I'm guessing this has given you a better informed perspective on the problems that Healthcare.gov has to solve. So what's your opinion on the struggles, do you feel like Healthcare.gov really screwed up a doable task or was the problem a lot more technically challenging than most people realize?
And do you think HealthSherpa or other 3rd party sites have the potential to eventually offer signups and fill the role of the Federal Exchange?
That's one major reason I wanted to bring this story here. Poor choices regarding the regulation of wood stoves can (as those regulations squeeze the availability of these stoves) result in deaths, especially since manufacturing repair parts for "illegal" stoves is a consequence of "you can't manufacture these stoves."
It's not like people use wood stoves to drive the kids to school; they're mostly used to avoid the hazards of freezing temperatures in the winter. Frostbite and hypothermia aren't commonly seen as positive outcomes of government regulations.
Well the first question is do the new regs seriously impact the design and capabilities of new stoves, or is it something the manufacturer's can accomplish without many tradeoffs but they haven't bothered to previously because there was no incentive.
And I'd say car regs are much higher stakes than stove regs as car issues can result in fairly instantaneous death. If your stove is inadequate to heat your house than there's countermeasures you can take such as more clothing, better insulation, closing doors to unused rooms, huddling right around the stove in particularly bad conditions, etc. A less effective stove is a nuisance (if that is the outcome) but it's a nuisance you can readily plan for and adapt to.
The thing is uninsured were already being treated and paid for, but they were doing it in emergency rooms so it was very inefficient and the insured were picking up the tab. A broken leg is one thing, but what if a young uninsured person gets cancer? It's very probable that they won't have the money to pay so what's your solution?
As for the passage, it was a specific Republican strategy to oppose any Democratic attempt at healthcare reform because passage, specifically bipartisan passage, would be seen as an accomplishment by Obama. Through consistent opposition they were able to make the bill highly unpopular and win more seats. But the cost was they ended up having almost no say on a major piece of legislation.
The ACA is a Democratic version of a Republican idea.
The Republican's were more than welcome to participate, but they knew that any serious reform would be interpreted as a victory for Obama and the Democrats, so they made the decision to make the bill as unpopular as possible, and that involved never entering serious negotiations to avoid the appearance of bipartisanship.
The reason people say they had no alternative is because they didn't, and that was a strategic decision. It's easy to make proposals, but who cares about a dozen different congress critters giving a dozen different ideas, none of which have a serious push even in their own party. You can't cover it in the media because it's just a shell game, if you criticize one they start talking about another. The Republican party has a whole news network devoted to promoting their views, if they were interested in passing a different model it would have been trivial to get the message out.
The Republicans had three basic choices when Obama proposed mandate based healthcare reform:
1) Enter the ACA discussion and negotiate some concessions like weakening the employer based system and allowing for catastrophic plans in exchange for support.
2) Come up with a different model for fixing healthcare, promote the hell out of it, and convince the public why it's better. If you've got something that solves the problem of the uninsured, pre-existing conditions, and all these other problems than present it!
3) Stand back and criticize the ACA without offering an alternative or any reasonable ground to enter negotiations with the objective of making Obama's must-pass legislation as unpopular as possible. This is the path they chose, they've succeeded in making the law very unpopular, but they've also ended up with a very Democratic version of what could have been a very Republican system.
I'm not sure that study is saying what you think it's saying.
The way I read it is that glucose causes inflammation in diabetic patients, which makes sense because too much glucose is toxic to your cells which is why we need insulin in the first place.
Insulin isn't the thing causing the heart disease, it's the thing preventing it.
As for carbs causing heart disease, if you're diabetic and unable to manage the glucose response than the study suggests that you'll have inflammation which damages a lot of things, probably including the heart (I assume this is the primary cause of the health issues that diabetics experience). But if you're non-diabetic than you can keep the glucose at the appropriate level and I don't see why carbs would be a problem.
Everyone is focusing on the obvious benefits of PR and trying to spread adoption and avoiding cheaper competitors gaining market share.
But I suspect even if you completely removed these benefits the donations make a profit for MS.
How? First subtract the revenue of the tiny handful of non-profits that would purchase Win8 on their own, then add the tax writeoffs they get from all the "donated" copies of Windows.
Can any accountants chime in on whether they could save more on their taxes than it actually cost to set up the program?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, aka Blade Runner, is a whole novel.
It's also a very different story than Blade Runner the movie.
The thing that typically makes a great novel is the inner dialogue of the characters.
The thing that typically makes a great movie is the characters.
If you just try to film what's on the page it's going to suck, I really feel the best adaptions capture the central idea of the novel but otherwise treat it as a guidebook.
Patents aren't about promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, they're about a business model based on rent-extraction via arcane legal means. As alternative manufacturing options such as 3D printing mature (assuming they're not strangled by the patent titans) patents will become as obsolete and ineffective as copyright is now.
I think this is conflating two very different issues.
Copyright has become controversial because information has never been as easy to copy, transform, and communicate. A hundred years ago sharing a book involved setting up a printing press, sharing a song involved building a radio station, the additional burden necessitated by handling copyrights was relatively minor. With information now trivial to communicate there's a huge amount of pressure to minimize that last barrier.
Patents have become controversial because they're being awarded simply for being the first one to explore a specific area or question rather than serious inventions. The standards may or may not be different from the past but the pace of innovation has become so fast that if you do anything remotely modern you'll probably hit a patent, and if you haven't you can probably patent it yourself.
I think the main thing they share is they're both IP, and as such the US government has a strong motivation to make the laws strong because that US is still very good at generating IP.
No. The House of Representatives is not a head of state, it's an elected body of those to whom the people delegate their authority and in whom the control of the government's purse strings are trusted by the constitution.
The House of Representatives has the duty of starting the budget process, but if the President and the Senate whom also have authority delegated by the people aren't supposed to have a say then why do they?
If the Republicans controlled the Presidency and Senate and the Democrats only held the house how would you feel about the Democrats threatening a shutdown and halting the debt ceiling if they didn't get a program implementing background checks for all gut purchases? That would be funded so it's not much less a budget question than defunding the ACA. Why would that be invalid and the ACA tactic is valid?
My solution is for the government to get as far away from healthcare as possible.
So just to be clear what happens if a poor person shows up at a hospital with a broken arm, or cancer, and they don't even have enough money to pay for pain killers?
