Yeah, that one I don't get, unless they're afraid you're going to document something that is going to cause them problems elsewhere.
Except... doctor-patient privilege. Medical records are private, and unless you give permission, even family is not allowed to know.
And how many people really understand the extent of doctor-patient privilege? I know I don't, and I know a heck of a lot more about it than the average person. I don't know what a doctor can be subpoenaed for. I don't know what they have to disclose to my insurer, or who they can talk to, or who gets told about things even though they shouldn't.
I do know that my doctor can't pass on something they don't know about.
I agree that there are other factors as well as you point out.
And there are a ton of mandatory-reporting laws out there. If your patient confessed that they like to abuse kids chances are you wouldn't keep it quiet, assuming that were even allowed. If your patient confessed that they are missing half of their field of view you probably have a legal obligation to report that to the local DMV. And so on...
I would argue that even many antibiotics and whatnot should not require a prescription.
I think the only antibiotics that it would make sense to not require a prescription for are those which are fed to animals, since they're already nearly-useless anyway.
Now, as far as which antibiotics I think should be routinely fed to animals, I'd say that should be none of them.
I think that all antibiotic use of any kind anywhere should require a prescription, because it isn't about your health, but about everybody else's. If the use of antibiotics is not regulated, then society has to pay a boatload of money to discover new ones when the existing ones would otherwise work just fine. Notice that private companies aren't discovering new antibiotics? That's because there is no financial sense in doing so. It makes just as much sense to have the government paying to develop new antibiotics while doing nothing to control the waste of the ones we have.
MD here. They lie. They lie all the time. Usually not all that important, sometimes it is. We almost always know anyway.
The patients pretend not to lie, and the doctors pretend that they don't know.
Honestly, I think half of that problem would go away if we didn't treat doctors like gatekeepers. If somebody wants a prescription for anything other than an antibiotic they should be able to just go to the store and buy it. I could see not forcing insurers to cover it, but I think that if we treated doctors less like gatekeepers we'd see fewer adversarial relationships.
If people went to the doctor solely because they wanted the doctor's advice they'd be far less likely to lie to them, because they would have no reason to do so. Nobody hires an engineer to come in and look at their foundation and then refuse to let them in the house.
The reason patients lie to doctors is that they ultimately disagree with them about something, but don't perceive (rightly or wrongly) that they have any choice about seeing the doctor in the first place. Usually that is because they need access to some medication or other treatment to manage their medical condition and they can't have that access without the permission of a doctor. So, they manage the doctor to get what they need, and the doctor is getting paid for their time so as long as he has plausible deniability he won't get sued about what the patient refuses to tell him. I think that fundamentally taints the relationship.
Yup. I know somebody who had a stroke which resulted in aphasia. That actually isn't a memory loss so much as an ability to use language of any kind. I did manage to help them remember their password, and in this case they were fortunate to have used variations on a single password for everything online. It involved a lot of charades, however.
They didn't even remember their spouse's or kids' names, so forget the poem idea.
If they actually did have amnesia then best of luck. There would have been no way to recover it unless it were written down in some fashion, or protected by some other form of escrow/authentication/etc.
Undermining defenses is WAY older than WWI. It is where the word "undermine" actually comes from. According to Wikipedia it was used by the Romans, Greeks, and ancient Chinese, and of course in the Middle Ages.
Admittedly, new towers are very costly (permits, installation, maintenance, etc.), however the wireless ISPs need to do a better job of reinvesting their profits into infrastructure to address this issue rather than blaming their customers.
It seems to me that there is a simple solution to this - make it illegal for a cell phone network to own cell phone towers. Tower operators will get paid to terminate calls and may not own more than a certain percentage of spectrum in any geographic location. Network operators will manage the network - dealing with tower operators to route calls to phones. Exclusive agreements of any kind between them would be illegal. The elimination of vertical integration would make it impossible for either tower or network operators to obtain a significant advantage beyond the most efficient provisioning of their services. Every network operator would have the same access to the spectrum of every tower nationwide. Network operators would be a lot more like virtual companies since all they do is route calls, so you'd probably see a lot more of them.
