There are areas where government is somewhat better than private business. For example, defense. Or enforcement of the contracts. Or border control. Nobody is getting into the argument about very basic functions of the government.
Now your CALPERS example is a further evidence of a too generous reimbursement. It is worth mentioning, that BART employees also get social security payments? Using your example: if you work for BART five years, you can get an extra 636 dollars per month in pension (in addition to Social Security). In comparison, many of the private companies no longer accrue and offer defined benefit. As such, BART is generous, very generous, in relative terms.
Rather than lecturing the audience about differences between private and public services, let's take your argument from the other side: are you stating that BART is efficiently and properly run service? Who runs it? How is your comment relevant to the discussion?
Not only they have not put aside some of the money, but they also have chosen to use accounting standards, that are not practical and not transparent when asset management is involved.
Any decent home ownership association, will accrue some money for the roof repairs or other capital expenses starting from the first year of the existence.
Public entities really do not see difference between the concepts of revenue, income and surplus.
BART employees are part of CALPers system. Basically, if you work 5 years and are 50 years old you can retire, now changed to 52 (https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/employers/benefit-programs/retirement-benefits). This is better, than Greece.
Nice achievement, retirement at 52, while the rest of the country on SS are considering whether to raise SS retirement age from 67 years (to those who are born after 1960). Social Security is not even considered as a pension plan. There is some litigation going on, but that is a super deal.
There are stories about $1000 thyristors. Since this is public money, nobody, I mean, nobody has a vested interest to negotiate a price, or look for alternatives. It is the opposite: most of the transportation authorities are covered with a tight knit of supply companies that make a living of it. No surprise, supply companies are private.
There was a story about LIRR (long island Rail Roads), where 95% of the retirees claimed disability (with the 98% approval rate). The story has disappeared from NYTimes for a while. I wonder how many disabilities are claimed by BART?
Waste, Fraud and Abuse: is what characterizes government run entities.
Unless you are living in the cave, you should have noticed never ending AI advertisment from IBM: Hi, my name is Watson!
Reality, is that it does not take Binney to say that having too much information is counterproductive. Thus be assured, that military versions of AI, are continuously are poring and monitoring through the dossier files, currently maintained as relationship databases.
You can be assured that there is an automated never-ending surveilance and the code, the AI, the algorithms will get better over the time.
Human life is so digitized, that pretty much everything can be used to infer necessary conclusions.
Get this: information gathering organizations NEVER delete anything.
As authoritarian and unpolished he is, it seems that his absence of political correctness was more of a business like saying they way it is.
I have heard that he wanted to weaken encryption so that it would be easier to break in to the phones, but that could probably be attributable to the technical ignorance of a 70 year old dude, all used to the old school paper, handshake and a smile business style.
I have never understood simple aspect of this email scandal: why did the secretary did not use her own official email account?
Had she used official email account, then you might play ignorance, saying that those techies did not get it right.Getting your own server in the basement of your home immediately transfers all responsibility to ms Secretary.
I still do not understand, why there is a debate on the issue? 99.9% of us would be disciplined for using personal accounts for work purposes.
Last attempt to externalize the mistake is just another attempt to rationalize. First there were no private emails, then there were no secret emails, then there were no top secret emails, then there were no attempts to destroy the evidence, now HRC is saying that it is somebody's else fault.
I understand HRC need for convenience and technological ignorance, but decisions and consequences need to be owned up.
Hawking opining on a political structure is pretty much the same as talented musician opining on a Standard Model changes. Both are not competent outside their area of expertise.
If you look into the history, the only thing that is constant is the fact that political and economic alliances are formed and later dismantled.
Congressional Medal of Honor is an award that needs to be considered.
Get this: to make the point that she did nothing wrong Miss Clinton would continue to use home server and would state that we have always been doing this and there was never a problem.
In the future, reflecting past and reconsidering their path to success president Bernie, Donald or Cruz, whoever the president at the time, will probably pardon this dude.