I'm going to guess this is code for "Huh, I looked for those hundreds of cases of fraud that I heard Republican X describe in state Y for election Z, and it turned out that of all those hundreds of alleged cases none/virtually none of them turned out to be fraud"
No, it's code for "Sorry, I'm not dumb enough to engage in any game where my opponent is the sole arbiter of the rules."
Case 1: An unnamed "former GOP official" (unnamed though maybe identifiable in the source article) who had voted absentee in the past and apparently was told he'd voted absentee this last time too. I couldn't find any follow up. So we have the possibility he actually did vote absentee a while ago and simply forgot, or there was a clerical error that later got cleared up or not (we never got a resolution, surely there's paperwork around the absentee application), or he lied (there are hyper-partisans that would do that), or that some sort of voter fraud occurred, but even if it did would voter ID laws have even fixed it?
Case 2: "A report at the Herald-Bulletin said that a “printing glitch” caused voters in Indiana to be turned away after being told the entire precinct voted absentee." So not only is the second case nothing to do with fraud, but it actually offers an alternative hypothesis to the fraud allegation in the first case!!
Case 3: "An article at Twitchy says that a number of people reported being told they had already voted." Oooh, this sounds promising. And their damning evidence is.... tweets. Oh yes, someone tweeted it so it must be true! Just check out their brilliant reporting How many have actually gotten away with it? These Twitter users claim that they have.
"Voted voted voted! I voted three times."
Yeah, because that person couldn't possibly be joking or trolling!
Case 4: The Blaze (Glenn Beck's org, that's reliable!). Showing an unidentified person claiming to have voted multiple times on FB. Oh no! It's way harder to make up things on FB than Twitter!
Now, you'll argue some variant of "Well, I said 'significant' and for all you know these individuals were an anomaly, unless you can provide documentation of whatever arbitrary figure I decide is 'significant', I'm going to ignore your cases of voter fraud".
The constitution gives the power of the purse to the House of Representatives. It's the House's prerogative to determine what gets funded and what does not. The shutdown occurred because Senate Democrats wanted to obstruct the House's Constitutionally provided power.
Weird, I wasn't aware the US was a Constitutional Monarchy where the Senate is a rubber stamp and the Head of State a figurehead. I thought when all three branches had a saw they had roughly proportional power.
I reject the premise that it's the government's role to solve all problems.
I didn't ask you to have the government solve all the problems, I asked you to give a solution. If you wish that solution can be take the government out of healthcare entirely but actually give an alternative.
Only in their official capacity as a government representative. But notice that at the beginning of ever session of the Supreme Court, the phrase "God save the United States and this Honorable Court!" is uttered. Does THAT violate the Separation of Church and State?
I would say so, you believe the government violates the constitution in some ways, I believe they violate it in others.
That's the sticky wicket, isn't it? You would be the arbiter of "significant". I'll decline to play that game.
I'm going to guess this is code for "Huh, I looked for those hundreds of cases of fraud that I heard Republican X describe in state Y for election Z, and it turned out that of all those hundreds of alleged cases none/virtually none of them turned out to be fraud"
We are not aware of any documented cases in which individual noncitizens have either intentionally registered to vote or voted while knowing that they were ineligible
Well there go the illegal aliens. Not sure what other kind of "fraud" you're thinking of but the only other ID specific one I can think of would be dead voters and double voting, and in both cases the documented cases were in the range of "handful". Is that significant enough to enact a law that will suppress voter turnout?
The shutdown wasn't about the debt ceiling. It was about the Democrats refusing to fund any discretionary spending unless Republicans were willing to fund it all.
It was about the Republicans tying to force Democrats to defund ObamaCare, the partial funding offers were just a way to turn phrase it as a negotiation rather than a hostage taking.
It's possible to advocate for not raising the debt ceiling while enforcing the individual mandate.
Medicare and the VA are still voluntary. If a veteran decides to eschew VA coverage and pay out of pocket for medical care, the administration won't send men with guns to take a tax penalty from him.
An elderly person has the ability to not participate in medicare.
True but the old system had a serious freeloader problem already. Sick uninsured people would go to Emergency to seek treatment in the least efficient way possible.
Either you turn them away to die (unconscionable). Cover them with some kind of public healthcare (Tea Party should hate that). Do what they were doing previously, which is to have them covered only by the people paying insurance (Tea Party should have that more). Or have a mandate.
What solution do you have for this problem that is consistent with the Tea Party principals?
It's bore possible to default on future financial obligations, the definition of default precludes that. It would have been austerity, not default. One can make a convincing argument that forced austerity would be far worse, in the short term, than austerity. I would agree, but that still doesn't change what default means.
So I played a bit loose with the terminology but default could eventually lead to actual default if receipts plummet or have an unexpected shortfall and there's insufficient capital to pay the debt.
No, the Supreme Court has consistently interpreted the constitution to mean what it says. No forced prayer in schools, no required learning of any particular religious doctrine but there is also the free exercise clause.
But exercise is very limited when you're a representative of the government, prayer to open council meetings is a definite problem as are religious displays in schools and on government property.
I'll agree that voter ID laws are aimed at disenfranchising two key Democrat voting blocks, illegal aliens and fraudsters. That's why leftists are so dead set against them.
Your source is clearly biased, it would he like if I used the Cato institute as a source.
LK
Ok. Show me the fraud. Show me the cases of illegal aliens or fraudsters casting votes in any significant numbers in any election.
Many establishment Republicans supported an individual mandate. They're the ones who pressured Boehner to to cave during the shutdown.
Heritage Action, the advocacy wing of the Heritage Foundation who endorsed the mandate for 15 years, was in favour of going into default.
You still haven't explained their support for MediCare or the VA.
The government was never in danger of a default on the debt. The debt service would have been paid first. What we were looking at was forced austerity, not default.
It probably wouldn't have default on its debt but it would have defaulted on its funding obligations.
There is no "Separation of church and state" in the constitution. There is a prohibition on establishment of a state religion.
The courts have consistently interpreted it to mean separation of church and state, how is school prayer and teaching of religious theories (creationism) anything but establishment of a state religion?
In what way does an ID requirement disenfranchise minorities? You have to argue that minorities are too stupid to figure out how to get an ID if you think that requiring one is designed to disenfranchise them.