If you run towers the only way to make more money is to put up more towers or run them more efficiently - you're getting paid by the call that goes through.
Likewise I advocate making it illegal for an ISP to provide connectivity to anything other than a central office, and telecos would not be allowed to be ISPs, but could charge ISPs a common rate for rack space and bill customers for line use (either a fixed cost for dedicated circuits, or a percentage of costs for shared circuits like cable). So, again telcos make more money when MORE data goes over the lines, and anybody can become a regional ISP just by putting a dozen boxes in various COs so there will be a million to choose from.
The key in both systems is to break up vertical integration so that you have a natural monopoly that gets metered like any other utility, and then all the value-adds which compete to utilize them with nobody having any advantage.
Well, I'm all for kicking telcos about underinvestment, but when it comes to wireless I'm not sure any amount of spending on their part is going to really satisfy the thirst for bandwidth. So, I have mixed feelings on this.
In the wired world, yes, we really should be at the point where video/torrents/etc aren't a concern. However, there will never be such a thing as infinite bandwidth. Demand seems to always grow to meet supply.
In fact, I think the wired world is driving the demand for the wireless world. Netflix only works because everybody has 10Mbps+ connections and ISPs really don't care until you get into the multi-TB regime per month. So, people get used to that and then want the same videos on their phone, still at HD resolution. The problem is that wireless just can't keep up - at least the kind of wireless that doesn't require high-gain antennas.
I think the Netflix solution is very relevant for traditional home broadband, but not quite as much in the case of cellular data.
In the case of a typical wired ISP, the ISPs last-mile network is fairly underutilized (especially for DSL/fiber), and the ISPs uplink to the internet is fairly heavily utilized. So, content caching at the ISP bypasses the congestion and is a win/win.
However, for a wireless carrier the bottleneck is the last mile. Getting the data to the cell tower is easy - the problem is that the only way they can expand the bandwidth from the tower to the phone is by having more wireless spectrum which is expensive and regulated, and there are technological limitations as well (if you wanted gigabit to your phone you couldn't really have it at any price). So, sticking a cache on every wireless carrier's network, or even on every tower, doesn't help much. At mobile data prices the upstream connection is the smallest component of the cost.
I'm a big fan of net neutrality, but I'm not sure the solutions for wired connections are going to work for wireless networks. I'm not sure how I feel at ATT's proposal - the biggest problem I see with it is how can a user tell whether a given packet is free or not? Will apps have a permission for sending free vs non-free data, and what if most apps need both anyway?
Have you never heard of HSAs? They're exactly what you're talking about: health savings accounts that never expire that are fully deductible. They even accrue interest. Of course, ACA/Obamacare is doing its best to kill them off, more's the pity.
I've heard of HSAs, but I've never heard of one that never expires. I thought they were all required to for legal reasons. If such a thing existed it would be a somewhat better solution, but I still don't see the need for an HSA at all. Just let people deduct their costs, period. You don't have to have a mortgage payment account to deduct mortgage interest, after all.
Mach 2? Try 40 mph once it starts vibrating and flexing. These surfaces are subject to significant aerodynamic forces even in a small airplane - that's why they're there in the first place...
Sounds like the game of zangband I once played where I got some +insane multi-hued plate armor about 10min into the game and proceeded to blast the daylights out of anything I saw for the next 24 levels while watching them scratch away at my armor in vain...
Or we could just pay a 5-10% increase in taxes and be done with it.
Well, that's why I called the ACA just as start. However, simply increasing taxes isn't really a complete solution to the problem. Costs also have to be contained, and the whole system needs a lot of restructuring.
2500 out of pocket? Nuts. I was something like 13 dollars out of pocket for codeine.
And what is your tax rate, including excise taxes on gasoline/etc? Actually, you'll probably still find your costs to be lower as the US has very high costs even when you factor out the crazy list prices that nobody actually pays. However, you'll find that socialized costs to individuals are still a lot higher than $13 for a major surgery.