Please go and talk to the common people who do not have all of their money in the banks and ask their opinion. It is not the opinion of the bankers that counts, it is how the changes are perceived by the people.
Where I live, in the state of New Jersey, I get 10 cent discount on gas for paying cash. My barber does not accept credit cards and my Saturday sport club did not take cash either. Somehow someway, a lot of gas stations in the US will give you discount if paying cash. Accepting cash allows them to have better control over the costs. Good luck calling small businesses illogical, nonsensical and living in the fantasy world.
If you find one of the small business that meets all the criteria (illogical, nonsensical and fantasy world) than you can go and vote for nutjobs: is that going to be Sanders or Hillary this year?
It is about tighter control of the rest of population, not the criminals.
All those who keep contemplating that it is so easy to carry 500 Euro notes, are also of the opinion that the value embodied in the paper bill represents time and efforts, savings, work and sweat, of the people who worked to get 500 Euros. Yet assholes such as Larry Summers consider all that money to be owned "by society" which is only temporarily in the hands of the "criminally minded" individual.
Two hundred years ago farmers would have chased you out of the village with the pitchforks if you would try to pay with the pieces of paper. For several hundred years there was a statement on every paper note stating that every paper note is exchangeable to gold, no questions asked.
Then there was WW1. Latin Monetary Union, established by Napoleon, has evaporated. Most of the promises pffft... and evaporated, except perhaps for Switzerland. Then, eventually, governments realized that many people are conditioned to accept paper money and it does not need to be backed with gold, and fiat currencies became widely used.
When electronic money has been invented, it has been realized that the money no longer needs to be printed. However few problems have remained: paper money is still a relatively convenient way to make a payment as it is not heavy and semi-anonymous. Also, it has been realized when negative interest rates were introduced, simple $100 bill would effectively become and interest bearing interest. Introduction of negative interest rates would IMMEDIATELY cause massive cash hoarding by the people and the bank runs.
Those who try to ban cash should be upfront with their thinking. They should state what they think:
1. We, the government people, do not like cash because it allows anonymity.
2. Anonymity allows people not to pay taxes
3. Cash makes it harder to introduce negative interest rate.
The hard cold reality is that 95% real tax evasion, crimes and corruption, measured at the dollar value and volume is not conducted in cash, and is mostly conducted by by the top 1% by corrupt politicians and their private sector partners.
It is not about petty crime. It is about control of the common people
Perhaps Obamacare became affordable for a small percentage, but for my business it is a significant and incremental expense. Expenses are shared by both the employer and by employee. Employees have considerably higher out-of pocket expenses. So when you say that nobody said that ACA will be free, then spend some time and find that impersonator in suite who said that ACA will cost cheaper than my cable ($30 per month).
My business, has made plans to expand and to create jobs in India and Argentina. At the same time closing facilities in USA and France. There was one common denominator: all closures were in high cost/high taxes area. There is one exception: we have expanded in Switzerland, which is a high cost country. However they respect ownership and taxes are relatively lower. Please note that those kind of decisions are not made in a rush. And voting for Democrats does have consequences.
If you feel that business are parasites, such as Ford, GM, Exxon, Apple, Berkshire, then please make sure you do not own their stock directly or indirectly via your retirement or defined benefit plans.
Another interesting detail: have you noticed that rich encourage you to vote for Democrats?
IT department: this is just a beginning. Any job that can be done remotely sooner or later will be competing with lower cost countries.
Keep voting for those who promise free stuff, more security and more political correctness, and in few years you can remember this conversation, after waiting to see the doctor after the 6 hour wait (under universal/single payer healthcare).
It does not matter how you vote, but every time elected are the clowns who promise free stuff (be it Obamacare, free education, free phones, free house, free security), that free stuff needs to be taken in the form of taxes, fees or higher fees from artificial monopolies, from somebody.
Sooner or later those evil entrepreneurs will re-run the numbers and will pluck the plug.