But, never let the truth get in the way of your leftist rhetoric.
LK
Or that minorities are poor and less likely to have ID, Voter ID laws disenfranchise people and the occurrence of voter fraud is vanishingly low. Republicans are usually smart enough not to say they're trying to disenfranchise voters explicitly but if you look around there's plenty of quotes where they openly admit the goal of the laws is to win elections. I'm sorry but the evidence that Voter ID laws are designed to disenfranchise Democratic leaning voters is fairly overwhelming and I'm happy to throw more evidence at you if you continue to disagree.
I think that's more an effect of the Tea Party not having had time to get really inconsistent though there's still instances. A lot of the Tea Party members (including the Heritage foundation) supported an individual mandate before '08.
They also make a huge noise about the debt, but the killing the ACA and not raising taxes trumps that (apparently they don't think much of contracts either as they were willing to default). And they want smaller government, except when that smaller government would reduce MediCare. They care about the Constitution, except for the parts about separation of church and state, and they apparently have no problem with laws designed to disenfranchise minorities.
The relative consistency of the Tea Party so far has to do with the fact that all they have to do is disagree with Obama and vote against the ACA, so as long as he's consistent they can be too. But their defining attribute is tribalism, and if they ever get in power and try to do something proactive that consistency is going to fall.
No, politicians and bureaucrats need to understand mathematics better so that they realize exactly how much heat you'd have to remove to start influencing geological events. Especially ones that measure 4000 km3...
While cheap geothermal would be nice I actually don't mind if they're hesitant to start poking the magma filled bubble that is eventually going to burst and wipe out the continent.
It's actually worse than that. The topic of study is on the impact of climate change on Nebraska, but the bill says they're only supposed to look at "cyclical" changes.
I think it's more like asking biologists to study the effects of antibiotic resistance, but they're not allowed to use evolution and must assume that the DNA of the bacteria doesn't significantly change over time.
I'd agree with that analogy. Except I see this as commissioning a study to focus on other possible causes of antibiotic resistance outside of DNA changes. Or are you assuming that evolution of DNA is the only possible means of acquiring resistance to antibiotics? That perhaps the host environment plays no role?
The politics here should not be discounted. The group that's refusing is a politically appointed commission, and they taking a political position before they've even read the study proposal. They've gone to the media claiming that the study proposal is rigged because it contains the single word "cyclical". I would think this is not exactly the unbiased group that should be doing this research.
I thought I explained it clearly but I believe you still misunderstand the purpose of the study. It isn't analogous to "commissioning a study to focus on other possible causes of antibiotic resistance outside of DNA changes" because that's a question of basic science and the Nebraska legislature has neither the expertise nor the motive to ask basic science questions.
The original study isn't about finding evidence to re-affirm AGW any more than the modified study is about finding evidence to deny it. The studies are because the Nebraska legislature wants to know what's going to happen to Nebraska.
The modified study wants to know what will climate change do to Nebraska if there is no climate change. The motive of this pointless study is so the legislator can wave the study around and say "See! We commissioned a study to ask what global warming would do to Nebraska and even the scientists said it wouldn't do anything!"
By refusing to do the study the scientists are protecting the integrity of government funded science and are absolutely doing the right thing.
It is the scientists who are refusing to study it who are being political, to the detriment of science. They should be taken out and shot. Or at least kicked out of any professional organizations they belong to.
The problem is, the study they where asked to take had as part of its *premise* that it was caused by non human means.
This is a bit like asking physicists to come up with a reason that newtons apple falls that DOESNT involve gravity. It just stops being science.
It's actually worse than that. The topic of study is on the impact of climate change on Nebraska, but the bill says they're only supposed to look at "cyclical" changes.
I think it's more like asking biologists to study the effects of antibiotic resistance, but they're not allowed to use evolution and must assume that the DNA of the bacteria doesn't significantly change over time.
Not only is it a nonsense question studying a fictitious universe. It's a completely useless question since there isn't any such thing as antibiotic resistance without evolution.
What's the effect of climate change on Nebraska if you assume all the climate changes are cyclical? Well nothing, because if the changes are cyclical there is no climate change.
We're not operating at the fringes of the size limit so our biology can adapt more easily.
A more relevant question might be what limits an Elephant's size. Would a slightly larger elephant have trouble extracting enough oxygen from the atmosphere to survive?
But he's not analyzing something, he's trying to fix a broken incomplete project. He might be brilliant in his field but that doesn't mean he's an expert project manager or knows enough about software for his "end of November" prediction to have any credibility.
Of course that's not really a bad thing, if your priority is simply to get it up and running the current team who bungled it is still the best bet. Zients might just be shuffling deckchairs in an effort to satisfy critics while they try to fix the code.
but Governments still have strong incentives to reduce spending
And they have strong incentives to increase spending as well. Why are you even trying to argue this particular point, when you can just look at actual government spending and see a large number of the governments are very out of control when it comes to spending, contrary to your assertion?
There are several reasons why governments overspend
1) Other people's money
2) Powerful interest groups who benefit from the spending
3) Bureaucracy lobbies for it.
4) Voters really value the service
5) Voters dislike taxes more than they dislike deficits. This doesn't cause specific spending so much as it causes spending to be overspending.
1 still holds for AGW spending, but for 2 contrary to your claims about green groups the balance of the interest groups is against AGW.
As for 3 the AGW bureaucracy is new, so causality wise it can't really be the cause of the spending.
For 4 the only service is mitigating the future damage of AGW, and if there's any direct effect on the voter it's a small cost.
And 5 isn't really relevant other than encouraging carbon caps instead of taxes.
The thing is almost all the factors that cause governments to overspend are absent from AGW, so you're left with the fact they feel that spending is unusually necessary.
You're still left making the ridiculous assertion that governments want to spend more money and run bigger deficits.
If you had actually kept up with the thread, you would have noticed that I don't make that assertion.
Poorly phrased on my part. Any bureaucracy certainly tries to capture funding but Governments still have strong incentives to reduce spending. The idea that the bureaucracy is so powerful they're able to spend 20% of the budget on nothing is essentially a conspiracy theory.
Governments actually don't want to spend money, and they don't want high taxes. But they want certain services more so are willing to spend a lot of money and run big deficits.
"Services" that happen to require a lot of flunkies, shiny buildings, pretty hardware, and a nice view. And as I note, some of those "services" seem rather imaginary in nature.
