While I think C should be involved at an early stage, the trouble I've come across is the unforgiving syntax. Mostly when I teach programming concepts, it's all on paper for at least 6 weeks before we even turn a computer on. Then we do Ruby since the syntax is more forgiving.
Thinking about it, however, you might be right. I've said before that a student's familiarity with correct grammar is a big determinant of whether or not they'll be a good programmer. Perhaps the correct approach really does need to start with C as a "filter."
Of course, we'd also need to accept that the Everyone Can Code! narrative is misguided. Essentially, going to Ruby was a concession on my part because I had failed every other time before (on the job) and had been labeled a sexist. Hey, it worked. Just that once, though.
I thought that method had succeeded for another person, but looking back, she's a much better manager (definitely not the asshole kind).
you have to take into consideration things like lost packets, late acks and how you will handle them, etc.
Personally, I don't! I mean, I gather how TCP works at the low level and have written some UDP stuff, but in the end I found C# and C weren't too much different. C#'s TcpClient class is wonky (doesn't properly do socket shutdown or at least how to get it to do that is undocumented) so I wound up using TcpConnection which was not that different from C's socket functions.
Similarly, I can implement a vector or linked list by hand, but I prefer libraries to do that for me.
In an educational context, however, I suppose it would be important to address those topics first on paper, and once the student has mastered the concepts, then we can turn the computer on and ask the student to implement those things.
Sadly no details in TFA about what this firewall does. Is it just a NAT box? Is it a full-fledged IDS with dashboards that can flash “TERRORIST HACKING ATTEMPT” in big red letters while everybody scrambles to cyber battle stations with klaxons going off?
*sigh* I remember when the word cyber was a verb that meant to have online sex on IRC. Hmm, actually, that gives me a strange new way to interpret stories about cyber stuff! Not unlike oblig xkcd (oblig for this comment anyway).
That's some mighty fine rhetoric there! The me of 10 years ago is cheering you on from my defunct UID!
Personally, I've come to the conclusion that 1.) the Illuminati are real (whatever they call themselves) and 2.) there is no point voting any more unless there's somebody I want to vote for (on the small hope that the Illuminati, being Masters of the Universe, will be inept enough to not actually rig an election on any meaningful scale in a first world democracy, which is why they rig candidates instead).
Being knowledgeable about computers, how they work, how to use them, and even how to program them, isn't about training the whole world to be programmers any more than teaching basic biology is about training the whole world to be doctors.
"Computers" are still a black art for most people, the way medical science was 400 years ago. Everybody uses computers, but mostly they're just dumbfounded when it comes to knowing what's going on inside.
You're spot on with these points. I'd be cheering these initiatives on if I had some idea that those things are what they teach. Instead, I see the "how" part completely glossed over, and the general computer remains indistinguishable from magic.
How does the image of the Disney princess get displayed? How does it come through the tubes from code.org? Nobody knows. But hey, look at all the cool magic Obama can do now that he's a programmer! Getting that Disney princess to ice skate is easy! See, those misogynerds were lying all along!
Because they're doing it wrong. They're not teaching about filesystems. They're not teaching about internetworking. They're not teaching about cryptography. They're not teaching about file formats. They're not teaching about memory management. Those things are simply all givens that just magically work on the magical palantir powered by waldoes programmed in Javascript (or Python if you're lucky).
They're not teaching about the difference between floats, ints, and how we store numbers to arbitrary precision. That one's probably completely ignored.
It's like teaching home ec by taking a trip to McDonald's to get some food and then Macy's to do some clothes shopping and calling everybody who tagged along a chef and seamstress.
Most everything I listed above is what should be taught. I simply don't understand this scramble to turn everybody into a Javascript programmer who has no idea how the machine she's working on actually works.
No, we are all required to have insurance now and it has to include more things. We haven't fixed the ceiling, we've raised the floor.
Maybe this has helped a lot of people, but for me personally it only gave Michigan TERFs and Christians more political ammo against me. I think the line of thought goes something like this: "If we give her meds, next she'll sue us for a free Obamacare sex change, then she'll get it and god/goddess will be pissed at us!"
She's living in the same town as me, which is why earlier this month I was getting so pissed off at Michigan Feminism. One of the local hospitals provides trans care, just not to me for unknown political reasons, most likely related to my role when Obamacare shut down a women's health organization I was "volunteered" to be a liaison with by my employer, they won't negotiate or even openly state.
Documents filed with a US court indicated Mr Geshuri, who now works for Tesla Motors, had been involved in enforcing a deal struck between Apple and Google not to poach each other's staff.
In a 2007 email, while he had been working at Google, he had assured his boss, Eric Schmidt, that a company employee would be "terminated within the hour" for approaching an Apple staff member, the documents indicated.