The cries of dissatisfaction for migrating the jobs are only from the ignorant ones. All large corporations have outsourced a lot of jobs to India already. Have you heard of Accenture? Many of the jobs were migrated a decade ago. Hertz is merely
There are entire industries of IT support, customer support, bank representing and accounting services in India and Phillipines serving Fortune 500 companies.
Haven't you noticed that when you call Citi, Microsoft, or HP, for support, your representative "Jessica" after some questions tells about nice weather in Jaipur, and lovely "Ben" is from Bangalore working his first hour on his shift.
Sooner or later safe and secure versions of Torrent Time (or equivalent) will appear which will allow the use of functionality without compromising security.
There are way too many assumptions and way too many inconsistencies with existing theoretical models.
The link mentions few details: event took place 1.3 billion years ago. two holes.. the radius of 100km...
First and foremost modern physics theorize that black hole does not have a dimension, and the size of the black hole cannot be measured using the usual three dimensional references. The radius of 100km is merely a Schwarzchild radius, representing a point of no return for the light.
Secondly, it has been announced that gravitation is a wave which automatically means it is subject to the 300,000 km/s limit. Otherwise how would they know when exactly the event took place.
I am not saying there are no gravitational effects. I am saying a confirmed chirp in dual interferometers is not enough to confirm weight, location, time and the nature of the event. I wish somebody would take time and explain the discover better. Hope somebody will provide not only good explanation, but also go over review process as well as peer review commentaries.
Other than that, it only looks that LIGO scientific insitution had to invent something to justify their existence. Historically, there were many announcements, that were later recalled. Let's hope this one is for real.
Currently according to the governmental instructions and memos doctors are monitoring you, enter all your medical information to the computers, and all the medical record data is available to the governmental employees
Contact information? Government knows all your personal information.
Let's turn the tables now. Are you ready to move out of the comfort zone?
In my opinion, each and every tax dollar should be transparent, and all the governmental employees should also be completely transparent, with few exceptions related to deep intelligence operations.
If government does not want to disclose some data, perhaps they should not be doing it.
All the government money should be paid and received in Bitcoin style for 100% transparency...
While getting 20,000 to sign to commit is a big thing by itself, a credit needs to be given where credit is due:
A credit for committing to pack your stuff and to move to the sparsely populated cold state. That is something.
While 20,000 voters will not change the elections in a state where 700K to 900K people vote, few things need to be taken to the account:
- FSP is not a political organization and it will not endorse any of the candidates. However it has been my observation that most of the free staters are libertarian leaning or would vote for Bernie Sanders.
- 20,000 is not the end. It is meant to be a beginning. A judgmentally selected, trigger point and future inflows will be encouraged.
- Local politics: Education of the jurors. Challenging unnecessary and outdated laws is the current
- Free staters are disproportionately more active in politics. Not only they vote, but, also, get elected and their share is much larger than general population.
Trying to fix the broken process by setting fundraising site is comparable to the ransom collection by the pirates of the seas, figuratively speaking. Slashdot article mentioned this arrangement because this site collected $2,315 on average per person. Clearly, the concept was executed by the layer of society, who believes in Obamacare, basic income, and free healthcare. Money are collected by the people who have a network anyway. For people without the network this website is not a big help.
As far as strangers involved: eventually the demand will dwarf all the anonymous donors...
It is a common knowledge, that pricing of uninsured patient services is outrageous and is inflated, like 10 to 20 times inflated, on what the reasonable or "Medicaid" rates are.
Writing off those billions is merely an accounting trick, that achieves the following goals:
1. Allows keeping price lists in obscurity and for different arrangement there is a different price. NB: same person, but with different insurance card or no card at all will be getting different rates. Which tells a lot what exactly is driving the process. Bottom line, every hospital is keeping full price pricelist which is used when people who, ordinarily, can afford the least, get medical services. This price list is public, and, historically, has also been used to confuse the competitors (of course everyone knows multiple pricelists today).