I'm entirely unconvinced that governments would spend that kind of money if they weren't convinced AGW was true.
That's ok. You can change your mind later when you get an attack of common sense. When you actually see governments act in this way as I have, you realize that they'd do a lot worse than spend vast sums of money on imaginary problems.
The only time I've seen governments spend anything comparable on possibly imaginary problems is when it comes to visceral threats like security. AGW is an incredibly abstract threat and I can't see the incentives pushing them to unnecessary spending.
And do you have any precedence for modern science making the kind of mistake you allege they're making with AGW?
(you also have the inconvenient fact of all those private insurance companies who are convinced AGW is real and placing their bets accordingly)
I see talk without action. It's only a fact, if it's actually happening. I'll just point out the often missed fact that most such alleged AGW damage is actually very specific, US flood damage which is caused by subsidizing the insuring of property in flood-prone areas rather than some climatic issue.
We just had a story about the insurance companies believing AGW. Even if their current action is just related to insurance related to flooding they still think something is changing the probabilities involving flooding.
To flip it around there's only two entities who have both the expertise to investigate and an incentive to understand the long term effects of AGW. Governments and insurance, and both are betting on AGW. Is there any entity with skin in the game betting the other way?
That would have been a true statement twenty years ago, it isn't any more. And fossil fuels won't be at existential risk until the developing world and OPEC comply. That probably won't happen until fossil fuels aren't particularly competitive with the other choices out there IMHO.
Green industries are still tiny compared to fossil fuels. As for fossil fuels, if the AGW **** really starts to hit the fan the developing world and OPEC might not be given much of an option to not comply, unfortunately by that time it might be too late to do anything about it.
Governments spending taxpayer money weakens the incentive effect but doesn't make it vanish.
And if you kill a lot of passenger pigeons, you just greatly weaken their numbers, you don't actually drive them to extinction. The problem with these sorts of assertions is that you can do enough of the activity in question to make something vanish even when it was very numerous at one time.
The EU politicians have every reason to spend as little on AGW as possible.
I already explained why that wasn't true. There's a lot of room for empire building once you have an eternal crisis like catastrophic AGW or the US's War on Drugs.
You're still left making the ridiculous assertion that governments want to spend more money and run bigger deficits.
Governments actually don't want to spend money, and they don't want high taxes. But they want certain services more so are willing to spend a lot of money and run big deficits.
I'm entirely unconvinced that governments would spend that kind of money if they weren't convinced AGW was true.
(you also have the inconvenient fact of all those private insurance companies who are convinced AGW is real and placing their bets accordingly)
If that capital didn't go to renewable energy and public transportation it would go to other investment opportunities. There might be a claim that finance could get slightly bigger by regulating the carbon credit markets but that's not a particularly strong incentive, particularly when compared to the massive incentives of the automotive and fossil fuel industries.
I see words, but I don't see a relevant argument. The incentives I mention are just as big as they are for those fossil fuel-dependent industries, even if you choose not to recognize them as such.
They're not remotely the same size. Green industry is TINY. Finance will get money from wherever. News has a big incentive to downplay the scientific consensus to generate controversy. And fossil fuels are an industry worth trillions of dollars that's at existential risk if AGW predictions are accepted.
At least you're asking the question. For the scientists, the conflict comes between the obligation to try to do accurate and unbiased scientific work versus the funding incentive to report research in a way that elevates the significance of climate change.
So I could see a slight institutional bias but there's still a strong individual bias to prove others wrong. Plus even if you want to show X and the answer is Y you still need to hide Y in your paper, sneak it past the reviewers, and hope no other researcher find your error and scores an easy publication at the expense of your reputation. Again it's economics, the individual scientist's strongest incentive is to publish the most credible piece of research.
For the funding sources, there's a similar conflict between the public obligation to fund accurate and unbiased research versus the bureaucratic benefits to be had from portraying an existential threat, real or imaginary, to modern society. The latter means larger budgets and more power to the bureaucracy that can justify them to society at large.
There's a much stronger bias from politicians who simply want bad news to go away so it's not their fault and they don't have to fix it.
It also reeks to me of a con job. There's always a glib answer to every complaint, language is abused to score propaganda points (such as the widespread use of "climate change" when AGW is meant), everything needs to be done right now, when you scratch the surface on a lot of this research, questionable or sloppy assumptions quickly show up, and these mistakes always favor a more aggressive interpretation of AGW. For example, criticism of a lack of obvious harm from near future AGW were met with the magical discovery of "extreme weather" (something the IPCC is apparently quietly dropping from its latest report BTW).
Well "climate change" is used because while the globe as a whole is getting warmer individual climates (like Europe) could get a lot colder.
As for "extreme weather" they've got a brochure on it but I'm not really sure what you're talking about.
As for the mistakes, when someone makes a mistake that favours a too aggressive scenario the denialists go "Ahah! They're trying to scare people!" and when the mistake underestimates the danger the denialists go "Ahah! We told you they were exaggerating!"
When one of the first real reports, the Stern review to attempt to quantify future harm of AGW was created, it made a major sloppy assumption by assuming discount rates about half as large as world chained GDP growth (completely ignoring that chained GDP growth is a better measure of ability to pay for future harm) and justified this on a major bogus basis, that a more reasonable discount rate was "immoral". That change alone ended up doubling for every 50 year period out future estimated costs of AGW. And of course, there's the recent weakening of recent climate predictions by the IPCC to reflect that current climate trends don't agree with the old models the IPCC used in previous reports.
I don't know a lot about the Stern review but it sounds like it may have had some issues, but a bad report doesn't mean that AGW isn't an issue.
This reminds me of a saying I've heard credited, apocryphally perhaps, to Will Rogers. "You expect cashiers to make mistakes on occasion. But when the mistakes are always in the cashier's favor, you have to wonder."
But if you only look at the mistakes that are in cashier's favour you're going to think every cashier to be dirty.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing this has given you a better informed perspective on the problems that Healthcare.gov has to solve. So what's your opinion on the struggles, do you feel like Healthcare.gov really screwed up a doable task or was the problem a lot more technically challenging than most people realize?
And do you think HealthSherpa or other 3rd party sites have the potential to eventually offer signups and fill the role of the Federal Exchange?