$2500 is also the max I can spend per year on an individual on my plan. I've only spent that much once, and this is in a family with fairly usual health problems.
Still, it is way too much money for somebody who is poor. The issue in the US isn't just the cost of care, but how those costs are distributed. That is the main goal of a socialized system - to make the costs more progressive. Drug prices are an even bigger case of this - any sustainable system for creating new drugs is going to cost nearly as much as the one we have today (oh, maybe you can chop out 20% if you try hard), but a socialized system would put the initial costs into taxes so that pill prices are closer to marginal cost. No, the prices paid by EU citizens for medicine today are not sustainable unless the government picks up the R&D tab entirely (not just basic research) - they can only charge so little because US citizens basically subsidize all their drug development.
It would make a lot more sense to get rid of per-country trademark registrations and move to a central database of some sort. I just don't see how proper names shouldn't simply be global.
The main probably is obviously that there are just too few short proper names out there. We could require that all company names be at least 30 characters long in order to not discriminate.
While this might be perfectly ordinary, it seems pretty dumb in design. It made more sense back in the days where few companies were global.
Having separate namespaces by country doesn't really make all that much sense these days. I'll agree that creates all kinds of jurisdictional problems, but the status quo just seems like a recipe for a mess. Does it really make sense for a couple of kids in a garage trying to start a business to have to register their name in every country that exists just in case they take off?
Bit of a tangent, but I saw an interesting Nova episode which included a tour of a Russian missile base. The commander bragged about using biorhythms to predict when soldiers would be at their best performance so that they could staff the silos accordingly and how this was much more advanced than what they did in the west. The operational manual was out of the old Soviet days.
That's the problem with dictatorships - they're really efficient about what they do, so when they do good stuff it often turns out rather good, and when for whatever reason the guy in charge is a bit crazy, well, they're really good on follow-through.
I'll take your word that it is rare, but I know somebody who has had sepsis multiple times from infections that originated in the kidney. She isn't really a typical case though. I think finally getting her blood sugars under control did the trick as she hasn't had that problem in a few years, though unfortunately she graduated from there to strokes, and now she is right on the border of stage 4 kidney disease...
As a Canadian, the US system fill me with dread. It's just plain WIERD to think that, were I American, I'd have had to actually think about whether or not to get my gall bladder out. It would have been an economic decision. That's not right.
Well, for the 2/3rds of Americans who have functional insurance it isn't a hard decision at all. If I needed my gall bladder out it would cost me a $500 deductible, and then 20% of the marked-down costs until I hit about $2500 (the $500 already spent counts towards that), and then the rest would be free. Oh, and the marked-down costs are fairly reasonable - probably more expensive than Canada but not the figures you see in the news. The way it works is that I'd get a bill from the hospital for $100k. Then I'd get a statement from the insurance company telling me that they feel $15k is fair and that I'd have to pay my $2500 limit, the insurance would pay $12.5k, and the hospital would consider it paid in full). If you pay cash then the hospital tells you that since you're a cash customer and save them all the trouble of dealing with the insurance companies they'll mark the price down to only $40k and you'll go on about how much more insured people pay, clearly never having seen what insured people actually pay.
Now, for the rest of America it is a HUGE mess. They either pay cash, in which case they pay a lot more than insured people pay for the same care, or they think they have insurance but they have a scumbag company that collects premiums and then denies care at the last minute. Fortunately, this second case has been in theory largely eliminated by the ACA with its ban on denial pre-existing conditions. That practice made sense in theory and makes sense for most other forms of insurance, but for health insurance it is hard to prove when a disease started and it was often used as a loophole to deny claims for perfectly honest consumers who just happened to have a break in their coverage sometime in the past.
In any case, I'm all for reform and consider the ACA really just getting started. However, the reason people in the US aren't all gung-ho about reform is that many haven't actually had to deal with serious illness if they do have insurance, and most Americans actually do have decent insurance and do just fine under the status quo (well, ignoring the problems they probably will face in a few decades as a result of insufficient preventative care).