I wish they would have presented that before this, because this makes no sense otherwise:
Nearly 300 backed a vote of no confidence over allegations of involvement in a no-poaching deal while he was a Google human resources boss.
Mr Geshuri was alleged to have fired an employee who violated an agreement by approaching an Apple staff member.
I don't know about you AC, but I would not want somebody working for me that had been involved in that breach of ethics. This guy played a part in keeping IT workers' salaries down because Google and Apple do not want to pay for what their talent is actually worth to them.
And of course, you know what that makes him in my book: a gaslighting asshole manager.
T-Mobile's Binge On service could have been great. Giving customers a choice about how to use their data so that they can stream more video without hitting their data cap is a wonderful idea. Unfortunately, T-Mobile botched the roll out. Without asking, they made it the default for all of their customers.
I also found a The Verge article that confirms that throttling goes away once Binge On is disabled:
T-Mobile was throttling all video traffic over its network, including video downloads, for all customers who had not disabled the Binge On feature that the company automatically enabled for everyone in November.
All in all, I think this is a mountain out of a molehill. The biggest problem was how T-Mobile rolled it out. If they would have made it opt-in at roll out instead of opt-out, the issue would be much more clear, and I don't think it would have become a net neutrality matter.
I'm not sure if it's a bugbear that non-Binge On videos get throttled when Binge On is active. I could go either way on that one. (Or better yet, T-Mobile should have made it an option.)
Actually, what I really want to know is why T-Mobile doesn't just apologize and disable it for everybody. Problem solved imho.
This is an interesting change that adds more insight to the nature of this spammer. For a while it was "Republicans hate children." Now it's "Democrats are servants of the devil."
I always read these in the voices of the pink a blue unicorns from Charlie the Unicorn.
NotDrWho is merely responding to the recent hate that's been aimed at anyone assigned the male gender at birth in a tech career.
I sit in a fairly unique position in this cycle of hate. On the one hand, we have the gaslighting asshole managers who really are firing women because they really do think that women should not be programmers. So, people like you observe that and want to do something about it.
So, you decide to open fire on anybody working as the male gender in tech. You openly attack on me, NotDrWho, and everybody else caught up in this cycle of hate. You don't go after the asshole managers; you go after the people on the ground who previously had no problem with co-workers who were women, trans, or homosexual or any combination thereof.
What's their reaction? Open fire on trans women and homosexuals, because deep down they've always hated us but were able to tolerate us. I was already under fire from Michgan TERFs, TYVM.
End result: my regular doctor is 150 miles away. Thanks, asshole SJWs, asshole anti-SJWs, asshole Michigan Feminists, and asshole Michigan lesbians.
No, real end result: I could have completed transition 14 years ago and would be living in deep stealth today with a vastly better quality of life if I knew what I know today. Instead you asshole SJWs, anti-SJWs, Michigan Feminists, and Michigan lesbians convinced me that I would not be able to work as the gender I am anywhere. It turns out you are all nothing but liars.
Haha, obvious troll. Please either kill yourself or stay in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, or where ever the fuck with all the other backwards people who would rather have led poisoning and fracking than a functional government and a healthy environment.
What it does eliminate, however, is choice. When someone else is being billed for your treatment, the level and type of care you qualify for becomes their decision, not yours.
Is there any reason private insurance companies won't still exist with single payer? Their profits and customer base will be much smaller, that's for sure.
Single payer usually doesn't cover any transgender services outside of meds that I'm aware of, yet somehow trans men and women still manage to find medical services in single payer systems.
Personally, I've got the worst of both worlds. I'm legally required to hold insurance, but because of circumstances beyond my control, I cannot get any services locally and have to go to providers that my insurance doesn't cover.
Normally I would say the solution is to just prevent companies from offering health insurance as a benefit and let health insurance companies compete the same way car insurance companies do. But here comes the ACA! I mean, if we're going to do socialized medicine, and it looks like there's no going back now, we need to do it right and not half-assed.
Those things don't happen without economic incentives.
What are these economic incentives you speak of?
I didn't choose my insurer. My employer did. My only choice is take it or leave it with the caveat that I also don't qualify for subsidies because my employer offers insurance.
I didn't choose which doctors and hospitals my insurer works with.
I have no idea what the cost of any of the services I need are ahead of time anywhere. I can't even make a free market choice on routine services, much less if I have a heart attack. If that happens, I don't care what the cost of saving my life is, I want my life saved, so that's not a free market choice.
Also the last time I called up a hospital and said, "I have perfectly routine and easily treatable condition $x. Please, take my money!" I got "religious objeciton!" So I tried again at a different hospital. "Please, take my money!" and got the runaround. Apparently they're still pissed at my employer and I'm still on somebody's shit list for denying women health care. So I went to my insurer's website and tried again, except every last doctor was affiliated with either of those two hospitals.