That's one major reason I wanted to bring this story here. Poor choices regarding the regulation of wood stoves can (as those regulations squeeze the availability of these stoves) result in deaths, especially since manufacturing repair parts for "illegal" stoves is a consequence of "you can't manufacture these stoves."
It's not like people use wood stoves to drive the kids to school; they're mostly used to avoid the hazards of freezing temperatures in the winter. Frostbite and hypothermia aren't commonly seen as positive outcomes of government regulations.
Well the first question is do the new regs seriously impact the design and capabilities of new stoves, or is it something the manufacturer's can accomplish without many tradeoffs but they haven't bothered to previously because there was no incentive.
And I'd say car regs are much higher stakes than stove regs as car issues can result in fairly instantaneous death. If your stove is inadequate to heat your house than there's countermeasures you can take such as more clothing, better insulation, closing doors to unused rooms, huddling right around the stove in particularly bad conditions, etc. A less effective stove is a nuisance (if that is the outcome) but it's a nuisance you can readily plan for and adapt to.
The thing is uninsured were already being treated and paid for, but they were doing it in emergency rooms so it was very inefficient and the insured were picking up the tab. A broken leg is one thing, but what if a young uninsured person gets cancer? It's very probable that they won't have the money to pay so what's your solution?
As for the passage, it was a specific Republican strategy to oppose any Democratic attempt at healthcare reform because passage, specifically bipartisan passage, would be seen as an accomplishment by Obama. Through consistent opposition they were able to make the bill highly unpopular and win more seats. But the cost was they ended up having almost no say on a major piece of legislation.
The ACA is a Democratic version of a Republican idea.
The Republican's were more than welcome to participate, but they knew that any serious reform would be interpreted as a victory for Obama and the Democrats, so they made the decision to make the bill as unpopular as possible, and that involved never entering serious negotiations to avoid the appearance of bipartisanship.
The reason people say they had no alternative is because they didn't, and that was a strategic decision. It's easy to make proposals, but who cares about a dozen different congress critters giving a dozen different ideas, none of which have a serious push even in their own party. You can't cover it in the media because it's just a shell game, if you criticize one they start talking about another. The Republican party has a whole news network devoted to promoting their views, if they were interested in passing a different model it would have been trivial to get the message out.
The Republicans had three basic choices when Obama proposed mandate based healthcare reform:
1) Enter the ACA discussion and negotiate some concessions like weakening the employer based system and allowing for catastrophic plans in exchange for support.
2) Come up with a different model for fixing healthcare, promote the hell out of it, and convince the public why it's better. If you've got something that solves the problem of the uninsured, pre-existing conditions, and all these other problems than present it!
3) Stand back and criticize the ACA without offering an alternative or any reasonable ground to enter negotiations with the objective of making Obama's must-pass legislation as unpopular as possible. This is the path they chose, they've succeeded in making the law very unpopular, but they've also ended up with a very Democratic version of what could have been a very Republican system.
I'm not sure that study is saying what you think it's saying.
The way I read it is that glucose causes inflammation in diabetic patients, which makes sense because too much glucose is toxic to your cells which is why we need insulin in the first place.
Insulin isn't the thing causing the heart disease, it's the thing preventing it.
As for carbs causing heart disease, if you're diabetic and unable to manage the glucose response than the study suggests that you'll have inflammation which damages a lot of things, probably including the heart (I assume this is the primary cause of the health issues that diabetics experience). But if you're non-diabetic than you can keep the glucose at the appropriate level and I don't see why carbs would be a problem.
even though carbs, and the associated insulin response, have been linked with increased risk of heart disease.
Citation? I know insulin resistance is associated with heart disease but that's something different
Everyone is focusing on the obvious benefits of PR and trying to spread adoption and avoiding cheaper competitors gaining market share.
But I suspect even if you completely removed these benefits the donations make a profit for MS.
How? First subtract the revenue of the tiny handful of non-profits that would purchase Win8 on their own, then add the tax writeoffs they get from all the "donated" copies of Windows.
Can any accountants chime in on whether they could save more on their taxes than it actually cost to set up the program?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, aka Blade Runner, is a whole novel.
It's also a very different story than Blade Runner the movie.
The thing that typically makes a great novel is the inner dialogue of the characters.
The thing that typically makes a great movie is the characters.
If you just try to film what's on the page it's going to suck, I really feel the best adaptions capture the central idea of the novel but otherwise treat it as a guidebook.
Patents aren't about promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, they're about a business model based on rent-extraction via arcane legal means. As alternative manufacturing options such as 3D printing mature (assuming they're not strangled by the patent titans) patents will become as obsolete and ineffective as copyright is now.
I think this is conflating two very different issues.
Copyright has become controversial because information has never been as easy to copy, transform, and communicate. A hundred years ago sharing a book involved setting up a printing press, sharing a song involved building a radio station, the additional burden necessitated by handling copyrights was relatively minor. With information now trivial to communicate there's a huge amount of pressure to minimize that last barrier.
Patents have become controversial because they're being awarded simply for being the first one to explore a specific area or question rather than serious inventions. The standards may or may not be different from the past but the pace of innovation has become so fast that if you do anything remotely modern you'll probably hit a patent, and if you haven't you can probably patent it yourself.
I think the main thing they share is they're both IP, and as such the US government has a strong motivation to make the laws strong because that US is still very good at generating IP.
No. The House of Representatives is not a head of state, it's an elected body of those to whom the people delegate their authority and in whom the control of the government's purse strings are trusted by the constitution.
The House of Representatives has the duty of starting the budget process, but if the President and the Senate whom also have authority delegated by the people aren't supposed to have a say then why do they?
If the Republicans controlled the Presidency and Senate and the Democrats only held the house how would you feel about the Democrats threatening a shutdown and halting the debt ceiling if they didn't get a program implementing background checks for all gut purchases? That would be funded so it's not much less a budget question than defunding the ACA. Why would that be invalid and the ACA tactic is valid?
My solution is for the government to get as far away from healthcare as possible.
So just to be clear what happens if a poor person shows up at a hospital with a broken arm, or cancer, and they don't even have enough money to pay for pain killers?
I'm going to guess this is code for "Huh, I looked for those hundreds of cases of fraud that I heard Republican X describe in state Y for election Z, and it turned out that of all those hundreds of alleged cases none/virtually none of them turned out to be fraud"
No, it's code for "Sorry, I'm not dumb enough to engage in any game where my opponent is the sole arbiter of the rules."
