If true--and I'm pretty sure it isn't--those doctors would've been picked up somewhere else.
The Premier of Alberta did try to tinker with the care system in the province a bit; I can't remember what her goals were, but I could believe that doctors were being laid off or shuffled from care facilities in certain parts of the province to other parts. You'll have to do better than this vague proclamation of doom to convince me, though. Alberta has a pretty great healthcare system, even as Canadian provinces go.
Yes, they are. By and large, all of those stories ARE just rumours.
Canadians aren't exactly clamouring to emulate the US system. The Canadian woman that appeared in Republican commercials trying to smear our system had a non-threatening disorder that she felt was more serious than it actually was. She wasn't being refused care because we didn't have the capacity, she was being put on a waiting list because she could afford to wait while other people that had more threatening problems were triaged up the chain first.
We have waiting lists, yes. There are times where the system fails, yes. These are problems that every system tries to work out. But people here get care, and they get it without going bankrupt. The best case scenario in the Canadian system is that you get timely care with minimal cost. The average case is probably that you got reasonably timely care with a bit of wait, but still at minimum cost. Putting aside the worst case scenarios of death or misdiagnosis which are endemic in any system that involves humans--including the American system--you may have to wait a long time for care, but you're STILL not on the hook for any costs.
Many of the best case scenarios in the USA seem to leave middle class people with great care but crippling bills. The rich get off scott free, the poor simply don't get any care at all (or emergency room care, which is too little, too late, for too much).
I can understand not necessarily wanting the Canadian system. There are actually plenty of examples of even better systems in the world. But the fact remains that Canadian outcomes and costs are, objectively, better at lower cost. Life expectancy is higher here, infant mortality is lower.
But the current American system? A failed experiment. Try something else.
Who has more bargaining power? An individual, or a whole government?
That's really what's at stake with a lot of healthcare schemes. If you take Canada, for instance (since I live here), the doctors are basically private corporations providing care. But to work within the healthcare system, they charge what the government says they can. It's not actually illegal to set up a private hip replacement clinic (contrary to some misconception), it's just that that private clinic wouldn't be able to charge both a patient for getting to the front of the line AND bill the government for the service; the patient would have to front the whole cost. (At that point, why bother? Just fly down to the USA if you have that much money and pay for service there.) This is what Canadians are talking about when they say they're against a multi-tier system.
The government bargains on behalf of the populace, and covers essential healthcare (dental care and things like laser eye surgery aren't covered, for instance) and thereby gets a better deal on everything, saving EVERYONE money. Additionally, a healthy populace saves everyone money just through avoiding productivity loss.
I've been to the emergency room twice so far in my life, both times after being hit by a car while cycling. When facing stitches, broken teeth or bones and a whole lot of pain, I'm not in the mindset to bargain for anything. If you offered me minimal care for an outrageous price at that moment, I'd jump at it. Pain and injury really reduce one's bargaining position.
That's an absurd statement. Microsoft is still the most popular desktop OS--do you believe that they're giving consumers everything they want?
Apple WAS the biggest mobile phone platform (and they still are, by revenue)--clearly you don't believe that they're giving consumers everything they want.
Your generalities speak to an unwillingness to face up to the fact that Android DOES have issues in the market. I assure you, the folks at Google are reading this (or things like it) and factoring those things in to make sure that they continue to improve the experience. You gain nothing by pretending criticism doesn't exist--even if the criticism is hyperbolic. There are people out there that think the same way this writer does. It's worth considering that viewpoint.
iTunes has its uses. I find the smart playlist functionality fundamental to putting music on my device. It's too big for its own good now, I admit, but there are elements in iTunes that are really excellent.
I will definitely concede that it works better on a Mac than on a PC. It's just not very well implemented on the PC, which exacerbates any problems it may already have.
Once again, Slashdot commenters have a problem of technical bias. We're all technical and relatively intelligent; we are NOT the average consumer. I suspect a lot of consumers configure their phones to act like crap (or are given a version of the phone that acts like crap out of the box; I hear a lot of complaints about TouchWiz and the HTC layer). It's the same problem from the 90s and 2000s of people installing every random BS plugin that they stumbled across onto their Windows machine and wondering why the devil everything had suddenly gone to shit. (This is in contrast to many of us using Linux/FreeBSD/etc. and XWindows and configuring everything out the wazoo, but being very satisfied with the result because we knew what we were doing.)