I still have to pay for this useless insurance, because the penalty is greater than the annual premiums as of 2014. It also costs me, in my 40 mpg fuel-efficient car, roughly $30-$40 round trip to see my regular doctor.
As far as I can tell, the USA's healthcare system looks exactly like the horror stories I keep reading about "socialist utopias" from people who like attacking that strawman.
Are you really suggesting that no R&D will happen with single payer?
I guess in your world, the USA never landed a man on the moon.
Can we talk about side effects and mitigation strategies before we dive in?
I posted this comment without bothering to log in (also didn't want to imply that the place I was able to find healthcare at is any less than perfect and wonderful, because it is). You're correct to point out that the economy will be hugely impacted. It's simply because of the number of bureaucrats who will be out of a job.
Relevant snippet:
Until you have seen it for yourself, you do not know the truly staggering amount of money wasted on bureaucrats to ensure that the "wrong people" don't get a free lunch. The USA doesn't pay as much as it does because its level of care is #1 in the world, but because of all the unnecessary paperwork, qualification guidelines for different programs, special charity programs, payment processing (granted, with single payer, there would still need to be numbers available on what's costing what), contract negotiations, advertisement not just for drugs but hospitals advertising, etc, etc.
Frankly, that is the most horrifyingly cruel part of the USA's system: the amount of money spent on the superficial appearance of a free market instead of actually delivering health care.
I don't know I have a solution that will make everybody happy, but the way I figure it, to not completely crash the economy when switching to single payer, we'll also need to either greatly expand unemployment into a long-term retraining program or implement a universal basic income.
(For the latter option, we can also abolish the minimum wage and probably a lot of other worker protections since they would no longer be necessary... keep the safety regulations, though. Also obviates all of the menagerie of half redundant patchwork welfare programs. Bring on the flood of unemployed bureaucrats!)
Unfortunately, either of those ideas causes too many temporarily embarrassed millionaires to have shit fits.
Please, may I?! Are you willing to pay for me to move over to say Germany or the Netherlands where my ancestors most likely came from and get established?
I would hop on the plane today, but being a wage slave, I simply don't have the resources to escape. I could vacation over there, sure, but how long will it take me to become fluent again and start having an income on my own? I will admit, it's my fault as well. I stupidly dug roots in a backwater state in a crumbling empire without understanding that what I've been facing is not the norm for the rest of the developed world or even in a general sense the rest of the USA.
I am curious if my recent difficulties obtaining health care would be enough to qualify me as a refugee instead of an economic migrant. Since I'm mostly German, would there be a problem with me saying, "My ancestors fucked up. Please accept my apologies and take me back in."
Thanks for the larger picture! I wish I lived in a civilized country like you do. People in the USA, at least in flyover country, are so scared shitless that one of "those people" might get a benefit and do nothing productive with it that they impoverish themselves.
My observation has been that there are two major ways that the TANSTAAFL => "waste your time flipping burgers so you don't starve instead of finding a cure for cancer on my dime" attitude impoverishes the USA. First, we have a bazillion different, often redundant ways of delivering education and health care from charity to welfare (the welfare system is egregiously fragmented). Just think of all the bureaucracy involved to make sure that the "wrong person" doesn't get a benefit. What a waste.
The other way is in the way I phrased the attitude about TANSTAAFL. I know I'd rate do something that would actually improve the world (even if a tiny bit) instead of the current make-work job I have.* Somebody I know basically is living on welfare. She used to waste time programming computers to shuffle data around for bureaucrats, but apparently gaslighting asshole managers don't think women should be programmers. So, she's getting ready to publish her art and music as a video game. Will it be good? I don't know, and I'm not a big fan of the genre. The point is that soon the world will have an original creation they can buy for the price of a Starbuck's coffee, and if it becomes popular, she will probably become a millionaire. Surely one would want more millionaires, right?
(Don't take that question the wrong way.)
Unfortunately not in before the reply about underwater basket weaving by somebody who hates art and music and sees no need for anything that doesn't have an immediate, practical application.
It's completely insane. I will grant this. TANSTAAFL, but please, raise my taxes and let a nation with a GDP of 14 trillion dollars end homelessness and poverty by gutting the mountains of bureaucracy that exist just to make sure the "wrong person" doesn't get a benefit and that people asking for help "really need" that benefit. I'm ok with the occasional deadbeat. The cost of the occasional deadbeat is a rounding error. I'm not ok with living in a nation that would rather impoverish itself over the minuscule number of people who actually are deadbeats.
This will become more apparent as various places begin implementing a universal basic income as a cost saving measure. Then again, it should have been apparent for education and healthcare to the USA long ago. The USA would rather impoverish itself and become a 3rd world shithole just so that the "wrong person" won't get to eat lunch.