I'll show you what I mean, like this.
Case 1: An unnamed "former GOP official" (unnamed though maybe identifiable in the source article) who had voted absentee in the past and apparently was told he'd voted absentee this last time too. I couldn't find any follow up. So we have the possibility he actually did vote absentee a while ago and simply forgot, or there was a clerical error that later got cleared up or not (we never got a resolution, surely there's paperwork around the absentee application), or he lied (there are hyper-partisans that would do that), or that some sort of voter fraud occurred, but even if it did would voter ID laws have even fixed it?
Case 2: "A report at the Herald-Bulletin said that a “printing glitch” caused voters in Indiana to be turned away after being told the entire precinct voted absentee."
So not only is the second case nothing to do with fraud, but it actually offers an alternative hypothesis to the fraud allegation in the first case!!
Case 3: "An article at Twitchy says that a number of people reported being told they had already voted." Oooh, this sounds promising. And their damning evidence is.... tweets. Oh yes, someone tweeted it so it must be true! Just check out their brilliant reporting
How many have actually gotten away with it? These Twitter users claim that they have.
"Voted voted voted! I voted three times."
Yeah, because that person couldn't possibly be joking or trolling!
Case 4: The Blaze (Glenn Beck's org, that's reliable!). Showing an unidentified person claiming to have voted multiple times on FB. Oh no! It's way harder to make up things on FB than Twitter!
Now, you'll argue some variant of "Well, I said 'significant' and for all you know these individuals were an anomaly, unless you can provide documentation of whatever arbitrary figure I decide is 'significant', I'm going to ignore your cases of voter fraud".
Here's another one.
But to be fair, these are not illegal aliens, they are non-citizens who are registered to vote and cast ballots in our elections.
LK
So note that the vast majority of these cases of non-citizens registering are just peo
The constitution gives the power of the purse to the House of Representatives. It's the House's prerogative to determine what gets funded and what does not. The shutdown occurred because Senate Democrats wanted to obstruct the House's Constitutionally provided power.
Weird, I wasn't aware the US was a Constitutional Monarchy where the Senate is a rubber stamp and the Head of State a figurehead. I thought when all three branches had a saw they had roughly proportional power.
I reject the premise that it's the government's role to solve all problems.
I didn't ask you to have the government solve all the problems, I asked you to give a solution. If you wish that solution can be take the government out of healthcare entirely but actually give an alternative.
Only in their official capacity as a government representative. But notice that at the beginning of ever session of the Supreme Court, the phrase "God save the United States and this Honorable Court!" is uttered. Does THAT violate the Separation of Church and State?
I would say so, you believe the government violates the constitution in some ways, I believe they violate it in others.
That's the sticky wicket, isn't it? You would be the arbiter of "significant". I'll decline to play that game.
I'm going to guess this is code for "Huh, I looked for those hundreds of cases of fraud that I heard Republican X describe in state Y for election Z, and it turned out that of all those hundreds of alleged cases none/virtually none of them turned out to be fraud"
Let's look at a study of voter fraud
We are not aware of any documented cases in which individual noncitizens have either intentionally registered to vote or voted while knowing that they were ineligible
Well there go the illegal aliens. Not sure what other kind of "fraud" you're thinking of but the only other ID specific one I can think of would be dead voters and double voting, and in both cases the documented cases were in the range of "handful". Is that significant enough to enact a law that will suppress voter turnout?
The shutdown wasn't about the debt ceiling. It was about the Democrats refusing to fund any discretionary spending unless Republicans were willing to fund it all.
It was about the Republicans tying to force Democrats to defund ObamaCare, the partial funding offers were just a way to turn phrase it as a negotiation rather than a hostage taking.
It's possible to advocate for not raising the debt ceiling while enforcing the individual mandate.
Medicare and the VA are still voluntary. If a veteran decides to eschew VA coverage and pay out of pocket for medical care, the administration won't send men with guns to take a tax penalty from him.
An elderly person has the ability to not participate in medicare.
True but the old system had a serious freeloader problem already. Sick uninsured people would go to Emergency to seek treatment in the least efficient way possible.
Either you turn them away to die (unconscionable). Cover them with some kind of public healthcare (Tea Party should hate that). Do what they were doing previously, which is to have them covered only by the people paying insurance (Tea Party should have that more). Or have a mandate.
What solution do you have for this problem that is consistent with the Tea Party principals?
It's bore possible to default on future financial obligations, the definition of default precludes that. It would have been austerity, not default. One can make a convincing argument that forced austerity would be far worse, in the short term, than austerity. I would agree, but that still doesn't change what default means.
So I played a bit loose with the terminology but default could eventually lead to actual default if receipts plummet or have an unexpected shortfall and there's insufficient capital to pay the debt.
No, the Supreme Court has consistently interpreted the constitution to mean what it says. No forced prayer in schools, no required learning of any particular religious doctrine but there is also the free exercise clause.
But exercise is very limited when you're a representative of the government, prayer to open council meetings is a definite problem as are religious displays in schools and on government property.
I'll agree that voter ID laws are aimed at disenfranchising two key Democrat voting blocks, illegal aliens and fraudsters. That's why leftists are so dead set against them.
Your source is clearly biased, it would he like if I used the Cato institute as a source.
LK
Ok. Show me the fraud. Show me the cases of illegal aliens or fraudsters casting votes in any significant numbers in any election.
Many establishment Republicans supported an individual mandate. They're the ones who pressured Boehner to to cave during the shutdown.
Heritage Action, the advocacy wing of the Heritage Foundation who endorsed the mandate for 15 years, was in favour of going into default.
You still haven't explained their support for MediCare or the VA.
The government was never in danger of a default on the debt. The debt service would have been paid first. What we were looking at was forced austerity, not default.
It probably wouldn't have default on its debt but it would have defaulted on its funding obligations.
There is no "Separation of church and state" in the constitution. There is a prohibition on establishment of a state religion.
The courts have consistently interpreted it to mean separation of church and state, how is school prayer and teaching of religious theories (creationism) anything but establishment of a state religion?
In what way does an ID requirement disenfranchise minorities? You have to argue that minorities are too stupid to figure out how to get an ID if you think that requiring one is designed to disenfranchise them.