2. Writing off the debts allows for the hospital to operate in a loss. Reality is that those original billings are not based on a reasonable cost, as such writing off of the losses (for provisions for noncollectable debts) is also not a real economic loss. There are some hospitals in lower socio-economic areas who start believing this accounting and economic model, by admitting a lot of non-paying customers and not having robust finance division. Those hospitals usually go bankrupt or verge on it. Again, incurring accounting losses is an outcome of management decisions on how to price, how to sell and up sell medical services and mix them with private insurance billings. All of this done in order to get coveted financial statements demonstrating poor state of affairs and financial loss, claiming non-profit status (yet paying exorbitant salaries to certain people in healthcare industry) and making money to the pharmaceutical companies and other suppliers.
The only solution to reducing the prices is complete deregulation and liberalization of the industry. In deregulated market, such fundraisers sites would be valuable if not indispensable tool....Will not happen in my lifetime.
I do not think that any sane person questions landing itself. The world, including arch-competitors Soviets, were monitoring and spying the process. Moreover, the landing vehicle at the first landing location has been photographed. You can't fake the fact of that kind of magnitude.
However there is a reasonable suspicion that the footage of the landing is.... well... a bit of a stretch, and those pesky conspiracy theorists brought dozens of details that did not make sense. Lastly, there is this Stanley Kubrick confession on being the producer of the footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Perhaps the moon landing was real, however the famous video footage was made here at earth.
In nowadays these type sharp-eyed people post their analysis under the "Movie mistakes".
Proof of concept for the cure of cancer has been patented more than 30 years ago, in 1983.
While many of the readers here are techies, I am bringing your attention to the Cabilly patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that are key to some of the existing effective FDA approved cancer medications (with the combo treatment cost of $250K or so). If you do not believe, please spend some time researching or ask your friend patent lawyer of biochemistry scientist to comment on Cabilly patents.
Bottom line is that cure for cancer has been discovered before 1983 (the patent date). This is not the only patent, but one of the key inventions that gave the beginning to the current modern cure cancers. Due to the patent restrictions as well as business competitive restrictions, patent owners were not that willing to license and the license fees were very high. This is one of the patents, and typical cancer drug has hundreds of patents (unlike small molecule medications)
Not only the patents. FDA has requirements, bureaucratic and administrative documentation requirement burden, that can only be met by only the largest pharmaceutical companies.
For all practical purposes, cancer drugs were discovered a long time ago, and real working prototypes are usually available about ten years before FDA approval.
As far as conspiracy.... The wording "suppressed" is kooky , because pharma companies are in business to make money by innovating and helping patients, and, as such, do not suppress money making technologies.
From the common man prospective, however, the conspiracy theory is 100% correct, assuming we do not nitpick wording but look into the essence, namely that the cure was available, but not really available due to the administrative burden. All for the protection of the dying cancer patients. Some very connected patients did get the treatment before everyone else.
Do not blame pharmaceutical companies on this one...
Same person asked two questions about so called "smart" technology will give two very different answers. I have to assume that that was the case.
The real test is actual use of so called smart guns. Reality is there are lot of guns that are smart, meaning there is electronic component in those: anti-aircraft and anti-tank rockets and even larger weapons.
Reality is that no army in the world is not using smart weapons, because guns are made to be as simple as possible and as reliable as possible.
Long story short: if someone wants a smart technology she should get a safe box with the finger print reader to lock all the guns.
Slashdot Mirror
There are areas where government is somewhat better than private business. For example, defense. Or enforcement of the contracts. Or border control. Nobody is getting into the argument about very basic functions of the government.
Now your CALPERS example is a further evidence of a too generous reimbursement. It is worth mentioning, that BART employees also get social security payments? Using your example: if you work for BART five years, you can get an extra 636 dollars per month in pension (in addition to Social Security). In comparison, many of the private companies no longer accrue and offer defined benefit. As such, BART is generous, very generous, in relative terms.
Rather than lecturing the audience about differences between private and public services, let's take your argument from the other side: are you stating that BART is efficiently and properly run service? Who runs it? How is your comment relevant to the discussion?