* I'm not any good at art or music, so instead I would join up with Engineers without Borders. Your choice: would you rather have me waste time keeping a chair warm doing make-work bullshit and posting to/., or would you rather I were out there with thousands of others trying to build up the rest of the world so things like Daesh won't arise again?
Pretty much. I'm a wage slave^H^H^H^H^Hworking professional. I just paid, what was it, $16 for my meds the other day after traveling 150 miles away, and I still don't know whether my insurance will even cover the office visit or if I'm going to have to pay $100+ out of pocket despite having insurance. Granted, that does turn out to be less expensive than my previous source. But!
I know somebody with medicaid. She can see a local doctor, and prescriptions are completely covered. She pays no premium and has no income.
There is something horribly wrong with this picture.
Aren't we all supposed to have quality insurance now? Why hasn't this problem gone away? Why are patients still being refused treatment because of economic circumstance?
I can't even.
Sentence: I officially degrade the USA to the status of 2nd world country.
What's the difference when the cost of living is spiraling out of control where the majority of tech workers live? Also, how can I be sure you haven't included in that figure gaslighting asshole managers who contribute nothing but stress, confusion, bullshit, a profusion of buzzwords, and the sexual harassment and discrimination that's chasing women out of the field in spite of the best efforts of people who come here and to the red site?
Sorry, Dice. You're not fooling anybody here. Getting into tech now is a fool's errand. You're better off flipping burgers. Nobody's ever called me a sexist for making a good burger.
Just get it over with and sell the damned site already.
I hadn't had my tea yet, so I missed the obvious. Let me try again.
Good for you, you rich bitch. I'll bet rich bitches like you never have to deal with juggling babysitters when you get your schedule for the next week that Sunday and find out that even though you usually work evenings, you've been scheduled for the afternoon for some inexplicable reason.
I'll bet rich bitches like you have plenty of time to cook homemade meals for your rich bitch daughters.
I'll bet rich bitches like you have no problem relocating to a better school district when some dipshit teacher with internalized misogyny starts transmitting her math and science phobia to your rich bitch daughters. I'll bet rich bitches like you don't ever need to worry about that! Just a little rumbling, and you can get any teacher you want fired and replaced with somebody else, just so your privileged little rich bitch daughters can show the world how much of a misogynerd people who aren't cisgendered women who work in science and programming are.
I'll bet rich bitches like you aren't beholden to the anonymous 1%ers here in Michigan to be able to afford to send your rich bitch daughters to college, because you are a 1%er! I'll bet you'll never trigger whatever hidden clause they have against whatever demographic they've put in there to make sure their money doesn't go to "those people."
I'll bet rich bitches like you don't ever need to worry about gaslighting asshole managers shutting down your rich bitch daughters' science or programming careers with sexual harassment!
I'll bet rich bitches like you don't need to worry about a husband cheating on you after you've given him a child and needing to go through divorce!*
I'll bet there are all kinds of things I'm missing about rich bitches like you that the women I know who struggle to make ends meet and make sure their children can eat don't have.
You know what, Melinda? Buddy! Pal! Let me give you a nickle's worth of free advice, my friend. Implement the basic guaranteed income, and then we will see some hope at resolving these problems. I believe your husband wants to make a legacy out of his charity in Africa, but there are children starving right here in the USA. There are single mothers at their wits end right here in the USA. Push for a basic guaranteed income. Make the USA great again, and let this country once more be a shining beacon and role model for the rest of the world. We have the wealth to do this. Its budget would be an order of magnitude less than the GDP. Yes, the number is still unimaginably huge compared to the numbers I'm familiar with seeing on budgets, but we have the wealth do this.
If you want more cisgendered* women to become scientists and programmers, you absolutely need to implement a basic guaranteed income.
* Circle of Protection: MRA. There is much progress from both ends that needs to be made on this matter. I also expect more out of feminism than FEEL GUILTY. I expect some actual sexual emancipation and equality instead of the current TERF victimhood bullshit. Final incantation: alimony needs to die a swift death. This will hopefully help feminism get the kick in the pants it needs to move out of victim mode.
* Circle of Protection: anti-SJW Trigger Word. If Circle of Protection: MRA is in play, reduce the casting cost to 0. I keep needing to drop that term because I don't know what else to do to correct news pieces like this. They don't give a shit about anybody assigned the male gender at birth regardless of what body pats they were or weren't born with. Any MRA who believes that "trans" women are communists is a delusional bigot and is not fighting for human rights for men.
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While I think C should be involved at an early stage, the trouble I've come across is the unforgiving syntax. Mostly when I teach programming concepts, it's all on paper for at least 6 weeks before we even turn a computer on. Then we do Ruby since the syntax is more forgiving.
Thinking about it, however, you might be right. I've said before that a student's familiarity with correct grammar is a big determinant of whether or not they'll be a good programmer. Perhaps the correct approach really does need to start with C as a "filter."