We would of had to know the precise mass and gravitational pull for any of the rockets or satellites we sent into space to work. Given that they have not all fallen back to earth, if their is any invisible matter out there, it is obviously in insignificant infinitesimally small amounts.
Well, the linked refutation points out the problems with the argument, but the guy is arguing that the amount of dark matter is fairly small. It wouldn't mess with the ability to launch a rocket. Sure, you might end up in a slightly different orbit than intended, but you'd end up in orbit. Almost all launches involve minor corrections anyway - it isn't like you can just calculate nothing but a burn time when the rocket to LEO spends its entire time inside the earth's atmosphere, and the target orbit is inside the atmosphere as well (just a VERY THIN part of the atmosphere). If you wanted to do everything ab initio then you'd need to know about every single piece of space junk in orbit, every passing rock, and so on...
If we were unable to find a source of magnets domestically then we wouldn't have these planes to begin with. If China were to cut off our supply then we might not be able to make more planes, but at least we would have the ones we already made. Some are better than none.
Sure - wasn't really debating that point. However, it is still a risk, and a domestic source should be obtained ASAP, or mitigation strategies might be pursued such as finding a diverse set of international sources, stockpiling, etc.
Also, while some F-35s are obviously better than none, a destroyed set of F-35s with no way of replacing them is probably not as useful as a destroyed set of F-16s with the ability to replace them. Retirement of existing aircraft is based on the assumption that their replacements will fulfill the same mission, which includes the ability to be manufactured after destruction.
Again, I'm not suggesting that the F-35 be halted, but this problem probably shouldn't just be glossed over either.
And magnets are unimportant? If you think so, you aren't familiar with their importance.
I think you're missing the point.
There is a security risk from using Chinese magnets in the F-35, and it is that if we get into a war with China they could cut off our supply of magnets and we would be unable to build more F-35s (at least, not until we find a new source of magnets). That is a risk, but if the magnets are the only part not produced domestically it probably isn't a big deal, especially if they look to correct that while they're at it.
The bigger security risk is with actual assembled electronics of any kind. Sourcing those from China would require providing specs on those parts to China which means the Chinese government would have access to them. Also, there would be a risk of undetectable sabotage in a complex component (I'm taking ICs here, not resistors). If you buy an entire chip from China you have no way to know if what you asked for is what got delivered, unless you open them up and check with an SEM/etc.
The reason that military contracts are supposed to be supplied domestically is to ensure that our military isn't susceptible to blockade/etc. Something like an aircraft could conceivably be supplied by every industrialized nation on the earth, and I'm sure this happens for most civilian aircraft. That means that you have supply chain problems if you go to war with just about anybody.
If you don't think that you risk sabotage by buying computer parts for a strategically-important project internationally, just talk to the Soviets, who had a major oil refinery destroyed by the US in the cold war by a subtle act of sabotage. Or talk to the Iranians about their centrifuges (or anybody dealing with STUXNET elsewhere). Or just read the latest headlines about the NSA. The US doesn't want to be vulnerable to these kinds of attacks precisely because it KNOWS it is possible having done it themselves.
So, the guy's point wasn't that magnets weren't important in general, but simply that they're not really a suitable vehicle for sabotage. A magnet has fairly simple physical properties, which means that a quality inspection would be likely to uncover any attempted sabotage. An IC for a radar system could be designed to pass every single test until some modulated signal is received on the antenna, and then it could do anything possible within the limits of whatever it is hooked up to (disable the radar, broadcast a homing signal for enemy missiles, overheat the radar unit and set the plane on fire, etc).
Sure, that makes sense. My employer owns a class A network and it certainly makes everything easier. In fact, after a merger they had routing established between the networks in no time simply because there were no collisions. I don't know if they ever migrated the other half of the company out of 10/8 land - we certainly have enough subnets to do it. Maybe they're banking on migrating the other way and selling the class A to some desperate ISP.
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Except... doctor-patient privilege. Medical records are private, and unless you give permission, even family is not allowed to know.
