The vast majority of medical spending is on chronic illness for the elderly. You should have your argument focus on this type of common outcome rather than "suddenly gets sick/hurt".
Sure, but it doesn't really change anything. In fact, most people become elderly so it only stands to reason that most people are going to need insurnace, and the money they pay in when they're young makes up for the money they take out when they're old.
Required purchase of health insurance is NOT Socialism! Many will still not be able to afford it or obtain sufficient assistance to do so.
True, on its own it isn't. ACA does include subsidies for the poor which is a form of socialism, though limited in scope.
Prices will continue to go up.
Well, they don't have to under a system like this if it is done right (aside from inflation, or rising levels of service). I don't think the ACA was really done right - it was a compromise all-around. The US health system is a nest of problems, and ACA really only hits a few of them. There is no one thing that you can do to fix it.
What happens if you have no insurance for 20 years, and never get sick. Then you sign up for insurance and pay your bills for 5 years. Then you get sick. What is the fine, and what happens if the person doesn't have the money to pay it at this point?
Do you even understand this question? What happens if I purchase insurance for 2 months and get sick. It doesn't matter, I purchased the insurance just the same as if I purchased it 20 years ago.
The whole point of insurance is that in order for it to work, people need to pay MORE than they consume on average. If people wait until they're sick to sign up, it can't work.
This is INSURANCE. The whole point of insurance is that you don't know when you'll need it, so you pay money now so that in the event you need it you know you'll have it. I "waste" money on fire insurance every month. My house will probably never burn down, and thus I'll probably never get anything back. However, if my house does burn down, then I get a new house for very little money.
And some people do not and will not need it. Why are they forced to pay for it when they do not want to? Why are normal law abiding citizens being told they are no longer free and must do as the government says and purchase something from a third party when they do nothing wrong?
So, your choices are force everybody to buy insurance even if they don't "need" it, or let people die when it turns out that they needed it after all.
In most cases insurance is voluntary, but then you suffer the loss if you don't have it. That's how health care was supposed to work before the ACA. The problem with that is that insurance companies were scumbags and if there was any lapse in coverage they assumed that your sickness started during the lapse and denied coverage. On the other hand, if you get rid of that loophole then everybody else behaves like scumbags and avoids paying for insurance until they start to feel sick.
What happens when some gun nut tea party gets elected and declares that anyone who doesn't own a gun has to pay a $2000 a year penalty?
If people who didn't own guns cost the average citizen money, then I'd be fine with such a law. People without health insurance DO cost others money, unless we as a society choose to let them die.
The only way to allow people to not buy health insurance is if we as a society refuse to provide care for them when they get sick unless they can pay the full bill themselves. If we were all sociopaths that system would work just fine, and people WOULD buy insurance because they would understand the consequences if they didn't.
lol.. so the last 200+ years of this country didn't happen and everything starts right now because you though of something you pretend is the only possible logic?
Yeah, I guess everything being peachy is the reason Obama won the election... The previous system worked reasonably well for anybody with a job with a large employer. The problem is that costs are spiraling out of control and the model just wasn't sustainable, and MANY people had no healthcare at all.
They would call 911 with chest pains, the call center would be set up to do an automatic insurance/credit check, and the guy on the phone would tell them that if they'd like an ambulance they need to get somebody else to provide a credit card number if the credit check isn't good. That isn't the society most voters want to live in.
And that happens every day in the previous 200+ years of our country's existence? Am I right or are you making things up in order to justify your worldview?
200 years ago if you dialed 911 you wouldn't get an answer, because you didn't have a phone. We hardly have 200 years of experience with modern medicine. Go take a l
Guess that makes large numbers of the homeless etc into tax evaders too now.
What do you think socialized healthcare is? Socialism only works if you don't let people opt-out.
Granted, the homeless folks aren't really the problem, since for the most part they're the recipients in any socialized benefit. The issue is the person who makes plenty of money and doesn't feel they need to pay taxes (which mostly benefit others).
If it was a fine the Supreme Court would have struck down the law. But they recognized Congress' authority to impose taxes, so the law stands.
Semantics. But, whatever. s/fine/tax and my argument stands. You can't force insurance companies to treat pre-existing conditions unless you make people pay for insurance when they're healthy (or have somebody else pay for it for them).
If you want to understand how insurance works, first look at what the insurance pays for. Then figure out the total annual US cost of paying for that thing. Then divide that by the total population of the country, and add a few percent. That is the cost per-person of insurance if everybody buys it (whether they think they need it or not).
On the other hand, if you only want people who need it to pay for it, then instead of dividing it by the total population, divide it by the number of people who think they need insurance, and since you're dividing by a smaller number you get a bigger insurance premium.
In the case of health insurance, if only people who get sick want to pay for insurance then the cost will be something like 20x higher, and then the sick people won't want insurance since it costs more than their care.