Of course, we'd also need to accept that the Everyone Can Code! narrative is misguided. Essentially, going to Ruby was a concession on my part because I had failed every other time before (on the job) and had been labeled a sexist. Hey, it worked. Just that once, though.
I thought that method had succeeded for another person, but looking back, she's a much better manager (definitely not the asshole kind).
you have to take into consideration things like lost packets, late acks and how you will handle them, etc.
Personally, I don't! I mean, I gather how TCP works at the low level and have written some UDP stuff, but in the end I found C# and C weren't too much different. C#'s TcpClient class is wonky (doesn't properly do socket shutdown or at least how to get it to do that is undocumented) so I wound up using TcpConnection which was not that different from C's socket functions.
Similarly, I can implement a vector or linked list by hand, but I prefer libraries to do that for me.
In an educational context, however, I suppose it would be important to address those topics first on paper, and once the student has mastered the concepts, then we can turn the computer on and ask the student to implement those things.
Sadly no details in TFA about what this firewall does. Is it just a NAT box? Is it a full-fledged IDS with dashboards that can flash “TERRORIST HACKING ATTEMPT” in big red letters while everybody scrambles to cyber battle stations with klaxons going off?
*sigh* I remember when the word cyber was a verb that meant to have online sex on IRC. Hmm, actually, that gives me a strange new way to interpret stories about cyber stuff! Not unlike oblig xkcd (oblig for this comment anyway).
That's some mighty fine rhetoric there! The me of 10 years ago is cheering you on from my defunct UID!
Personally, I've come to the conclusion that 1.) the Illuminati are real (whatever they call themselves) and 2.) there is no point voting any more unless there's somebody I want to vote for (on the small hope that the Illuminati, being Masters of the Universe, will be inept enough to not actually rig an election on any meaningful scale in a first world democracy, which is why they rig candidates instead).
I was going to say that a permaban is a bit harsh, but then again, they're politicians. Bring on the permaban!
Being knowledgeable about computers, how they work, how to use them, and even how to program them, isn't about training the whole world to be programmers any more than teaching basic biology is about training the whole world to be doctors.
"Computers" are still a black art for most people, the way medical science was 400 years ago. Everybody uses computers, but mostly they're just dumbfounded when it comes to knowing what's going on inside.
You're spot on with these points. I'd be cheering these initiatives on if I had some idea that those things are what they teach. Instead, I see the "how" part completely glossed over, and the general computer remains indistinguishable from magic.
How does the image of the Disney princess get displayed? How does it come through the tubes from code.org? Nobody knows. But hey, look at all the cool magic Obama can do now that he's a programmer! Getting that Disney princess to ice skate is easy! See, those misogynerds were lying all along!
Because they're doing it wrong. They're not teaching about filesystems. They're not teaching about internetworking. They're not teaching about cryptography. They're not teaching about file formats. They're not teaching about memory management. Those things are simply all givens that just magically work on the magical palantir powered by waldoes programmed in Javascript (or Python if you're lucky).
They're not teaching about the difference between floats, ints, and how we store numbers to arbitrary precision. That one's probably completely ignored.
It's like teaching home ec by taking a trip to McDonald's to get some food and then Macy's to do some clothes shopping and calling everybody who tagged along a chef and seamstress.
Most everything I listed above is what should be taught. I simply don't understand this scramble to turn everybody into a Javascript programmer who has no idea how the machine she's working on actually works.
No, we are all required to have insurance now and it has to include more things. We haven't fixed the ceiling, we've raised the floor.
Maybe this has helped a lot of people, but for me personally it only gave Michigan TERFs and Christians more political ammo against me. I think the line of thought goes something like this: "If we give her meds, next she'll sue us for a free Obamacare sex change, then she'll get it and god/goddess will be pissed at us!"
She's living in the same town as me, which is why earlier this month I was getting so pissed off at Michigan Feminism. One of the local hospitals provides trans care, just not to me for unknown political reasons, most likely related to my role when Obamacare shut down a women's health organization I was "volunteered" to be a liaison with by my employer, they won't negotiate or even openly state.
Ok then, don't worry. You're just going to have to wait a few years for me to get the resources together.
However, I'm also eyeballing the ravaged land of the druggies and laws that protect trans people: Colorado.
Where are you getting that? From the BBC:
Documents filed with a US court indicated Mr Geshuri, who now works for Tesla Motors, had been involved in enforcing a deal struck between Apple and Google not to poach each other's staff.
In a 2007 email, while he had been working at Google, he had assured his boss, Eric Schmidt, that a company employee would be "terminated within the hour" for approaching an Apple staff member, the documents indicated.
I wish they would have presented that before this, because this makes no sense otherwise:
Nearly 300 backed a vote of no confidence over allegations of involvement in a no-poaching deal while he was a Google human resources boss.