And how many people really understand the extent of doctor-patient privilege? I know I don't, and I know a heck of a lot more about it than the average person. I don't know what a doctor can be subpoenaed for. I don't know what they have to disclose to my insurer, or who they can talk to, or who gets told about things even though they shouldn't.
I do know that my doctor can't pass on something they don't know about.
I agree that there are other factors as well as you point out.
And there are a ton of mandatory-reporting laws out there. If your patient confessed that they like to abuse kids chances are you wouldn't keep it quiet, assuming that were even allowed. If your patient confessed that they are missing half of their field of view you probably have a legal obligation to report that to the local DMV. And so on...
I would argue that even many antibiotics and whatnot should not require a prescription.
I think the only antibiotics that it would make sense to not require a prescription for are those which are fed to animals, since they're already nearly-useless anyway.
Now, as far as which antibiotics I think should be routinely fed to animals, I'd say that should be none of them.
I think that all antibiotic use of any kind anywhere should require a prescription, because it isn't about your health, but about everybody else's. If the use of antibiotics is not regulated, then society has to pay a boatload of money to discover new ones when the existing ones would otherwise work just fine. Notice that private companies aren't discovering new antibiotics? That's because there is no financial sense in doing so. It makes just as much sense to have the government paying to develop new antibiotics while doing nothing to control the waste of the ones we have.
Yeah, that one I don't get, unless they're afraid you're going to document something that is going to cause them problems elsewhere.
MD here. They lie. They lie all the time. Usually not all that important, sometimes it is. We almost always know anyway.
The patients pretend not to lie, and the doctors pretend that they don't know.
Honestly, I think half of that problem would go away if we didn't treat doctors like gatekeepers. If somebody wants a prescription for anything other than an antibiotic they should be able to just go to the store and buy it. I could see not forcing insurers to cover it, but I think that if we treated doctors less like gatekeepers we'd see fewer adversarial relationships.
If people went to the doctor solely because they wanted the doctor's advice they'd be far less likely to lie to them, because they would have no reason to do so. Nobody hires an engineer to come in and look at their foundation and then refuse to let them in the house.
The reason patients lie to doctors is that they ultimately disagree with them about something, but don't perceive (rightly or wrongly) that they have any choice about seeing the doctor in the first place. Usually that is because they need access to some medication or other treatment to manage their medical condition and they can't have that access without the permission of a doctor. So, they manage the doctor to get what they need, and the doctor is getting paid for their time so as long as he has plausible deniability he won't get sued about what the patient refuses to tell him. I think that fundamentally taints the relationship.
Yup. I know somebody who had a stroke which resulted in aphasia. That actually isn't a memory loss so much as an ability to use language of any kind. I did manage to help them remember their password, and in this case they were fortunate to have used variations on a single password for everything online. It involved a lot of charades, however.
They didn't even remember their spouse's or kids' names, so forget the poem idea.
If they actually did have amnesia then best of luck. There would have been no way to recover it unless it were written down in some fashion, or protected by some other form of escrow/authentication/etc.
Undermining defenses is WAY older than WWI. It is where the word "undermine" actually comes from. According to Wikipedia it was used by the Romans, Greeks, and ancient Chinese, and of course in the Middle Ages.
Admittedly, new towers are very costly (permits, installation, maintenance, etc.), however the wireless ISPs need to do a better job of reinvesting their profits into infrastructure to address this issue rather than blaming their customers.
It seems to me that there is a simple solution to this - make it illegal for a cell phone network to own cell phone towers. Tower operators will get paid to terminate calls and may not own more than a certain percentage of spectrum in any geographic location. Network operators will manage the network - dealing with tower operators to route calls to phones. Exclusive agreements of any kind between them would be illegal. The elimination of vertical integration would make it impossible for either tower or network operators to obtain a significant advantage beyond the most efficient provisioning of their services. Every network operator would have the same access to the spectrum of every tower nationwide. Network operators would be a lot more like virtual companies since all they do is route calls, so you'd probably see a lot more of them.
If you run towers the only way to make more money is to put up more towers or run them more efficiently - you're getting paid by the call that goes through.