Not only they have not put aside some of the money, but they also have chosen to use accounting standards, that are not practical and not transparent when asset management is involved.
Any decent home ownership association, will accrue some money for the roof repairs or other capital expenses starting from the first year of the existence.
Public entities really do not see difference between the concepts of revenue, income and surplus.
BART employees are part of CALPers system. Basically, if you work 5 years and are 50 years old you can retire, now changed to 52 (https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/employers/benefit-programs/retirement-benefits). This is better, than Greece.
Nice achievement, retirement at 52, while the rest of the country on SS are considering whether to raise SS retirement age from 67 years (to those who are born after 1960). Social Security is not even considered as a pension plan. There is some litigation going on, but that is a super deal.
There are stories about $1000 thyristors. Since this is public money, nobody, I mean, nobody has a vested interest to negotiate a price, or look for alternatives. It is the opposite: most of the transportation authorities are covered with a tight knit of supply companies that make a living of it. No surprise, supply companies are private.
There was a story about LIRR (long island Rail Roads), where 95% of the retirees claimed disability (with the 98% approval rate). The story has disappeared from NYTimes for a while. I wonder how many disabilities are claimed by BART?
Waste, Fraud and Abuse: is what characterizes government run entities.
Unless you are living in the cave, you should have noticed never ending AI advertisment from IBM: Hi, my name is Watson!
Reality, is that it does not take Binney to say that having too much information is counterproductive. Thus be assured, that military versions of AI, are continuously are poring and monitoring through the dossier files, currently maintained as relationship databases.
You can be assured that there is an automated never-ending surveilance and the code, the AI, the algorithms will get better over the time.
Human life is so digitized, that pretty much everything can be used to infer necessary conclusions.
Get this: information gathering organizations NEVER delete anything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As authoritarian and unpolished he is, it seems that his absence of political correctness was more of a business like saying they way it is.
I have heard that he wanted to weaken encryption so that it would be easier to break in to the phones, but that could probably be attributable to the technical ignorance of a 70 year old dude, all used to the old school paper, handshake and a smile business style.
I think he will get popularity boost.
I have never understood simple aspect of this email scandal: why did the secretary did not use her own official email account?
Had she used official email account, then you might play ignorance, saying that those techies did not get it right.Getting your own server in the basement of your home immediately transfers all responsibility to ms Secretary.
I still do not understand, why there is a debate on the issue? 99.9% of us would be disciplined for using personal accounts for work purposes.
Last attempt to externalize the mistake is just another attempt to rationalize. First there were no private emails, then there were no secret emails, then there were no top secret emails, then there were no attempts to destroy the evidence, now HRC is saying that it is somebody's else fault.
I understand HRC need for convenience and technological ignorance, but decisions and consequences need to be owned up.
Hawking opining on a political structure is pretty much the same as talented musician opining on a Standard Model changes. Both are not competent outside their area of expertise.
If you look into the history, the only thing that is constant is the fact that political and economic alliances are formed and later dismantled.
Congressional Medal of Honor is an award that needs to be considered.
Get this: to make the point that she did nothing wrong Miss Clinton would continue to use home server and would state that we have always been doing this and there was never a problem.
In the future, reflecting past and reconsidering their path to success president Bernie, Donald or Cruz, whoever the president at the time, will probably pardon this dude.
Please go and talk to the common people who do not have all of their money in the banks and ask their opinion. It is not the opinion of the bankers that counts, it is how the changes are perceived by the people.
Where I live, in the state of New Jersey, I get 10 cent discount on gas for paying cash. My barber does not accept credit cards and my Saturday sport club did not take cash either. Somehow someway, a lot of gas stations in the US will give you discount if paying cash. Accepting cash allows them to have better control over the costs. Good luck calling small businesses illogical, nonsensical and living in the fantasy world.
If you find one of the small business that meets all the criteria (illogical, nonsensical and fantasy world) than you can go and vote for nutjobs: is that going to be Sanders or Hillary this year?