Mr Geshuri was alleged to have fired an employee who violated an agreement by approaching an Apple staff member.
I don't know about you AC, but I would not want somebody working for me that had been involved in that breach of ethics. This guy played a part in keeping IT workers' salaries down because Google and Apple do not want to pay for what their talent is actually worth to them.
And of course, you know what that makes him in my book: a gaslighting asshole manager.
We're discussing LEGO here.
This is Serious Business!
In addition, video services NOT INCLUDED IN BINGE-ON are also being throttled
This is at the users request (the user enables binge on and the throttling setting).
To quote an EFF article:
T-Mobile's Binge On service could have been great. Giving customers a choice about how to use their data so that they can stream more video without hitting their data cap is a wonderful idea. Unfortunately, T-Mobile botched the roll out. Without asking, they made it the default for all of their customers.
I also found a The Verge article that confirms that throttling goes away once Binge On is disabled:
T-Mobile was throttling all video traffic over its network, including video downloads, for all customers who had not disabled the Binge On feature that the company automatically enabled for everyone in November.
All in all, I think this is a mountain out of a molehill. The biggest problem was how T-Mobile rolled it out. If they would have made it opt-in at roll out instead of opt-out, the issue would be much more clear, and I don't think it would have become a net neutrality matter.
I'm not sure if it's a bugbear that non-Binge On videos get throttled when Binge On is active. I could go either way on that one. (Or better yet, T-Mobile should have made it an option.)
Actually, what I really want to know is why T-Mobile doesn't just apologize and disable it for everybody. Problem solved imho.
This is an interesting change that adds more insight to the nature of this spammer. For a while it was "Republicans hate children." Now it's "Democrats are servants of the devil."
I always read these in the voices of the pink a blue unicorns from Charlie the Unicorn.
Nothing really meaningful to add here.
NotDrWho is merely responding to the recent hate that's been aimed at anyone assigned the male gender at birth in a tech career.
I sit in a fairly unique position in this cycle of hate. On the one hand, we have the gaslighting asshole managers who really are firing women because they really do think that women should not be programmers. So, people like you observe that and want to do something about it.
So, you decide to open fire on anybody working as the male gender in tech. You openly attack on me, NotDrWho, and everybody else caught up in this cycle of hate. You don't go after the asshole managers; you go after the people on the ground who previously had no problem with co-workers who were women, trans, or homosexual or any combination thereof.
What's their reaction? Open fire on trans women and homosexuals, because deep down they've always hated us but were able to tolerate us. I was already under fire from Michgan TERFs, TYVM.
End result: my regular doctor is 150 miles away. Thanks, asshole SJWs, asshole anti-SJWs, asshole Michigan Feminists, and asshole Michigan lesbians.
No, real end result: I could have completed transition 14 years ago and would be living in deep stealth today with a vastly better quality of life if I knew what I know today. Instead you asshole SJWs, anti-SJWs, Michigan Feminists, and Michigan lesbians convinced me that I would not be able to work as the gender I am anywhere. It turns out you are all nothing but liars.
So I'm going to ask you to please kill yourself.
Haha, obvious troll. Please either kill yourself or stay in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, or where ever the fuck with all the other backwards people who would rather have led poisoning and fracking than a functional government and a healthy environment.
What it does eliminate, however, is choice. When someone else is being billed for your treatment, the level and type of care you qualify for becomes their decision, not yours.
Is there any reason private insurance companies won't still exist with single payer? Their profits and customer base will be much smaller, that's for sure.
Single payer usually doesn't cover any transgender services outside of meds that I'm aware of, yet somehow trans men and women still manage to find medical services in single payer systems.
Personally, I've got the worst of both worlds. I'm legally required to hold insurance, but because of circumstances beyond my control, I cannot get any services locally and have to go to providers that my insurance doesn't cover.
Normally I would say the solution is to just prevent companies from offering health insurance as a benefit and let health insurance companies compete the same way car insurance companies do. But here comes the ACA! I mean, if we're going to do socialized medicine, and it looks like there's no going back now, we need to do it right and not half-assed.
Those things don't happen without economic incentives.
What are these economic incentives you speak of?
I didn't choose my insurer. My employer did. My only choice is take it or leave it with the caveat that I also don't qualify for subsidies because my employer offers insurance.
I didn't choose which doctors and hospitals my insurer works with.
I have no idea what the cost of any of the services I need are ahead of time anywhere. I can't even make a free market choice on routine services, much less if I have a heart attack. If that happens, I don't care what the cost of saving my life is, I want my life saved, so that's not a free market choice.