Likewise I advocate making it illegal for an ISP to provide connectivity to anything other than a central office, and telecos would not be allowed to be ISPs, but could charge ISPs a common rate for rack space and bill customers for line use (either a fixed cost for dedicated circuits, or a percentage of costs for shared circuits like cable). So, again telcos make more money when MORE data goes over the lines, and anybody can become a regional ISP just by putting a dozen boxes in various COs so there will be a million to choose from.
The key in both systems is to break up vertical integration so that you have a natural monopoly that gets metered like any other utility, and then all the value-adds which compete to utilize them with nobody having any advantage.
Well, unless it is a terminology issue every HSA I've ever had expired at the end of the year - use it or lose it.
Well, I'm all for kicking telcos about underinvestment, but when it comes to wireless I'm not sure any amount of spending on their part is going to really satisfy the thirst for bandwidth. So, I have mixed feelings on this.
In the wired world, yes, we really should be at the point where video/torrents/etc aren't a concern. However, there will never be such a thing as infinite bandwidth. Demand seems to always grow to meet supply.
In fact, I think the wired world is driving the demand for the wireless world. Netflix only works because everybody has 10Mbps+ connections and ISPs really don't care until you get into the multi-TB regime per month. So, people get used to that and then want the same videos on their phone, still at HD resolution. The problem is that wireless just can't keep up - at least the kind of wireless that doesn't require high-gain antennas.
I think the Netflix solution is very relevant for traditional home broadband, but not quite as much in the case of cellular data.
In the case of a typical wired ISP, the ISPs last-mile network is fairly underutilized (especially for DSL/fiber), and the ISPs uplink to the internet is fairly heavily utilized. So, content caching at the ISP bypasses the congestion and is a win/win.
However, for a wireless carrier the bottleneck is the last mile. Getting the data to the cell tower is easy - the problem is that the only way they can expand the bandwidth from the tower to the phone is by having more wireless spectrum which is expensive and regulated, and there are technological limitations as well (if you wanted gigabit to your phone you couldn't really have it at any price). So, sticking a cache on every wireless carrier's network, or even on every tower, doesn't help much. At mobile data prices the upstream connection is the smallest component of the cost.
I'm a big fan of net neutrality, but I'm not sure the solutions for wired connections are going to work for wireless networks. I'm not sure how I feel at ATT's proposal - the biggest problem I see with it is how can a user tell whether a given packet is free or not? Will apps have a permission for sending free vs non-free data, and what if most apps need both anyway?
Have you never heard of HSAs? They're exactly what you're talking about: health savings accounts that never expire that are fully deductible. They even accrue interest. Of course, ACA/Obamacare is doing its best to kill them off, more's the pity.
I've heard of HSAs, but I've never heard of one that never expires. I thought they were all required to for legal reasons. If such a thing existed it would be a somewhat better solution, but I still don't see the need for an HSA at all. Just let people deduct their costs, period. You don't have to have a mortgage payment account to deduct mortgage interest, after all.
Mach 2? Try 40 mph once it starts vibrating and flexing. These surfaces are subject to significant aerodynamic forces even in a small airplane - that's why they're there in the first place...
Sounds like the game of zangband I once played where I got some +insane multi-hued plate armor about 10min into the game and proceeded to blast the daylights out of anything I saw for the next 24 levels while watching them scratch away at my armor in vain...
Or we could just pay a 5-10% increase in taxes and be done with it.
Well, that's why I called the ACA just as start. However, simply increasing taxes isn't really a complete solution to the problem. Costs also have to be contained, and the whole system needs a lot of restructuring.
2500 out of pocket? Nuts. I was something like 13 dollars out of pocket for codeine.
And what is your tax rate, including excise taxes on gasoline/etc? Actually, you'll probably still find your costs to be lower as the US has very high costs even when you factor out the crazy list prices that nobody actually pays. However, you'll find that socialized costs to individuals are still a lot higher than $13 for a major surgery.
