Most of the people (CS researchers, students, scientists, etc.) who used to use UNIX have pretty much moved to Linux. So whether OS X is technically UNIX or not really doesn't matter much.
But "responsible people" were already subsidizing those who aren't. It was just done indirectly and very inefficiently,
That was a justification given for ACA, but the numbers never made much sense to me. Most of the uninsured were healthy anyway. And most of the people who were irresponsible but covered still are covered the same way they were before: through Medicare and Medicaid. ACA's effect in this regard is virtually nil.
I see what you're saying, and I agree that the ACA is not an ideal solution. It was only adopted because it was almost entirely Republican-drafted and Democrats assumed that would mean they would get at least some support.
Well, and when that assumption turned out to be wrong, they could have simply dropped the entire matter.
The whole concept of "health insurance" is a bit wonky, because you can be dropped from your coverage whenever by an insurance provider.
That is a result of the employer provisions in existing law, plus the absence of regulations to prevent insurance companies to do just that. Those are the two legal issues reform really needed to address, and it failed to address both.
Obviously, there is the catastrophic accident scenario, but that's relatively rare in our hyper-safety society, so the bulk of health issues are chronic and/or terminal.
And neither of those are usually costly. Chronic conditions generally have good and cheap treatments, and terminal conditions only need cheap palliative care. Statins alone, for example, rake in $35b for drug companies and are unnecessary and probably harmful.
I don't think any changes to the healthcare or health insurance system will fix things like obesity or smoking, frankly, because most humans are inherently REALLY bad at planning.
Constant fear and losing money are the two most powerful motivators we have, and they are sufficient for many people to counter smoking and obesity. Unfortunately, both are exactly the motivators that ACA and single payer are supposed to eliminate.
It's easy to create "vast amounts of work" and get people jobs. If the work isn't productive, it doesn't help anybody. And switching to different energy sources is not, in itself, productive work.
Do those people also "live with the consequences" and die, destitute? seems a curious claim. Or are you contending that most unexpected hospitalizations are due to lifestyle choices?
I'm saying neither, actually.
First, I'm saying that the cost and success of treatment is related to the causes. If someone gets diabetes because they can't manage their weight or diet, their treatment will be very expensive and largely ineffective. People who live healthy and get diabetes randomly are very cheap to treat (I have friends like that). It's similar for many other diseases.
Second, loss of insurance and pre-existing conditions are a result of tying health insurance to jobs and letting insurance companies weasel out of their obligations when people get sick. There simply has been no way even for financially responsible people to get a health insurance contract in the US that would actually protect them long term under existing law (I've tried). That's what should have been addressed.
ACA doesn't fix these problems. Instead, it forces people who use medical care and insurance responsibly to subsidize those who don't. Furthermore, it makes it hard for insurance companies to signal the cost of poor choices to people through their rates. That does ensure universal coverage, but those are exactly the things you don't want to do if you want to control costs and improve public health. Americans will get poorer, sicker, and fatter as a result of ACA.
No, because you write unscientific bullshit like this:
Dipshit, what you deniers don't understand is that we humans (and our crops, and our livestock animals) have evolved to survive in a certain climate range, and that we're not going to evolve quickly enough to survive what we're doing to the planet
And unscientific bullshit like this:
Weather is an inherently chaotic system, and adding more energy (c.f. global warming) increases the chaos, i.e. makes for more unexpected/extreme weather.
Now:
lack of social understanding & empathy with other people, especially with that simian chest-thumping about how mighty you lot are.
I understand you perfectly well: well-off, spoiled brats like you have been whining about progressive causes forever. And you're right: I don't have "empathy" for you: you ought to know better.
I do have empathy for the people you want to hurt: developing nations, the poor, etc. Your attitude towards them is "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"
Yes, but you understood that it was clearly *meant* as a joke (as we all did)
Which is why I responded with sarcasm.
There was nothing in his comment to suggest he was "uneducated".
There is plenty in his other comments to indicate that he knows little about science.
and he hit a nerve with that comment.
He didn't "hit a nerve". But that doesn't mean one should let his kind of bogus and stupid comment just pass. People need to understand that libertarians are here, we are a sizable force, and you better deal with us by making smart comments, instead of the bullshit that people like Nimey and you post.