As for smaller Android phones, Android handset makers--and this is a criticism of the handset makers only, not the OS itself, obviously--don't like offering small flagship phones. The smaller phones are always deficient to their larger counterparts in ways beyond merely the screen size. Battery life is worse, or the build quality suffers. One way or another, the phone just doesn't stand up to the iPhone as a small flagship phone. One of the things that I particularly look for in my phone is mobility, and something the size of the iPhone 4 was perfect; I'm actually disappointed that the iPhone 5 is the size it is, but it's still better than the Android phones that I've considered (Moto X, HTC One, XPeria Z--all lovely devices). I'm tied into the Apple ecosystem fairly extensively, I admit, but I want a small phone, and I can't get the *best* small phone without sticking with Apple. It's just one more factor that prevents me from jumping ship.
You're on/., so you're a technical sort of person. And you're probably a bit affluent; I rarely see anyone on here that isn't fairly well off. That means the people you're around are probably more affluent than average and possibly more technical. I'm making guesses based on very little concrete information, so you tell me how close I am.
That said, the marketshare numbers for the S3/S4 aren't huge. They do dominate the top-end of the Android market, but I as many people with inexpensive Android (including the Nexus, which is inexpensive but not 'cheap') phones as flagship phones. Certainly, if you look at the global marketshare, the Android phones absolutely dominate the low and middle end of the market, and Apple actually still tends to take the top spot, even in so-called developing economies.
It's not really even just a fast shutter, as I understand it. It's like a zillion cameras all with their own shutters being asked to capture a frame one trillionth of a second after the previous one captures a frame. It's like quantum bullet-time.
We can't really open and close a shutter that fast, but we can get electronics to trigger at extremely precise times.
(I could be mistaken; I haven't read the article in a while and I didn't reference it before writing this comment because hey: slashdot.:D)
A flexible or bendable screen is different from a screen that comes pre-curved and doesn't flex at all, I reckon.
I fail to see the point of this curved screen, honestly. Maybe it's better if you carry a large phone in your pocket?
Sometimes it's not worth being first. They may as well have come to market with a phone that's covered in mushrooms, or one that drips motor oil. This is pretty random stuff, here.
But maybe they'll prove me wrong once they actually reveal how it works.
It can't be worse than the Samsung's I've handled. And the HTC One is premium and beautiful, but that doesn't seem to be working out.
I will accept that you personally are calling it a mid-range device on the build quality alone, but so much of the commentary has focussed on how it has 'mid-range specs' and is overpriced for the screen/CPU/GPU that's in there.
There are trade-offs to be had. iPhones are top-tier devices, but they've got smaller screens than the top-tier Android phones. The S4 is a plasticky top-tier device with a big screen and a whole bunch of useless software features. Given these things, I'm not convinced the Moto X (and I admit, I haven't sat down and played with one) deserves its mid-tier accusations.
It's not a mid-range device. It's only mid-range if you look at the spec sheet and nothing else. Its (non-gamed) benchmarks are actually pretty good for all this talk of 'mid-range'. They did the same thing Apple did and tried to balance out performance with battery life. They didn't put the biggest screen in it, and they have optimised silicon to listen for commands without keeping the CPU on all the time.
Specs aren't the war that anyone should be trying to win in the mobile space. That kind of thinking is why there are phones that only last half the day.
The labour at Foxconn is actually fairly well paid. The suicide rate at the factory is LESS than in the general populace. Many workers were upset when their hours were reduced because they're only working there so they can make some money now then leave in a year or two. A lot of these people are sending money home to their farming families. There are lines outside the company of people wanting to work there. AND Apple is working to improve conditions and clamp down on working violations.
Dodging taxes is legal, though of dubious ethics. But no other large company is playing by any different rules.
Everyone is suing everyone. You think Samsung isn't also on the suing end of courtroom as well? In any case, the problem is the patent system that allows those patents in the first place; once the patent is actually accepted, Apple legally has the right to defend it. You're looking at this from the wrong side.
That 'false advertising' claim is subjective. I've never had a problem at the genius bar.
By definition, their stuff isn't overpriced because people buy it at that price. If it were overpriced, nobody would buy it. It's what the market will bear, and people are perfectly happy to pay it.