$2500 is also the max I can spend per year on an individual on my plan. I've only spent that much once, and this is in a family with fairly usual health problems.
Still, it is way too much money for somebody who is poor. The issue in the US isn't just the cost of care, but how those costs are distributed. That is the main goal of a socialized system - to make the costs more progressive. Drug prices are an even bigger case of this - any sustainable system for creating new drugs is going to cost nearly as much as the one we have today (oh, maybe you can chop out 20% if you try hard), but a socialized system would put the initial costs into taxes so that pill prices are closer to marginal cost. No, the prices paid by EU citizens for medicine today are not sustainable unless the government picks up the R&D tab entirely (not just basic research) - they can only charge so little because US citizens basically subsidize all their drug development.
It would make a lot more sense to get rid of per-country trademark registrations and move to a central database of some sort. I just don't see how proper names shouldn't simply be global.
The main probably is obviously that there are just too few short proper names out there. We could require that all company names be at least 30 characters long in order to not discriminate.
While this might be perfectly ordinary, it seems pretty dumb in design. It made more sense back in the days where few companies were global.
Having separate namespaces by country doesn't really make all that much sense these days. I'll agree that creates all kinds of jurisdictional problems, but the status quo just seems like a recipe for a mess. Does it really make sense for a couple of kids in a garage trying to start a business to have to register their name in every country that exists just in case they take off?
Bit of a tangent, but I saw an interesting Nova episode which included a tour of a Russian missile base. The commander bragged about using biorhythms to predict when soldiers would be at their best performance so that they could staff the silos accordingly and how this was much more advanced than what they did in the west. The operational manual was out of the old Soviet days.
That's the problem with dictatorships - they're really efficient about what they do, so when they do good stuff it often turns out rather good, and when for whatever reason the guy in charge is a bit crazy, well, they're really good on follow-through.
I'll take your word that it is rare, but I know somebody who has had sepsis multiple times from infections that originated in the kidney. She isn't really a typical case though. I think finally getting her blood sugars under control did the trick as she hasn't had that problem in a few years, though unfortunately she graduated from there to strokes, and now she is right on the border of stage 4 kidney disease...
Here's good place to start. DME providers for CPAP supplies. Work your way up from there.
Heck, just look at buying contact lenses or glasses. That's just the CPAP mess at 1/10th scale or so.
As a Canadian, the US system fill me with dread. It's just plain WIERD to think that, were I American, I'd have had to actually think about whether or not to get my gall bladder out. It would have been an economic decision. That's not right.
Well, for the 2/3rds of Americans who have functional insurance it isn't a hard decision at all. If I needed my gall bladder out it would cost me a $500 deductible, and then 20% of the marked-down costs until I hit about $2500 (the $500 already spent counts towards that), and then the rest would be free. Oh, and the marked-down costs are fairly reasonable - probably more expensive than Canada but not the figures you see in the news. The way it works is that I'd get a bill from the hospital for $100k. Then I'd get a statement from the insurance company telling me that they feel $15k is fair and that I'd have to pay my $2500 limit, the insurance would pay $12.5k, and the hospital would consider it paid in full). If you pay cash then the hospital tells you that since you're a cash customer and save them all the trouble of dealing with the insurance companies they'll mark the price down to only $40k and you'll go on about how much more insured people pay, clearly never having seen what insured people actually pay.
Now, for the rest of America it is a HUGE mess. They either pay cash, in which case they pay a lot more than insured people pay for the same care, or they think they have insurance but they have a scumbag company that collects premiums and then denies care at the last minute. Fortunately, this second case has been in theory largely eliminated by the ACA with its ban on denial pre-existing conditions. That practice made sense in theory and makes sense for most other forms of insurance, but for health insurance it is hard to prove when a disease started and it was often used as a loophole to deny claims for perfectly honest consumers who just happened to have a break in their coverage sometime in the past.
In any case, I'm all for reform and consider the ACA really just getting started. However, the reason people in the US aren't all gung-ho about reform is that many haven't actually had to deal with serious illness if they do have insurance, and most Americans actually do have decent insurance and do just fine under the status quo (well, ignoring the problems they probably will face in a few decades as a result of insufficient preventative care).