It's mostly been a problem with older versions of Word, when various parts of the format and its meaning were changing fairly frequently. Word has pretty much stagnated for a number of years now, so it isn't as much of a problem with changes between recent "versions" (which are largely cosmetic anyway).
Most of us understand that the was making fun of libertarianism (whether or not we agreed with the underlying point being made). This is generally known as a "joke".
Most of us also understand sarcasm, which is what I was using. And they understand that a "joke" needs to be humorous, which that lame and repetitive dig at libertarianism wasn't. And Nimey in particular is nothing more than an uneducated lout.
You might go for that, I am not intersted in having some company play parent for me.
With a free market in health care, you don't have to, since you can choose what health plan you want. Of course, the less information you reveal, the more expensive your plan gets.
With Obamacare or single payer, you and everybody else will have the government play parent for us; there won't be a choice.
The fact is, if your business is in an industry where you have to share or read documents that other people send to you (such as anything in contracting, law, real estate, medical, etc), then you kind of have to stick with Microsoft Office
Fact is, even Microsoft Office can't reliably read its own files due to version differences and other problems.
Best thing you can do is just upload the stuff to the cloud and have everybody fix compatibility problems there once. That way, you don't have to deal with any of that.
I'm a former member of the cult, kiddo, spent my late teens and early-mid 20s in that headspace.
Just like any other political philosophy, libertarianism attracts its share of morons and scientifically illiterate people. Thank goodness you moved on to something else. Your statements about climate show that you have about the level of understanding of science of a fundamentalist Christian young earth creationist.
Weather is an inherently chaotic system, and adding more energy (c.f. global warming) increases the chaos, i.e. makes for more unexpected/extreme weather.
That statement was completely and utterly false. It shows that you know nothing about the climate.
PS: humans haven't been around for 7 million years. We and our immediate ancestors have been around for about 500,000 years.
That's totally irrelevant. I was simply drawing your attention to the fact that the climate was much warmer, and more stable, more than 7 million years ago, countering your idiotic claim that warmer temperatures make the weather chaotic or unstable. If anything, the opposite is true.
Now, you add more b.s. to your statements:
Dipshit, what you deniers don't understand is that we humans (and our crops, and our livestock animals) have evolved to survive in a certain climate range,
Our crops and livestock animals haven't "evolved" into crops and livestock at all, they have been selected and bred. And humans can survive in just about any climate on earth, from completely frozen to dry desert to high mountains.
and that we're not going to evolve quickly enough to survive what we're doing to the planet - temps are changing faster than they ever have since humans have been here.
That too is b.s. Over the last 20000 years, temperatures, sea levels, and climate have changed dramatically, both over extended regions of the planet and global average temperatures, and people have obviously thrived.
Pay attention to the thread: I was using that as proof that Obamacare WAS a compromise, not a bill that was rammed through without discussion like you were saying.
Just because liberals staked out an extreme and unworkable position doesn't mean that Obamacare is a "compromise". The "compromise" I was referring to wasn't even between different health care positions, it could have involved lots of other issues.
Again, you're ignoring context. I was pointing out that there was never going to be any bipartisan support.
And as I was saying: if Obama couldn't pass health care reform with bipartisan support, he should have passed nothing at all. There was no urgency to pass health care reform, and there certainly wasn't any urgency to pass the turd that Obama actually passed.
It failed (like many government programs) because nobody really cares or even has to care. Sure, the government employees want to do a good job, but their livelihood doesn't depend on it. The government contractors themselves don't care either, because they'll still keep getting new contracts that they can screw up the same way as the old ones. And even if they were prevented from bidding again, they'd just change their name and go again.
Weather is an inherently chaotic system, and adding more energy (c.f. global warming) increases the chaos, i.e. makes for more unexpected/extreme weather.
If you actually bothered to just even look at historical climate records, you'd realize that your statement is total bullshit:
Even if it were true, it would make no difference, because it is hard to image climate that's less hospitable and stable than the climate that has existed during the past 7 million years, with regular glaciation cycles covering much of the northern hemisphere.
1) By omission. Did you read? They call it "climate change" and omit any reference to how it's caused by pollution. That's part of WSJ's staying on the conservative message
Fact is that climate change has multiple sources, both man-made and natural. WSJ is correct, and you are attempting to "spin" things.