I don't know who you're talking about on the compatible hardware front, exactly, but Apple isn't under any obligation to make software that allows OS X or iOS to run. That's not unethical, that's just a philosophical discussion. If you don't like it--and I'm sure you'll tell me you don't--don't run it.
Ah, jellyfish. This is one of my favourite up-and-coming ocean doomsday scenarios.
Consider: - No hard parts, so unaffected by ocean acidification - Perform well in anoxic (low oxygen) environments - Eat everything - Have almost no nutritional value of their own - Can shrink when food resources are low, and simply eat less - Few natural predators - Some species are effectively immortal by way of reverting to earlier life stages
To a certain extent, it's a bit of a miracle that the oceans managed to ever keep them in check, but oxygenation of the oceans created whole ecosystems of creatures that could--as a group--effectively compete against jellyfish.
There's no one predator that we can release that will keep the jellyfish contained or under control. It takes whole ecosystems to combat a real jellyfish problem.
Don't sell the standard virtual keyboard short. I use mine quite competently--I've written quite long emails on my iPhone when I've been of a mind to--and I have a colleague that can put the iPad on his lap and effectively touch-type with virtually no errors at nearly the same speed as he types on a normal keyboard. Autocorrect on all platforms is, by and large, good enough. We make fun of the corrections, but they're honestly a damn sight better than the brutality of text speak.
I agree with you. We can adapt.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need
on
How BlackBerry Blew It
·
· Score: 1
But a big part of the main thrust is that the iPhone reduced both the BlackBerry and the standard candybar phone to APPS. It wasn't necessary to have a whole device that did just phoning, or one that just did messaging, you could have a device that did a lot more than that.
The iPhone wasn't cheaper, but it WAS better. It was a general purpose device in a world that previously basically just had single-purpose devices.
I can't think of anything worse for an economy than not paying people. The right thing to do would be to pay essential staff time and a half, and 'non-essential' staff, even if they didn't have to come in. Having that many people that have no money to spend that can't go out and get different jobs is brutal.
Also, just how 'non-essential' is this personel? If they're really not needed, shouldn't their absence be virtually unnoticeable? It clearly isn't, so they can't really be termed 'non-essential'.
Actually, if you look at how well the government run systems work (the Veterans' healthcare system, for instance) it's clear that the government is MUCH better at spending money as a single-payer entity than as the weirdly cobbled together chimera that it is right now. Single-payer systems have more bargaining power. They can dictate rates or at least dictate what they're willing to pay.
Business is lousy at running health care because they have no vested interest in the outcome going well. A sick patient that stays sick is worth far more money than a patient that needs one good day of care and can go home.
Part of the problem is that the sequestration rate of the Earth used to be vastly different because there was a point at which carbon based life didn't decompose in the same way. If a tree fell in the forest, it would basically stay a tree. Then it would get buried by other junk and eventually become coal or something else that we could burn.
Because life on Earth has evolved since then to use that spare biomass that's just sitting around, the sequestration rate of a rotting forest is much, much lower than what we need.
To a certain extent, what we need to do is open up a giant pit in the ground, grow a bunch of stuff that binds carbon up really quickly, and dump it in and not use it ever at all, much like ancient Earth did.
Right, and I'm currently working on a project where someone thought that template heavy code and functors everywhere without comments are the solution to everything.
The problem with C++ is that NOBODY knows how to use it. It doesn't straddle the line between functionality and readability very well, and programmers have somehow increasingly been skipping the part of their education that relates to commenting their damn code so the next poor bastard that comes along doesn't have to decipher everything from scratch.
A friend of mine (who now has a PhD in robotics and last I heard was working on autonomous vehicles) once said, "The philosophy of C++ is that you don't pay for anything that you don't use. The result is a language where there's nothing worth paying for." There are few times where the extra features of C++ don't come at a cost that's HIGHER than the benefit that they give, either syntactically or even in terms of performance.
Blocking people is much worse for so-called group-think; the logical end result is two camps that never see each other's comments and just exist in a permanent echo chamber. At least this way someone is FORCED to read another comment before voting it down. I can't moderate something for its content without being exposed to the content itself, right?