But, never let the truth get in the way of your leftist rhetoric.
LK
Or that minorities are poor and less likely to have ID, Voter ID laws disenfranchise people and the occurrence of voter fraud is vanishingly low. Republicans are usually smart enough not to say they're trying to disenfranchise voters explicitly but if you look around there's plenty of quotes where they openly admit the goal of the laws is to win elections. I'm sorry but the evidence that Voter ID laws are designed to disenfranchise Democratic leaning voters is fairly overwhelming and I'm happy to throw more evidence at you if you continue to disagree.
I think that's more an effect of the Tea Party not having had time to get really inconsistent though there's still instances. A lot of the Tea Party members (including the Heritage foundation) supported an individual mandate before '08.
They also make a huge noise about the debt, but the killing the ACA and not raising taxes trumps that (apparently they don't think much of contracts either as they were willing to default). And they want smaller government, except when that smaller government would reduce MediCare. They care about the Constitution, except for the parts about separation of church and state, and they apparently have no problem with laws designed to disenfranchise minorities.
The relative consistency of the Tea Party so far has to do with the fact that all they have to do is disagree with Obama and vote against the ACA, so as long as he's consistent they can be too. But their defining attribute is tribalism, and if they ever get in power and try to do something proactive that consistency is going to fall.
No, politicians and bureaucrats need to understand mathematics better so that they realize exactly how much heat you'd have to remove to start influencing geological events. Especially ones that measure 4000 km3...
While cheap geothermal would be nice I actually don't mind if they're hesitant to start poking the magma filled bubble that is eventually going to burst and wipe out the continent.
It's actually worse than that. The topic of study is on the impact of climate change on Nebraska, but the bill says they're only supposed to look at "cyclical" changes.
I think it's more like asking biologists to study the effects of antibiotic resistance, but they're not allowed to use evolution and must assume that the DNA of the bacteria doesn't significantly change over time.
I'd agree with that analogy. Except I see this as commissioning a study to focus on other possible causes of antibiotic resistance outside of DNA changes. Or are you assuming that evolution of DNA is the only possible means of acquiring resistance to antibiotics? That perhaps the host environment plays no role?
The politics here should not be discounted. The group that's refusing is a politically appointed commission, and they taking a political position before they've even read the study proposal. They've gone to the media claiming that the study proposal is rigged because it contains the single word "cyclical". I would think this is not exactly the unbiased group that should be doing this research.
I thought I explained it clearly but I believe you still misunderstand the purpose of the study. It isn't analogous to "commissioning a study to focus on other possible causes of antibiotic resistance outside of DNA changes" because that's a question of basic science and the Nebraska legislature has neither the expertise nor the motive to ask basic science questions.
The original study isn't about finding evidence to re-affirm AGW any more than the modified study is about finding evidence to deny it. The studies are because the Nebraska legislature wants to know what's going to happen to Nebraska.
The modified study wants to know what will climate change do to Nebraska if there is no climate change. The motive of this pointless study is so the legislator can wave the study around and say "See! We commissioned a study to ask what global warming would do to Nebraska and even the scientists said it wouldn't do anything!"
By refusing to do the study the scientists are protecting the integrity of government funded science and are absolutely doing the right thing.
Why do we not need a study on cyclical climate change? Recognizing how much of global warming isn't due to humans is also important.
I just saw someone explain this quite succinctly.
Why do we not need a study on cyclical climate change?
It is the scientists who are refusing to study it who are being political, to the detriment of science. They should be taken out and shot. Or at least kicked out of any professional organizations they belong to.
The problem is, the study they where asked to take had as part of its *premise* that it was caused by non human means.
This is a bit like asking physicists to come up with a reason that newtons apple falls that DOESNT involve gravity. It just stops being science.
It's actually worse than that. The topic of study is on the impact of climate change on Nebraska, but the bill says they're only supposed to look at "cyclical" changes.
I think it's more like asking biologists to study the effects of antibiotic resistance, but they're not allowed to use evolution and must assume that the DNA of the bacteria doesn't significantly change over time.
Not only is it a nonsense question studying a fictitious universe. It's a completely useless question since there isn't any such thing as antibiotic resistance without evolution.
What's the effect of climate change on Nebraska if you assume all the climate changes are cyclical? Well nothing, because if the changes are cyclical there is no climate change.
We're not operating at the fringes of the size limit so our biology can adapt more easily.
A more relevant question might be what limits an Elephant's size. Would a slightly larger elephant have trouble extracting enough oxygen from the atmosphere to survive?
I'm still waiting for the scientifically accurate remake of Jurassic Park where the dinosaurs are all lying on the ground gasping for air.
But he's not analyzing something, he's trying to fix a broken incomplete project. He might be brilliant in his field but that doesn't mean he's an expert project manager or knows enough about software for his "end of November" prediction to have any credibility.
Of course that's not really a bad thing, if your priority is simply to get it up and running the current team who bungled it is still the best bet. Zients might just be shuffling deckchairs in an effort to satisfy critics while they try to fix the code.
but Governments still have strong incentives to reduce spending
And they have strong incentives to increase spending as well. Why are you even trying to argue this particular point, when you can just look at actual government spending and see a large number of the governments are very out of control when it comes to spending, contrary to your assertion?
There are several reasons why governments overspend
1) Other people's money
2) Powerful interest groups who benefit from the spending
3) Bureaucracy lobbies for it.
4) Voters really value the service
5) Voters dislike taxes more than they dislike deficits. This doesn't cause specific spending so much as it causes spending to be overspending.
1 still holds for AGW spending, but for 2 contrary to your claims about green groups the balance of the interest groups is against AGW.
As for 3 the AGW bureaucracy is new, so causality wise it can't really be the cause of the spending.
For 4 the only service is mitigating the future damage of AGW, and if there's any direct effect on the voter it's a small cost.
And 5 isn't really relevant other than encouraging carbon caps instead of taxes.
The thing is almost all the factors that cause governments to overspend are absent from AGW, so you're left with the fact they feel that spending is unusually necessary.
You're still left making the ridiculous assertion that governments want to spend more money and run bigger deficits.
If you had actually kept up with the thread, you would have noticed that I don't make that assertion.