Also the last time I called up a hospital and said, "I have perfectly routine and easily treatable condition $x. Please, take my money!" I got "religious objeciton!" So I tried again at a different hospital. "Please, take my money!" and got the runaround. Apparently they're still pissed at my employer and I'm still on somebody's shit list for denying women health care. So I went to my insurer's website and tried again, except every last doctor was affiliated with either of those two hospitals.
I still have to pay for this useless insurance, because the penalty is greater than the annual premiums as of 2014. It also costs me, in my 40 mpg fuel-efficient car, roughly $30-$40 round trip to see my regular doctor.
As far as I can tell, the USA's healthcare system looks exactly like the horror stories I keep reading about "socialist utopias" from people who like attacking that strawman.
Are you really suggesting that no R&D will happen with single payer?
I guess in your world, the USA never landed a man on the moon.
Can we talk about side effects and mitigation strategies before we dive in?
I posted this comment without bothering to log in (also didn't want to imply that the place I was able to find healthcare at is any less than perfect and wonderful, because it is). You're correct to point out that the economy will be hugely impacted. It's simply because of the number of bureaucrats who will be out of a job.
Relevant snippet:
Until you have seen it for yourself, you do not know the truly staggering amount of money wasted on bureaucrats to ensure that the "wrong people" don't get a free lunch. The USA doesn't pay as much as it does because its level of care is #1 in the world, but because of all the unnecessary paperwork, qualification guidelines for different programs, special charity programs, payment processing (granted, with single payer, there would still need to be numbers available on what's costing what), contract negotiations, advertisement not just for drugs but hospitals advertising, etc, etc.
Frankly, that is the most horrifyingly cruel part of the USA's system: the amount of money spent on the superficial appearance of a free market instead of actually delivering health care.
I don't know I have a solution that will make everybody happy, but the way I figure it, to not completely crash the economy when switching to single payer, we'll also need to either greatly expand unemployment into a long-term retraining program or implement a universal basic income.
(For the latter option, we can also abolish the minimum wage and probably a lot of other worker protections since they would no longer be necessary... keep the safety regulations, though. Also obviates all of the menagerie of half redundant patchwork welfare programs. Bring on the flood of unemployed bureaucrats!)
Unfortunately, either of those ideas causes too many temporarily embarrassed millionaires to have shit fits.
Why not move to the great Europe than?
Please, may I?! Are you willing to pay for me to move over to say Germany or the Netherlands where my ancestors most likely came from and get established?
I would hop on the plane today, but being a wage slave, I simply don't have the resources to escape. I could vacation over there, sure, but how long will it take me to become fluent again and start having an income on my own? I will admit, it's my fault as well. I stupidly dug roots in a backwater state in a crumbling empire without understanding that what I've been facing is not the norm for the rest of the developed world or even in a general sense the rest of the USA.
I am curious if my recent difficulties obtaining health care would be enough to qualify me as a refugee instead of an economic migrant. Since I'm mostly German, would there be a problem with me saying, "My ancestors fucked up. Please accept my apologies and take me back in."
Thanks for the larger picture! I wish I lived in a civilized country like you do. People in the USA, at least in flyover country, are so scared shitless that one of "those people" might get a benefit and do nothing productive with it that they impoverish themselves.
My observation has been that there are two major ways that the TANSTAAFL => "waste your time flipping burgers so you don't starve instead of finding a cure for cancer on my dime" attitude impoverishes the USA. First, we have a bazillion different, often redundant ways of delivering education and health care from charity to welfare (the welfare system is egregiously fragmented). Just think of all the bureaucracy involved to make sure that the "wrong person" doesn't get a benefit. What a waste.
The other way is in the way I phrased the attitude about TANSTAAFL. I know I'd rate do something that would actually improve the world (even if a tiny bit) instead of the current make-work job I have.* Somebody I know basically is living on welfare. She used to waste time programming computers to shuffle data around for bureaucrats, but apparently gaslighting asshole managers don't think women should be programmers. So, she's getting ready to publish her art and music as a video game. Will it be good? I don't know, and I'm not a big fan of the genre. The point is that soon the world will have an original creation they can buy for the price of a Starbuck's coffee, and if it becomes popular, she will probably become a millionaire. Surely one would want more millionaires, right?
(Don't take that question the wrong way.)
Unfortunately not in before the reply about underwater basket weaving by somebody who hates art and music and sees no need for anything that doesn't have an immediate, practical application.
It's completely insane. I will grant this. TANSTAAFL, but please, raise my taxes and let a nation with a GDP of 14 trillion dollars end homelessness and poverty by gutting the mountains of bureaucracy that exist just to make sure the "wrong person" doesn't get a benefit and that people asking for help "really need" that benefit. I'm ok with the occasional deadbeat. The cost of the occasional deadbeat is a rounding error. I'm not ok with living in a nation that would rather impoverish itself over the minuscule number of people who actually are deadbeats.