It is about tighter control of the rest of population, not the criminals.
All those who keep contemplating that it is so easy to carry 500 Euro notes, are also of the opinion that the value embodied in the paper bill represents time and efforts, savings, work and sweat, of the people who worked to get 500 Euros. Yet assholes such as Larry Summers consider all that money to be owned "by society" which is only temporarily in the hands of the "criminally minded" individual.
Two hundred years ago farmers would have chased you out of the village with the pitchforks if you would try to pay with the pieces of paper. For several hundred years there was a statement on every paper note stating that every paper note is exchangeable to gold, no questions asked.
Then there was WW1. Latin Monetary Union, established by Napoleon, has evaporated. Most of the promises pffft... and evaporated, except perhaps for Switzerland. Then, eventually, governments realized that many people are conditioned to accept paper money and it does not need to be backed with gold, and fiat currencies became widely used.
When electronic money has been invented, it has been realized that the money no longer needs to be printed. However few problems have remained: paper money is still a relatively convenient way to make a payment as it is not heavy and semi-anonymous. Also, it has been realized when negative interest rates were introduced, simple $100 bill would effectively become and interest bearing interest. Introduction of negative interest rates would IMMEDIATELY cause massive cash hoarding by the people and the bank runs.
Those who try to ban cash should be upfront with their thinking. They should state what they think:
1. We, the government people, do not like cash because it allows anonymity.
2. Anonymity allows people not to pay taxes
3. Cash makes it harder to introduce negative interest rate.
The hard cold reality is that 95% real tax evasion, crimes and corruption, measured at the dollar value and volume is not conducted in cash, and is mostly conducted by by the top 1% by corrupt politicians and their private sector partners.
It is not about petty crime. It is about control of the common people
I have, indeed, lived under both single payer and US.
Two factors:
1. In US you used to have a choice, whether to have insurance or not. Now you do not have that choice.
2. Rationing. Socialized medicine means rationing, absence of competition, low quality, experienced by broad layers of population.
Finally, in countries with socialized medicine there is a second tier, private medical industry, frequented by affluent people or middle class.
In the long term single payer is worse and is more expensive, hands down.
Perhaps Obamacare became affordable for a small percentage, but for my business it is a significant and incremental expense. Expenses are shared by both the employer and by employee. Employees have considerably higher out-of pocket expenses. So when you say that nobody said that ACA will be free, then spend some time and find that impersonator in suite who said that ACA will cost cheaper than my cable ($30 per month).
My business, has made plans to expand and to create jobs in India and Argentina. At the same time closing facilities in USA and France. There was one common denominator: all closures were in high cost/high taxes area. There is one exception: we have expanded in Switzerland, which is a high cost country. However they respect ownership and taxes are relatively lower. Please note that those kind of decisions are not made in a rush. And voting for Democrats does have consequences.
If you feel that business are parasites, such as Ford, GM, Exxon, Apple, Berkshire, then please make sure you do not own their stock directly or indirectly via your retirement or defined benefit plans.
Another interesting detail: have you noticed that rich encourage you to vote for Democrats?
IT department: this is just a beginning. Any job that can be done remotely sooner or later will be competing with lower cost countries.
Keep voting for those who promise free stuff, more security and more political correctness, and in few years you can remember this conversation, after waiting to see the doctor after the 6 hour wait (under universal/single payer healthcare).
Then you will understand it.
Or for Republicans, for that matter.
It does not matter how you vote, but every time elected are the clowns who promise free stuff (be it Obamacare, free education, free phones, free house, free security), that free stuff needs to be taken in the form of taxes, fees or higher fees from artificial monopolies, from somebody.
Sooner or later those evil entrepreneurs will re-run the numbers and will pluck the plug.
The cries of dissatisfaction for migrating the jobs are only from the ignorant ones. All large corporations have outsourced a lot of jobs to India already. Have you heard of Accenture? Many of the jobs were migrated a decade ago. Hertz is merely
There are entire industries of IT support, customer support, bank representing and accounting services in India and Phillipines serving Fortune 500 companies.