Maybe what we need is moderation points that augment the current discussion for a single user only. You'd be able to moderate the discussion so you can see the things you want, but you'd have to go through and read the comments that you don't like before modding them down. I know I'd occasionally find it very satisfying to moderate down an irritating comment, even just for my own benefit.
Or only moderators have full mod points, and everyone else gets fractional mod points. If 100 people think your comment is bad, maybe it IS bad.
That's not true. We can't know something is going to happen 100%, but we're confident enough in causality that we can perform experiments that are based on prior knowledge. We know well enough that the sun will rise tomorrow that we can build an experiment that RELIES on the sun rising tomorrow. For most practical AND philosophical purposes, there are plenty of things that we consider a 'scientific certainty'.
I agree that one should always beware of someone that claims something is 100% scientific truth, because there's always the chance that they're wrong (and frankly, the media is FAR more likely to declare something as scientific truth even though the paper that they're citing hedges and uses an endless stream of qualifiers in the statements), but there are things that are science FACTS. Evolution is a scientific FACT. That's why it has its own theory. Gravity is also a scientific fact, and also has a theory. It doesn't mean that we understand every nuance, but we know that they work.
If you're putting that much effort into hacking into my phone, well, you'd get my data no matter what I did. Frankly, I think you'd be better off packet sniffing my cellular traffic or something.
Why are you so interested in my phone that you want to lift my fingerprints onto a conductive substrate and force my phone open? What data do you think I keep on my phone that's worth so much? Once I notice my phone is gone I'm just going to remote wipe it anyway, and you can't turn THAT off without the code that I have memorised. Wait, you know that code? Well in that case you DIDN'T NEED MY FINGERPRINT AT ALL.
You don't have to use the scanner. You can use the passcode any time you like. I keep my phone in my pockets in the winter as much as possible, personally. If I really need to make a phone call, well, it's probably pretty important to force me to contemplate doing it at -30C anyway, so I'll take my glove off for 3 seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
If true--and I'm pretty sure it isn't--those doctors would've been picked up somewhere else.
The Premier of Alberta did try to tinker with the care system in the province a bit; I can't remember what her goals were, but I could believe that doctors were being laid off or shuffled from care facilities in certain parts of the province to other parts. You'll have to do better than this vague proclamation of doom to convince me, though. Alberta has a pretty great healthcare system, even as Canadian provinces go.
Yes, they are. By and large, all of those stories ARE just rumours.
Canadians aren't exactly clamouring to emulate the US system. The Canadian woman that appeared in Republican commercials trying to smear our system had a non-threatening disorder that she felt was more serious than it actually was. She wasn't being refused care because we didn't have the capacity, she was being put on a waiting list because she could afford to wait while other people that had more threatening problems were triaged up the chain first.
We have waiting lists, yes. There are times where the system fails, yes. These are problems that every system tries to work out. But people here get care, and they get it without going bankrupt. The best case scenario in the Canadian system is that you get timely care with minimal cost. The average case is probably that you got reasonably timely care with a bit of wait, but still at minimum cost. Putting aside the worst case scenarios of death or misdiagnosis which are endemic in any system that involves humans--including the American system--you may have to wait a long time for care, but you're STILL not on the hook for any costs.
Many of the best case scenarios in the USA seem to leave middle class people with great care but crippling bills. The rich get off scott free, the poor simply don't get any care at all (or emergency room care, which is too little, too late, for too much).
I can understand not necessarily wanting the Canadian system. There are actually plenty of examples of even better systems in the world. But the fact remains that Canadian outcomes and costs are, objectively, better at lower cost. Life expectancy is higher here, infant mortality is lower.
But the current American system? A failed experiment. Try something else.
Who has more bargaining power? An individual, or a whole government?
That's really what's at stake with a lot of healthcare schemes. If you take Canada, for instance (since I live here), the doctors are basically private corporations providing care. But to work within the healthcare system, they charge what the government says they can. It's not actually illegal to set up a private hip replacement clinic (contrary to some misconception), it's just that that private clinic wouldn't be able to charge both a patient for getting to the front of the line AND bill the government for the service; the patient would have to front the whole cost. (At that point, why bother? Just fly down to the USA if you have that much money and pay for service there.) This is what Canadians are talking about when they say they're against a multi-tier system.
The government bargains on behalf of the populace, and covers essential healthcare (dental care and things like laser eye surgery aren't covered, for instance) and thereby gets a better deal on everything, saving EVERYONE money. Additionally, a healthy populace saves everyone money just through avoiding productivity loss.