This will become more apparent as various places begin implementing a universal basic income as a cost saving measure. Then again, it should have been apparent for education and healthcare to the USA long ago. The USA would rather impoverish itself and become a 3rd world shithole just so that the "wrong person" won't get to eat lunch.
* I'm not any good at art or music, so instead I would join up with Engineers without Borders. Your choice: would you rather have me waste time keeping a chair warm doing make-work bullshit and posting to /., or would you rather I were out there with thousands of others trying to build up the rest of the world so things like Daesh won't arise again?
Pretty much. I'm a wage slave^H^H^H^H^Hworking professional. I just paid, what was it, $16 for my meds the other day after traveling 150 miles away, and I still don't know whether my insurance will even cover the office visit or if I'm going to have to pay $100+ out of pocket despite having insurance. Granted, that does turn out to be less expensive than my previous source. But!
I know somebody with medicaid. She can see a local doctor, and prescriptions are completely covered. She pays no premium and has no income.
There is something horribly wrong with this picture.
This is so completely and utterly backwards.
Aren't we all supposed to have quality insurance now? Why hasn't this problem gone away? Why are patients still being refused treatment because of economic circumstance?
I can't even.
Sentence: I officially degrade the USA to the status of 2nd world country.
What's the difference when the cost of living is spiraling out of control where the majority of tech workers live? Also, how can I be sure you haven't included in that figure gaslighting asshole managers who contribute nothing but stress, confusion, bullshit, a profusion of buzzwords, and the sexual harassment and discrimination that's chasing women out of the field in spite of the best efforts of people who come here and to the red site?
Sorry, Dice. You're not fooling anybody here. Getting into tech now is a fool's errand. You're better off flipping burgers. Nobody's ever called me a sexist for making a good burger.
Just get it over with and sell the damned site already.
I hadn't had my tea yet, so I missed the obvious. Let me try again.
Good for you, you rich bitch. I'll bet rich bitches like you never have to deal with juggling babysitters when you get your schedule for the next week that Sunday and find out that even though you usually work evenings, you've been scheduled for the afternoon for some inexplicable reason.
I'll bet rich bitches like you have plenty of time to cook homemade meals for your rich bitch daughters.
I'll bet rich bitches like you have no problem relocating to a better school district when some dipshit teacher with internalized misogyny starts transmitting her math and science phobia to your rich bitch daughters. I'll bet rich bitches like you don't ever need to worry about that! Just a little rumbling, and you can get any teacher you want fired and replaced with somebody else, just so your privileged little rich bitch daughters can show the world how much of a misogynerd people who aren't cisgendered women who work in science and programming are.
I'll bet rich bitches like you aren't beholden to the anonymous 1%ers here in Michigan to be able to afford to send your rich bitch daughters to college, because you are a 1%er! I'll bet you'll never trigger whatever hidden clause they have against whatever demographic they've put in there to make sure their money doesn't go to "those people."
I'll bet rich bitches like you don't ever need to worry about gaslighting asshole managers shutting down your rich bitch daughters' science or programming careers with sexual harassment!
I'll bet rich bitches like you don't need to worry about a husband cheating on you after you've given him a child and needing to go through divorce!*
I'll bet there are all kinds of things I'm missing about rich bitches like you that the women I know who struggle to make ends meet and make sure their children can eat don't have.
You know what, Melinda? Buddy! Pal! Let me give you a nickle's worth of free advice, my friend. Implement the basic guaranteed income, and then we will see some hope at resolving these problems. I believe your husband wants to make a legacy out of his charity in Africa, but there are children starving right here in the USA. There are single mothers at their wits end right here in the USA. Push for a basic guaranteed income. Make the USA great again, and let this country once more be a shining beacon and role model for the rest of the world. We have the wealth to do this. Its budget would be an order of magnitude less than the GDP. Yes, the number is still unimaginably huge compared to the numbers I'm familiar with seeing on budgets, but we have the wealth do this.
If you want more cisgendered* women to become scientists and programmers, you absolutely need to implement a basic guaranteed income.
* Circle of Protection: MRA. There is much progress from both ends that needs to be made on this matter. I also expect more out of feminism than FEEL GUILTY. I expect some actual sexual emancipation and equality instead of the current TERF victimhood bullshit. Final incantation: alimony needs to die a swift death. This will hopefully help feminism get the kick in the pants it needs to move out of victim mode.
* Circle of Protection: anti-SJW Trigger Word. If Circle of Protection: MRA is in play, reduce the casting cost to 0. I keep needing to drop that term because I don't know what else to do to correct news pieces like this. They don't give a shit about anybody assigned the male gender at birth regardless of what body pats they were or weren't born with. Any MRA who believes that "trans" women are communists is a delusional bigot and is not fighting for human rights for men.
Good for you, you rich bitch. I'll bet rich bitches like you never have trouble finding medical care.