We would of had to know the precise mass and gravitational pull for any of the rockets or satellites we sent into space to work. Given that they have not all fallen back to earth, if their is any invisible matter out there, it is obviously in insignificant infinitesimally small amounts.
Well, the linked refutation points out the problems with the argument, but the guy is arguing that the amount of dark matter is fairly small. It wouldn't mess with the ability to launch a rocket. Sure, you might end up in a slightly different orbit than intended, but you'd end up in orbit. Almost all launches involve minor corrections anyway - it isn't like you can just calculate nothing but a burn time when the rocket to LEO spends its entire time inside the earth's atmosphere, and the target orbit is inside the atmosphere as well (just a VERY THIN part of the atmosphere). If you wanted to do everything ab initio then you'd need to know about every single piece of space junk in orbit, every passing rock, and so on...
If we were unable to find a source of magnets domestically then we wouldn't have these planes to begin with. If China were to cut off our supply then we might not be able to make more planes, but at least we would have the ones we already made. Some are better than none.
Sure - wasn't really debating that point. However, it is still a risk, and a domestic source should be obtained ASAP, or mitigation strategies might be pursued such as finding a diverse set of international sources, stockpiling, etc.
Also, while some F-35s are obviously better than none, a destroyed set of F-35s with no way of replacing them is probably not as useful as a destroyed set of F-16s with the ability to replace them. Retirement of existing aircraft is based on the assumption that their replacements will fulfill the same mission, which includes the ability to be manufactured after destruction.
Again, I'm not suggesting that the F-35 be halted, but this problem probably shouldn't just be glossed over either.
we're talking about magnets here
And magnets are unimportant? If you think so, you aren't familiar with their importance.
I think you're missing the point.
There is a security risk from using Chinese magnets in the F-35, and it is that if we get into a war with China they could cut off our supply of magnets and we would be unable to build more F-35s (at least, not until we find a new source of magnets). That is a risk, but if the magnets are the only part not produced domestically it probably isn't a big deal, especially if they look to correct that while they're at it.
The bigger security risk is with actual assembled electronics of any kind. Sourcing those from China would require providing specs on those parts to China which means the Chinese government would have access to them. Also, there would be a risk of undetectable sabotage in a complex component (I'm taking ICs here, not resistors). If you buy an entire chip from China you have no way to know if what you asked for is what got delivered, unless you open them up and check with an SEM/etc.
The reason that military contracts are supposed to be supplied domestically is to ensure that our military isn't susceptible to blockade/etc. Something like an aircraft could conceivably be supplied by every industrialized nation on the earth, and I'm sure this happens for most civilian aircraft. That means that you have supply chain problems if you go to war with just about anybody.
If you don't think that you risk sabotage by buying computer parts for a strategically-important project internationally, just talk to the Soviets, who had a major oil refinery destroyed by the US in the cold war by a subtle act of sabotage. Or talk to the Iranians about their centrifuges (or anybody dealing with STUXNET elsewhere). Or just read the latest headlines about the NSA. The US doesn't want to be vulnerable to these kinds of attacks precisely because it KNOWS it is possible having done it themselves.
So, the guy's point wasn't that magnets weren't important in general, but simply that they're not really a suitable vehicle for sabotage. A magnet has fairly simple physical properties, which means that a quality inspection would be likely to uncover any attempted sabotage. An IC for a radar system could be designed to pass every single test until some modulated signal is received on the antenna, and then it could do anything possible within the limits of whatever it is hooked up to (disable the radar, broadcast a homing signal for enemy missiles, overheat the radar unit and set the plane on fire, etc).
Sure, that makes sense. My employer owns a class A network and it certainly makes everything easier. In fact, after a merger they had routing established between the networks in no time simply because there were no collisions. I don't know if they ever migrated the other half of the company out of 10/8 land - we certainly have enough subnets to do it. Maybe they're banking on migrating the other way and selling the class A to some desperate ISP.