mining (espionage and economic crime), image processing (espionage), mechanical and civil engineering (sabotage and terrorism), molecular biology and microbiology (bioterrorism), and probably others.
You can't do science and engineering without learning how to potentially do bad things. We have three choices: (1) we accept the fact that technology has risks and live with the occasional loss, (2) we start living in a technologically advanced totalitarian society in which technology can only be used with the blessing of government, or (3) we revert to a less technologically advanced society. But we can't have both liberty and total safety; they are incompatible. Of those, I find (2) by far the worst choice, but it's what we're headed for right now
What's particularly disconcerting is that the so-called "liberal" in the White House with credentials of Constitutional scholarship has been advancing this agenda even faster than his "conservative" predecessor, all the while bemoaning the lack of interest in STEM education and making noises about "fixing" education.
So did European spy agencies, European war mongers, and European assassins, but Europeans are completely blind to that when they do it.
And that's why Europeans are justified at venting their anger at the US instead of their own "monitoring agencies", who aid, support, and cooperate with the US? Yup, makes PERFECT sense.
Given that things are spiraling more and more out of control, everything is "chump change" in hindsight. But it wasn't chump change at the time.
But far worse than the monetary cost is the opportunity cost and the corruption that these programs engender: instead of requiring people (wall street bankers or home buyers) to live with the consequences of their dumb choices, they get bailed out with other people's money. Why should anybody pay any attention to anything they do anymore, why should they worry about risks they take, if they just get bailed out with other people's money anyway?
So, what you want to do is tax people and then take that money to give it away to private medical providers, private educational providers, and other private corporations. Of course, those corporations you give the money to will lobby politicians heavily for getting a bigger and bigger chunk of taxes, and politicians won't be able to refuse them. In effect, you want what we already have, you just want to make it even worse by forcing people to transfer even more money to private corporations through taxes. You're the perfect little crony capitalist masquerading as a progressive.
If you want a progressive scheme that's actually sustainable, you can't take taxes and then redistribute them to private corporations as part of a pretend-market, you need to nationalize most services and regulate the rest heavily. That means nationalized health care providers under salaries, payments, and services determined by the government, the way it works in the UK. It means nationalized, public higher educational institutions, like in most of Europe. It means nationalized or strictly regulated pension plans guaranteed by the government with none of the tax breaks or support for individual retirement planning, again like in much of Europe. And when money gets tight (as it will when the baby boomers retire), services and payments must get automatically cut for everybody to keep everything in balance, like Europeans do; no more automatic adjustments for inflation or steadily growing retirement benefits.
Of course, you should be prepared for a massive cut in US economic growth rates and innovation as a result as well, bringing the US down to anemic European levels.
If you don't control the software itself, you can't be sure that there aren't backdoors. Even if there aren't backdoors when you start, they can always get introduced later.
If you're really concerned about this, put a server somewhere and use encrypted rsync or something similar. Even then, be aware that backdoors can still be pushed onto your machine with a software update.
And how is what the US agencies are doing different from what European governments have been doing routinely?
Yes, but it is legal for many kinds of government agencies to snoop on your network in many European countries, without disclosure and without legal oversight. And that's a far bigger problem.
"The Europeans" isn't actually a single group of people with a single agenda. Like "the Americans", it's composed of many different groups. One group, namely European politicians, gets a lot of coverage, and they find it advantageous to inflame anti-American sentiment to (1) get more attention and (2) push through legislation that otherwise wouldn't have much chance to be pushed through.
If you "kneecap" them, they are simply going to leave the market entirely. Remember that ACA still has a pretense of a free market.
They don't do the same job at all. There is one "government death panel", I don't get to choose it, I have no influence over it, and it makes politically motivated decisions. There are many insurance companies with many actuaries and the actuaries make financially motivated decisions. In a free market, I can influence their decisions with money (by picking different coverage) and by choosing different companies.
And I'm not actually concerned with "government death panels" killing me, I'm concerned with "death panels" wasting large amounts of money for politically popular, or heavily lobbied for, but utterly useless, drugs and procedures, and then making me pay for it.
Of course they do: they take large amounts of money from one group of people and hand it to other people. It doesn't matter how inefficiently they do it, the recipients still gain. They are "satisfactory" in the same way Christmas presents are always "satisfactory".
Yes, because otherwise we'd simply be wasting even more money for the same poor quality. Either the government needs to develop things like healthcare.gov in-house, with government employees, or it needs to leave it entirely to the market. Outsourcing such things doesn't work; it just amounts to massive corruption followed by massive blame shifting.
Obama's real failure vis-a-vis Wall Street and corporate America was the massive bailouts and stimulus he supported, and all the other crony capitalist gifts he has given them. These regulators couldn't successfully oversee an elementary school class, let alone "Wall Street banks", no matter how much money you stuff into their greedy, incompetent hands. This blame game over regulatory agency funding is a fig leaf for Obama's own massive failures.