Haven't you noticed that when you call Citi, Microsoft, or HP, for support, your representative "Jessica" after some questions tells about nice weather in Jaipur, and lovely "Ben" is from Bangalore working his first hour on his shift.
The same with software or new technology.
Sooner or later safe and secure versions of Torrent Time (or equivalent) will appear which will allow the use of functionality without compromising security.
The movie Dallas Buyers Club demonstrates how, by braking the laws, people improve their lives and solve their problems.
The irony is that when the movie itself is pirated an issue is taken by the creators of the movie about infringing the very same laws.
I am not defending pirates. But at the same time existing laws and rules related to the intelectual property protection are very much imperfect.
There are way too many assumptions and way too many inconsistencies with existing theoretical models.
The link mentions few details: event took place 1.3 billion years ago. two holes .. the radius of 100km...
First and foremost modern physics theorize that black hole does not have a dimension, and the size of the black hole cannot be measured using the usual three dimensional references. The radius of 100km is merely a Schwarzchild radius, representing a point of no return for the light.
Secondly, it has been announced that gravitation is a wave which automatically means it is subject to the 300,000 km/s limit. Otherwise how would they know when exactly the event took place.
I am not saying there are no gravitational effects. I am saying a confirmed chirp in dual interferometers is not enough to confirm weight, location, time and the nature of the event. I wish somebody would take time and explain the discover better. Hope somebody will provide not only good explanation, but also go over review process as well as peer review commentaries.
Other than that, it only looks that LIGO scientific insitution had to invent something to justify their existence. Historically, there were many announcements, that were later recalled. Let's hope this one is for real.
Currently according to the governmental instructions and memos doctors are monitoring you, enter all your medical information to the computers, and all the medical record data is available to the governmental employees
Contact information? Government knows all your personal information.
Let's turn the tables now. Are you ready to move out of the comfort zone?
In my opinion, each and every tax dollar should be transparent, and all the governmental employees should also be completely transparent, with few exceptions related to deep intelligence operations.
If government does not want to disclose some data, perhaps they should not be doing it.
All the government money should be paid and received in Bitcoin style for 100% transparency...
While getting 20,000 to sign to commit is a big thing by itself, a credit needs to be given where credit is due:
A credit for committing to pack your stuff and to move to the sparsely populated cold state. That is something.
While 20,000 voters will not change the elections in a state where 700K to 900K people vote, few things need to be taken to the account:
- FSP is not a political organization and it will not endorse any of the candidates. However it has been my observation that most of the free staters are libertarian leaning or would vote for Bernie Sanders.
- 20,000 is not the end. It is meant to be a beginning. A judgmentally selected, trigger point and future inflows will be encouraged.
- Local politics: Education of the jurors. Challenging unnecessary and outdated laws is the current
- Free staters are disproportionately more active in politics. Not only they vote, but, also, get elected and their share is much larger than general population.
Rather than fiddling with keys and password recoveries, we have just installed Linux Mint.
No complains or further questions. People use computer for browsing mostly.
And the aspirin (or equivalent) will cost you $0.25.
Trying to fix the broken process by setting fundraising site is comparable to the ransom collection by the pirates of the seas, figuratively speaking. Slashdot article mentioned this arrangement because this site collected $2,315 on average per person. Clearly, the concept was executed by the layer of society, who believes in Obamacare, basic income, and free healthcare. Money are collected by the people who have a network anyway. For people without the network this website is not a big help.
As far as strangers involved: eventually the demand will dwarf all the anonymous donors...
It is a common knowledge, that pricing of uninsured patient services is outrageous and is inflated, like 10 to 20 times inflated, on what the reasonable or "Medicaid" rates are.
Writing off those billions is merely an accounting trick, that achieves the following goals:
1. Allows keeping price lists in obscurity and for different arrangement there is a different price. NB: same person, but with different insurance card or no card at all will be getting different rates. Which tells a lot what exactly is driving the process. Bottom line, every hospital is keeping full price pricelist which is used when people who, ordinarily, can afford the least, get medical services. This price list is public, and, historically, has also been used to confuse the competitors (of course everyone knows multiple pricelists today).