I've been to the emergency room twice so far in my life, both times after being hit by a car while cycling. When facing stitches, broken teeth or bones and a whole lot of pain, I'm not in the mindset to bargain for anything. If you offered me minimal care for an outrageous price at that moment, I'd jump at it. Pain and injury really reduce one's bargaining position.
That's an absurd statement. Microsoft is still the most popular desktop OS--do you believe that they're giving consumers everything they want?
Apple WAS the biggest mobile phone platform (and they still are, by revenue)--clearly you don't believe that they're giving consumers everything they want.
Your generalities speak to an unwillingness to face up to the fact that Android DOES have issues in the market. I assure you, the folks at Google are reading this (or things like it) and factoring those things in to make sure that they continue to improve the experience. You gain nothing by pretending criticism doesn't exist--even if the criticism is hyperbolic. There are people out there that think the same way this writer does. It's worth considering that viewpoint.
iTunes has its uses. I find the smart playlist functionality fundamental to putting music on my device. It's too big for its own good now, I admit, but there are elements in iTunes that are really excellent.
I will definitely concede that it works better on a Mac than on a PC. It's just not very well implemented on the PC, which exacerbates any problems it may already have.
Once again, Slashdot commenters have a problem of technical bias. We're all technical and relatively intelligent; we are NOT the average consumer. I suspect a lot of consumers configure their phones to act like crap (or are given a version of the phone that acts like crap out of the box; I hear a lot of complaints about TouchWiz and the HTC layer). It's the same problem from the 90s and 2000s of people installing every random BS plugin that they stumbled across onto their Windows machine and wondering why the devil everything had suddenly gone to shit. (This is in contrast to many of us using Linux/FreeBSD/etc. and XWindows and configuring everything out the wazoo, but being very satisfied with the result because we knew what we were doing.)
As for smaller Android phones, Android handset makers--and this is a criticism of the handset makers only, not the OS itself, obviously--don't like offering small flagship phones. The smaller phones are always deficient to their larger counterparts in ways beyond merely the screen size. Battery life is worse, or the build quality suffers. One way or another, the phone just doesn't stand up to the iPhone as a small flagship phone. One of the things that I particularly look for in my phone is mobility, and something the size of the iPhone 4 was perfect; I'm actually disappointed that the iPhone 5 is the size it is, but it's still better than the Android phones that I've considered (Moto X, HTC One, XPeria Z--all lovely devices). I'm tied into the Apple ecosystem fairly extensively, I admit, but I want a small phone, and I can't get the *best* small phone without sticking with Apple. It's just one more factor that prevents me from jumping ship.
Selection bias, essentially.
You're on /., so you're a technical sort of person. And you're probably a bit affluent; I rarely see anyone on here that isn't fairly well off. That means the people you're around are probably more affluent than average and possibly more technical. I'm making guesses based on very little concrete information, so you tell me how close I am.
That said, the marketshare numbers for the S3/S4 aren't huge. They do dominate the top-end of the Android market, but I as many people with inexpensive Android (including the Nexus, which is inexpensive but not 'cheap') phones as flagship phones. Certainly, if you look at the global marketshare, the Android phones absolutely dominate the low and middle end of the market, and Apple actually still tends to take the top spot, even in so-called developing economies.
It's not really even just a fast shutter, as I understand it. It's like a zillion cameras all with their own shutters being asked to capture a frame one trillionth of a second after the previous one captures a frame. It's like quantum bullet-time.
We can't really open and close a shutter that fast, but we can get electronics to trigger at extremely precise times.
(I could be mistaken; I haven't read the article in a while and I didn't reference it before writing this comment because hey: slashdot. :D)
A flexible or bendable screen is different from a screen that comes pre-curved and doesn't flex at all, I reckon.
I fail to see the point of this curved screen, honestly. Maybe it's better if you carry a large phone in your pocket?
Sometimes it's not worth being first. They may as well have come to market with a phone that's covered in mushrooms, or one that drips motor oil. This is pretty random stuff, here.
But maybe they'll prove me wrong once they actually reveal how it works.
It can't be worse than the Samsung's I've handled. And the HTC One is premium and beautiful, but that doesn't seem to be working out.