Poorly phrased on my part. Any bureaucracy certainly tries to capture funding but Governments still have strong incentives to reduce spending. The idea that the bureaucracy is so powerful they're able to spend 20% of the budget on nothing is essentially a conspiracy theory.
Governments actually don't want to spend money, and they don't want high taxes. But they want certain services more so are willing to spend a lot of money and run big deficits.
"Services" that happen to require a lot of flunkies, shiny buildings, pretty hardware, and a nice view. And as I note, some of those "services" seem rather imaginary in nature.
I'm entirely unconvinced that governments would spend that kind of money if they weren't convinced AGW was true.
That's ok. You can change your mind later when you get an attack of common sense. When you actually see governments act in this way as I have, you realize that they'd do a lot worse than spend vast sums of money on imaginary problems.
The only time I've seen governments spend anything comparable on possibly imaginary problems is when it comes to visceral threats like security. AGW is an incredibly abstract threat and I can't see the incentives pushing them to unnecessary spending.
And do you have any precedence for modern science making the kind of mistake you allege they're making with AGW?
(you also have the inconvenient fact of all those private insurance companies who are convinced AGW is real and placing their bets accordingly)
I see talk without action. It's only a fact, if it's actually happening. I'll just point out the often missed fact that most such alleged AGW damage is actually very specific, US flood damage which is caused by subsidizing the insuring of property in flood-prone areas rather than some climatic issue.
We just had a story about the insurance companies believing AGW. Even if their current action is just related to insurance related to flooding they still think something is changing the probabilities involving flooding.
To flip it around there's only two entities who have both the expertise to investigate and an incentive to understand the long term effects of AGW. Governments and insurance, and both are betting on AGW. Is there any entity with skin in the game betting the other way?
That would have been a true statement twenty years ago, it isn't any more. And fossil fuels won't be at existential risk until the developing world and OPEC comply. That probably won't happen until fossil fuels aren't particularly competitive with the other choices out there IMHO.
Green industries are still tiny compared to fossil fuels. As for fossil fuels, if the AGW **** really starts to hit the fan the developing world and OPEC might not be given much of an option to not comply, unfortunately by that time it might be too late to do anything about it.
Governments spending taxpayer money weakens the incentive effect but doesn't make it vanish.
And if you kill a lot of passenger pigeons, you just greatly weaken their numbers, you don't actually drive them to extinction. The problem with these sorts of assertions is that you can do enough of the activity in question to make something vanish even when it was very numerous at one time.
The EU politicians have every reason to spend as little on AGW as possible.
I already explained why that wasn't true. There's a lot of room for empire building once you have an eternal crisis like catastrophic AGW or the US's War on Drugs.
You're still left making the ridiculous assertion that governments want to spend more money and run bigger deficits.
Governments actually don't want to spend money, and they don't want high taxes. But they want certain services more so are willing to spend a lot of money and run big deficits.
I'm entirely unconvinced that governments would spend that kind of money if they weren't convinced AGW was true.
(you also have the inconvenient fact of all those private insurance companies who are convinced AGW is real and placing their bets accordingly)
If that capital didn't go to renewable energy and public transportation it would go to other investment opportunities. There might be a claim that finance could get slightly bigger by regulating the carbon credit markets but that's not a particularly strong incentive, particularly when compared to the massive incentives of the automotive and fossil fuel industries.
I see words, but I don't see a relevant argument. The incentives I mention are just as big as they are for those fossil fuel-dependent industries, even if you choose not to recognize them as such.
They're not remotely the same size. Green industry is TINY. Finance will get money from wherever. News has a big incentive to downplay the scientific consensus to generate controversy. And fossil fuels are an industry worth trillions of dollars that's at existential risk if AGW predictions are accepted.
At least you're asking the question. For the scientists, the conflict comes between the obligation to try to do accurate and unbiased scientific work versus the funding incentive to report research in a way that elevates the significance of climate change.
So I could see a slight institutional bias but there's still a strong individual bias to prove others wrong. Plus even if you want to show X and the answer is Y you still need to hide Y in your paper, sneak it past the reviewers, and hope no other researcher find your error and scores an easy publication at the expense of your reputation. Again it's economics, the individual scientist's strongest incentive is to publish the most credible piece of research.
For the funding sources, there's a similar conflict between the public obligation to fund accurate and unbiased research versus the bureaucratic benefits to be had from portraying an existential threat, real or imaginary, to modern society. The latter means larger budgets and more power to the bureaucracy that can justify them to society at large.
There's a much stronger bias from politicians who simply want bad news to go away so it's not their fault and they don't have to fix it.
It also reeks to me of a con job. There's always a glib answer to every complaint, language is abused to score propaganda points (such as the widespread use of "climate change" when AGW is meant), everything needs to be done right now, when you scratch the surface on a lot of this research, questionable or sloppy assumptions quickly show up, and these mistakes always favor a more aggressive interpretation of AGW. For example, criticism of a lack of obvious harm from near future AGW were met with the magical discovery of "extreme weather" (something the IPCC is apparently quietly dropping from its latest report BTW).
Well "climate change" is used because while the globe as a whole is getting warmer individual climates (like Europe) could get a lot colder.
As for "extreme weather" they've got a brochure on it but I'm not really sure what you're talking about.
As for the mistakes, when someone makes a mistake that favours a too aggressive scenario the denialists go "Ahah! They're trying to scare people!" and when the mistake underestimates the danger the denialists go "Ahah! We told you they were exaggerating!"
When one of the first real reports, the Stern review to attempt to quantify future harm of AGW was created, it made a major sloppy assumption by assuming discount rates about half as large as world chained GDP growth (completely ignoring that chained GDP growth is a better measure of ability to pay for future harm) and justified this on a major bogus basis, that a more reasonable discount rate was "immoral". That change alone ended up doubling for every 50 year period out future estimated costs of AGW. And of course, there's the recent weakening of recent climate predictions by the IPCC to reflect that current climate trends don't agree with the old models the IPCC used in previous reports.
I don't know a lot about the Stern review but it sounds like it may have had some issues, but a bad report doesn't mean that AGW isn't an issue.
This reminds me of a saying I've heard credited, apocryphally perhaps, to Will Rogers. "You expect cashiers to make mistakes on occasion. But when the mistakes are always in the cashier's favor, you have to wonder."
But if you only look at the mistakes that are in cashier's favour you're going to think every cashier to be dirty.