2. Writing off the debts allows for the hospital to operate in a loss. Reality is that those original billings are not based on a reasonable cost, as such writing off of the losses (for provisions for noncollectable debts) is also not a real economic loss. There are some hospitals in lower socio-economic areas who start believing this accounting and economic model, by admitting a lot of non-paying customers and not having robust finance division. Those hospitals usually go bankrupt or verge on it. Again, incurring accounting losses is an outcome of management decisions on how to price, how to sell and up sell medical services and mix them with private insurance billings. All of this done in order to get coveted financial statements demonstrating poor state of affairs and financial loss, claiming non-profit status (yet paying exorbitant salaries to certain people in healthcare industry) and making money to the pharmaceutical companies and other suppliers.
The only solution to reducing the prices is complete deregulation and liberalization of the industry. In deregulated market, such fundraisers sites would be valuable if not indispensable tool. ...Will not happen in my lifetime.
I do not think that any sane person questions landing itself. The world, including arch-competitors Soviets, were monitoring and spying the process. Moreover, the landing vehicle at the first landing location has been photographed. You can't fake the fact of that kind of magnitude.
However there is a reasonable suspicion that the footage of the landing is .... well... a bit of a stretch, and those pesky conspiracy theorists brought dozens of details that did not make sense. Lastly, there is this Stanley Kubrick confession on being the producer of the footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Perhaps the moon landing was real, however the famous video footage was made here at earth.
In nowadays these type sharp-eyed people post their analysis under the "Movie mistakes".
Proof of concept for the cure of cancer has been patented more than 30 years ago, in 1983.
While many of the readers here are techies, I am bringing your attention to the Cabilly patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that are key to some of the existing effective FDA approved cancer medications (with the combo treatment cost of $250K or so). If you do not believe, please spend some time researching or ask your friend patent lawyer of biochemistry scientist to comment on Cabilly patents.
Bottom line is that cure for cancer has been discovered before 1983 (the patent date). This is not the only patent, but one of the key inventions that gave the beginning to the current modern cure cancers. Due to the patent restrictions as well as business competitive restrictions, patent owners were not that willing to license and the license fees were very high. This is one of the patents, and typical cancer drug has hundreds of patents (unlike small molecule medications)
Not only the patents. FDA has requirements, bureaucratic and administrative documentation requirement burden, that can only be met by only the largest pharmaceutical companies.
For all practical purposes, cancer drugs were discovered a long time ago, and real working prototypes are usually available about ten years before FDA approval.
As far as conspiracy.... The wording "suppressed" is kooky , because pharma companies are in business to make money by innovating and helping patients, and, as such, do not suppress money making technologies.
From the common man prospective, however, the conspiracy theory is 100% correct, assuming we do not nitpick wording but look into the essence, namely that the cure was available, but not really available due to the administrative burden. All for the protection of the dying cancer patients. Some very connected patients did get the treatment before everyone else.
Do not blame pharmaceutical companies on this one...
Just put a web camera towards projection screen and set to detect and record motion movement.
If there are no changes, no exceptions, no hidden "frames", to this incredibly dull movie, motion movement recorder will have zero footage to review.
$600 per hour and 10 hour movie? Hell, I would be more than happy to take view the movie and sleep at the same time. Or clean the house.
It is all how you formulate the question.
Same person asked two questions about so called "smart" technology will give two very different answers. I have to assume that that was the case.
The real test is actual use of so called smart guns. Reality is there are lot of guns that are smart, meaning there is electronic component in those: anti-aircraft and anti-tank rockets and even larger weapons.
Reality is that no army in the world is not using smart weapons, because guns are made to be as simple as possible and as reliable as possible.
Long story short: if someone wants a smart technology she should get a safe box with the finger print reader to lock all the guns.