I will accept that you personally are calling it a mid-range device on the build quality alone, but so much of the commentary has focussed on how it has 'mid-range specs' and is overpriced for the screen/CPU/GPU that's in there.
There are trade-offs to be had. iPhones are top-tier devices, but they've got smaller screens than the top-tier Android phones. The S4 is a plasticky top-tier device with a big screen and a whole bunch of useless software features. Given these things, I'm not convinced the Moto X (and I admit, I haven't sat down and played with one) deserves its mid-tier accusations.
It's not a mid-range device. It's only mid-range if you look at the spec sheet and nothing else. Its (non-gamed) benchmarks are actually pretty good for all this talk of 'mid-range'. They did the same thing Apple did and tried to balance out performance with battery life. They didn't put the biggest screen in it, and they have optimised silicon to listen for commands without keeping the CPU on all the time.
Specs aren't the war that anyone should be trying to win in the mobile space. That kind of thinking is why there are phones that only last half the day.
The labour at Foxconn is actually fairly well paid. The suicide rate at the factory is LESS than in the general populace. Many workers were upset when their hours were reduced because they're only working there so they can make some money now then leave in a year or two. A lot of these people are sending money home to their farming families. There are lines outside the company of people wanting to work there. AND Apple is working to improve conditions and clamp down on working violations.
Dodging taxes is legal, though of dubious ethics. But no other large company is playing by any different rules.
Everyone is suing everyone. You think Samsung isn't also on the suing end of courtroom as well? In any case, the problem is the patent system that allows those patents in the first place; once the patent is actually accepted, Apple legally has the right to defend it. You're looking at this from the wrong side.
That 'false advertising' claim is subjective. I've never had a problem at the genius bar.
By definition, their stuff isn't overpriced because people buy it at that price. If it were overpriced, nobody would buy it. It's what the market will bear, and people are perfectly happy to pay it.
I don't know who you're talking about on the compatible hardware front, exactly, but Apple isn't under any obligation to make software that allows OS X or iOS to run. That's not unethical, that's just a philosophical discussion. If you don't like it--and I'm sure you'll tell me you don't--don't run it.
Ah, jellyfish. This is one of my favourite up-and-coming ocean doomsday scenarios.
Consider:
- No hard parts, so unaffected by ocean acidification
- Perform well in anoxic (low oxygen) environments
- Eat everything
- Have almost no nutritional value of their own
- Can shrink when food resources are low, and simply eat less
- Few natural predators
- Some species are effectively immortal by way of reverting to earlier life stages
To a certain extent, it's a bit of a miracle that the oceans managed to ever keep them in check, but oxygenation of the oceans created whole ecosystems of creatures that could--as a group--effectively compete against jellyfish.
There's no one predator that we can release that will keep the jellyfish contained or under control. It takes whole ecosystems to combat a real jellyfish problem.
Here's a review of a book written by Dr. Lisa Gershwin (composer Gershwin's granddaughter, I believe) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/?pagination=false
Fortunately, humans are adept at obliterating species if they can get a taste for them. Better acquire a taste for them quick.
Don't sell the standard virtual keyboard short. I use mine quite competently--I've written quite long emails on my iPhone when I've been of a mind to--and I have a colleague that can put the iPad on his lap and effectively touch-type with virtually no errors at nearly the same speed as he types on a normal keyboard. Autocorrect on all platforms is, by and large, good enough. We make fun of the corrections, but they're honestly a damn sight better than the brutality of text speak.
I agree with you. We can adapt.
This article at Stratechery has some interesting points about 'disruption' and being 'obsoletive'. http://stratechery.com/2013/obsoletive/
But a big part of the main thrust is that the iPhone reduced both the BlackBerry and the standard candybar phone to APPS. It wasn't necessary to have a whole device that did just phoning, or one that just did messaging, you could have a device that did a lot more than that.
The iPhone wasn't cheaper, but it WAS better. It was a general purpose device in a world that previously basically just had single-purpose devices.
Anyway, the article is worth a read.
Narcc, I'd like to BUY your rock!
I can't think of anything worse for an economy than not paying people. The right thing to do would be to pay essential staff time and a half, and 'non-essential' staff, even if they didn't have to come in. Having that many people that have no money to spend that can't go out and get different jobs is brutal.