It's implicitly positive that we can grow corn further north now, i.e. over a larger area. Article omits how this implies we won't be able to grow it anymore in southerly regions.
No, it's not "implicitly positive", it's just a statement of fact. What bothers you is that this can, in fact, be rationally perceived as positive. Again, your spin and your biases.
Strawman, nobody's saying that scientists should be able to make policy decisions. We are saying that common fuckwits should pay attention to them despite how the fixes are going to be expensive and inconvenient, because ignoring them will be more expensive and even more inconvenient.
Except, of course, that scientists are not in a position to make that determination, economists are. And to most economists, your reasoning is bogus because future costs are strongly discounted when translated into the present, to the point that they basically don't matter.
It appears as though you have learned to live with a very dim view of humanity's ability to innovate.
Quite the contrary: I think humanity will have no problem coping with warmer temperatures and rising sea levels. I also think humanity will have no problem developing new, clean energy sources.
I will never understand why there is a small but vocal cadre of tech nerds who for some reason believe that we have reached the absolute zenith of technological innovation when it comes to energy
Quite to the contrary: I think there will be tons of innovation in clean energy. And to get that, government should get out of the way and let companies develop those technologies, instead of attempting to solve the problem top-down and interfering with innovation.
Maybe you shouldn't speak for anyone but yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the people (CS researchers, students, scientists, etc.) who used to use UNIX have pretty much moved to Linux. So whether OS X is technically UNIX or not really doesn't matter much.
That was a justification given for ACA, but the numbers never made much sense to me. Most of the uninsured were healthy anyway. And most of the people who were irresponsible but covered still are covered the same way they were before: through Medicare and Medicaid. ACA's effect in this regard is virtually nil.
Well, and when that assumption turned out to be wrong, they could have simply dropped the entire matter.
That is a result of the employer provisions in existing law, plus the absence of regulations to prevent insurance companies to do just that. Those are the two legal issues reform really needed to address, and it failed to address both.
And neither of those are usually costly. Chronic conditions generally have good and cheap treatments, and terminal conditions only need cheap palliative care. Statins alone, for example, rake in $35b for drug companies and are unnecessary and probably harmful.
Constant fear and losing money are the two most powerful motivators we have, and they are sufficient for many people to counter smoking and obesity. Unfortunately, both are exactly the motivators that ACA and single payer are supposed to eliminate.
It's easy to create "vast amounts of work" and get people jobs. If the work isn't productive, it doesn't help anybody. And switching to different energy sources is not, in itself, productive work.
Your statements are objectively wrong, regardless of what position one takes on climate change (and my position is that it is man-made and real).
You simply have demonstrated that you are scientifically illiterate.
Just because you used to adopt libertarianism as part of some immature teenage rebellion doesn't mean everybody does.
I'm saying neither, actually.
First, I'm saying that the cost and success of treatment is related to the causes. If someone gets diabetes because they can't manage their weight or diet, their treatment will be very expensive and largely ineffective. People who live healthy and get diabetes randomly are very cheap to treat (I have friends like that). It's similar for many other diseases.
Second, loss of insurance and pre-existing conditions are a result of tying health insurance to jobs and letting insurance companies weasel out of their obligations when people get sick. There simply has been no way even for financially responsible people to get a health insurance contract in the US that would actually protect them long term under existing law (I've tried). That's what should have been addressed.
ACA doesn't fix these problems. Instead, it forces people who use medical care and insurance responsibly to subsidize those who don't. Furthermore, it makes it hard for insurance companies to signal the cost of poor choices to people through their rates. That does ensure universal coverage, but those are exactly the things you don't want to do if you want to control costs and improve public health. Americans will get poorer, sicker, and fatter as a result of ACA.
No, because you write unscientific bullshit like this:
And unscientific bullshit like this:
Now:
I understand you perfectly well: well-off, spoiled brats like you have been whining about progressive causes forever. And you're right: I don't have "empathy" for you: you ought to know better.
I do have empathy for the people you want to hurt: developing nations, the poor, etc. Your attitude towards them is "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"
Which is why I responded with sarcasm.
There is plenty in his other comments to indicate that he knows little about science.