Also, just how 'non-essential' is this personel? If they're really not needed, shouldn't their absence be virtually unnoticeable? It clearly isn't, so they can't really be termed 'non-essential'.
Actually, if you look at how well the government run systems work (the Veterans' healthcare system, for instance) it's clear that the government is MUCH better at spending money as a single-payer entity than as the weirdly cobbled together chimera that it is right now. Single-payer systems have more bargaining power. They can dictate rates or at least dictate what they're willing to pay.
Business is lousy at running health care because they have no vested interest in the outcome going well. A sick patient that stays sick is worth far more money than a patient that needs one good day of care and can go home.
The warming is a measured value. It's not up for debate because we can see it right there.
At this point, most deniers don't even deny that the planet is warming, merely that humans have anything to do with it.
Part of the problem is that the sequestration rate of the Earth used to be vastly different because there was a point at which carbon based life didn't decompose in the same way. If a tree fell in the forest, it would basically stay a tree. Then it would get buried by other junk and eventually become coal or something else that we could burn.
Because life on Earth has evolved since then to use that spare biomass that's just sitting around, the sequestration rate of a rotting forest is much, much lower than what we need.
To a certain extent, what we need to do is open up a giant pit in the ground, grow a bunch of stuff that binds carbon up really quickly, and dump it in and not use it ever at all, much like ancient Earth did.
Right, and I'm currently working on a project where someone thought that template heavy code and functors everywhere without comments are the solution to everything.
The problem with C++ is that NOBODY knows how to use it. It doesn't straddle the line between functionality and readability very well, and programmers have somehow increasingly been skipping the part of their education that relates to commenting their damn code so the next poor bastard that comes along doesn't have to decipher everything from scratch.
A friend of mine (who now has a PhD in robotics and last I heard was working on autonomous vehicles) once said, "The philosophy of C++ is that you don't pay for anything that you don't use. The result is a language where there's nothing worth paying for." There are few times where the extra features of C++ don't come at a cost that's HIGHER than the benefit that they give, either syntactically or even in terms of performance.
Here's a page that runs down some of the most egregious problems with C++. It's broken by design. http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html
Blocking people is much worse for so-called group-think; the logical end result is two camps that never see each other's comments and just exist in a permanent echo chamber. At least this way someone is FORCED to read another comment before voting it down. I can't moderate something for its content without being exposed to the content itself, right?
Maybe what we need is moderation points that augment the current discussion for a single user only. You'd be able to moderate the discussion so you can see the things you want, but you'd have to go through and read the comments that you don't like before modding them down. I know I'd occasionally find it very satisfying to moderate down an irritating comment, even just for my own benefit.
Or only moderators have full mod points, and everyone else gets fractional mod points. If 100 people think your comment is bad, maybe it IS bad.
That's not true. We can't know something is going to happen 100%, but we're confident enough in causality that we can perform experiments that are based on prior knowledge. We know well enough that the sun will rise tomorrow that we can build an experiment that RELIES on the sun rising tomorrow. For most practical AND philosophical purposes, there are plenty of things that we consider a 'scientific certainty'.
I agree that one should always beware of someone that claims something is 100% scientific truth, because there's always the chance that they're wrong (and frankly, the media is FAR more likely to declare something as scientific truth even though the paper that they're citing hedges and uses an endless stream of qualifiers in the statements), but there are things that are science FACTS. Evolution is a scientific FACT. That's why it has its own theory. Gravity is also a scientific fact, and also has a theory. It doesn't mean that we understand every nuance, but we know that they work.
If you're putting that much effort into hacking into my phone, well, you'd get my data no matter what I did. Frankly, I think you'd be better off packet sniffing my cellular traffic or something.
Why are you so interested in my phone that you want to lift my fingerprints onto a conductive substrate and force my phone open? What data do you think I keep on my phone that's worth so much? Once I notice my phone is gone I'm just going to remote wipe it anyway, and you can't turn THAT off without the code that I have memorised. Wait, you know that code? Well in that case you DIDN'T NEED MY FINGERPRINT AT ALL.
You don't have to use the scanner. You can use the passcode any time you like. I keep my phone in my pockets in the winter as much as possible, personally. If I really need to make a phone call, well, it's probably pretty important to force me to contemplate doing it at -30C anyway, so I'll take my glove off for 3 seconds.