He didn't "hit a nerve". But that doesn't mean one should let his kind of bogus and stupid comment just pass. People need to understand that libertarians are here, we are a sizable force, and you better deal with us by making smart comments, instead of the bullshit that people like Nimey and you post.
It's mostly been a problem with older versions of Word, when various parts of the format and its meaning were changing fairly frequently. Word has pretty much stagnated for a number of years now, so it isn't as much of a problem with changes between recent "versions" (which are largely cosmetic anyway).
Most of us also understand sarcasm, which is what I was using. And they understand that a "joke" needs to be humorous, which that lame and repetitive dig at libertarianism wasn't. And Nimey in particular is nothing more than an uneducated lout.
With a free market in health care, you don't have to, since you can choose what health plan you want. Of course, the less information you reveal, the more expensive your plan gets.
With Obamacare or single payer, you and everybody else will have the government play parent for us; there won't be a choice.
Fact is, even Microsoft Office can't reliably read its own files due to version differences and other problems.
Best thing you can do is just upload the stuff to the cloud and have everybody fix compatibility problems there once. That way, you don't have to deal with any of that.
That's a huge amount of work to set up and administer compared with cloud office suites.
How do you "remove metro"? It keeps rearing its ugly head, and some functionality seems to have migrated to it.
IE11 may not render Google products well because it has been optimized for the new health care exchange sites!
Just like any other political philosophy, libertarianism attracts its share of morons and scientifically illiterate people. Thank goodness you moved on to something else. Your statements about climate show that you have about the level of understanding of science of a fundamentalist Christian young earth creationist.
You made the statement:
That statement was completely and utterly false. It shows that you know nothing about the climate.
That's totally irrelevant. I was simply drawing your attention to the fact that the climate was much warmer, and more stable, more than 7 million years ago, countering your idiotic claim that warmer temperatures make the weather chaotic or unstable. If anything, the opposite is true.
Now, you add more b.s. to your statements:
Our crops and livestock animals haven't "evolved" into crops and livestock at all, they have been selected and bred. And humans can survive in just about any climate on earth, from completely frozen to dry desert to high mountains.
That too is b.s. Over the last 20000 years, temperatures, sea levels, and climate have changed dramatically, both over extended regions of the planet and global average temperatures, and people have obviously thrived.
Your statement just proves your utter lack of understanding of libertarianism or morality.
Just because liberals staked out an extreme and unworkable position doesn't mean that Obamacare is a "compromise". The "compromise" I was referring to wasn't even between different health care positions, it could have involved lots of other issues.
And as I was saying: if Obama couldn't pass health care reform with bipartisan support, he should have passed nothing at all. There was no urgency to pass health care reform, and there certainly wasn't any urgency to pass the turd that Obama actually passed.
Unfortunately, there's almost no evidence for that.
It failed (like many government programs) because nobody really cares or even has to care. Sure, the government employees want to do a good job, but their livelihood doesn't depend on it. The government contractors themselves don't care either, because they'll still keep getting new contracts that they can screw up the same way as the old ones. And even if they were prevented from bidding again, they'd just change their name and go again.
If you actually bothered to just even look at historical climate records, you'd realize that your statement is total bullshit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png
Even if it were true, it would make no difference, because it is hard to image climate that's less hospitable and stable than the climate that has existed during the past 7 million years, with regular glaciation cycles covering much of the northern hemisphere.
I'm sorry you're so uneducated that you think libertarianism is a religion.
Of course, Keen is actually not debunking economics, he is debunking a left wing caricature of economics.
Fact is that climate change has multiple sources, both man-made and natural. WSJ is correct, and you are attempting to "spin" things.
No, it's not "implicitly positive", it's just a statement of fact. What bothers you is that this can, in fact, be rationally perceived as positive. Again, your spin and your biases.
Except, of course, that scientists are not in a position to make that determination, economists are. And to most economists, your reasoning is bogus because future costs are strongly discounted when translated into the present, to the point that they basically don't matter.
Quite the contrary: I think humanity will have no problem coping with warmer temperatures and rising sea levels. I also think humanity will have no problem developing new, clean energy sources.
Quite to the contrary: I think there will be tons of innovation in clean energy. And to get that, government should get out of the way and let companies develop those technologies, instead of attempting to solve the problem top-down and interfering with innovation.
Maybe you should take your own advice.