Insurance is normally just voluntary socialism. The problem with healthcare is that we don't like making people die without treatment when they get really sick, so we don't want to make it voluntary. Insurance only works as a voluntary program if you actually let people who don't buy in suffer the full consequences of their decision. As soon as you create a "safety net" you've basically created an insurance program where all the taxpayers are paying for insurance for everybody, and that only works if you tax them enough to pay for it. However, Obamacare expects private insurance companies to actually pay the bills (aside from subsidies applied to premiums). So, you can't have a "safety net" in that case.
And before you go all authoritarianism on me, you can't have it both ways. Either you have to allow insurance companies to deny pre-existing conditions, or you have to force people to buy insurance. If you don't do either then people wait until they're sick to buy insurance, and then insurance companies go out of business. Socialist healthcare systems like in Europe do the second one by basically buying insurance for everybody through tax receipts (I didn't say that the insured had to directly pay the premium).
Such shallow thinking. How about forcing a penalty after needing treatment without insurance or the ability to pay it?
What happens if you have no insurance for 20 years, and never get sick. Then you sign up for insurance and pay your bills for 5 years. Then you get sick. What is the fine, and what happens if the person doesn't have the money to pay it at this point?
Why wait 20 years to charge them for 20 years of premiums?
The most sensible solution would be to just have the government buy insurance for anybody who does not do so, and then tax them for it. That is what happens if you don't mow your lawn - the local government will just mow it for you and send you a bill, and put a lein on your house if you don't pay it.
However, for whatever reason the government choosing your insurance policy turned people off, so instead we have a tax that people without insurance have to pay. The problem is that the tax is way too low, so for those who are young and healthy it just makes sense to pay the tax.
You do not need to force insurance purchased or allow preexisting condition exclusions. You can simply penalize the people who do not have coverage when they need it and also do not have the ability to pay for their treatment. You can also mandate as part of that penalty that they maintain coverage for a certain period of time.
If the penalty is less than the total of all the unpaid premiums, then there is no incentive to buy insurance, and the insurer loses money on the patient (since the premiums are calculated as the amount of money needed to cover losses on average, plus a profit).
What you propose is like a retirement plan where you tell people to save up for retirement, and then if they fail to do so and have no money you fine them, except they have no money so you can't fine them, and you still have to pay for their retirement. If you want people to invest in the future you have to give them incentive to do it when they can actually do it (whether investment is for retirement, or future health problems, or whatever).
The thing is, the people who say they don't want/need insurance are more than happy to sign up for it once they get an expensive medical condition, so what they usually really want is to have the benefits of insurance without actually paying for it.
What people want is to not pay for something until they need it. They don't want to buy new tires for their car until their old ones need replaced, They do not want to buy another gallon of milk until the other is almost empty. Can you blame them for not wanting to be forced into buying something they do not need at the moment?
This is INSURANCE. The whole point of insurance is that you don't know when you'll need it, so you pay money now so that in the event you need it you know you'll have it. I "waste" money on fire insurance every month. My house will probably never burn down, and thus I'll probably never get anything back. However, if my house does burn down, then I get a new house for very little money.
The only way to allow people to not buy health insurance is if we as a society refuse to provide care for them when they get sick unless they can pay the full bill themselves. If we were all sociopaths that system would work just fine, and people WOULD buy insurance because they would understand the consequences i
I suspect that a big part of the problem is that the fine for not having insurance is too low. That discourages healthy young people from signing up, since they can always sign up later with little penalty (pre-existing conditions must be covered).
And before you go all authoritarianism on me, you can't have it both ways. Either you have to allow insurance companies to deny pre-existing conditions, or you have to force people to buy insurance. If you don't do either then people wait until they're sick to buy insurance, and then insurance companies go out of business. Socialist healthcare systems like in Europe do the second one by basically buying insurance for everybody through tax receipts (I didn't say that the insured had to directly pay the premium).
So, either you get people complaining about having to pay for insurance they don't want/need, or you get people being ripped off by insurance companies who claim that they must have first contracted their diabetes 6 years ago when they were unemployed and uninsured for two months and it just went undetected all the remaining time so they refuse to pay for it. The thing is, the people who say they don't want/need insurance are more than happy to sign up for it once they get an expensive medical condition, so what they usually really want is to have the benefits of insurance without actually paying for it.
If you want to have an idea of how reliable automation is, just look at the number of military drones that have crashed so far. Their mission couldn't be simpler: take off, fly over some area, come back and land. They only fly in relatively nice weather, there are vaslty less drones than passenger aircraft, yet there are many more drone crashes than passenger aircraft crashes.
I hate to reply twice, but I was giving this some thought. How many of these crashes are the result of faulty automation?
Virtually all airliners have redundant everything, especially for critical components like engines. Drones usually don't have these things - if the predator's single engine fails, then it crashes. Sure, they could put two engines on them, but the cost of doing that is higher than the cost of buying a new one from time to time. They're designed to be expendable.
A computer-piloted passenger aircraft would obviously be designed with all the same reliability standards as any other passenger aircraft.
All my other comments still apply - I do agree that the automation would still need some improvement beyond what we have today. However, I just wanted to point out that you can't project from military drone failure rates to the failure rate of a 777 controlled by automation.
The whole concept is to get the pilot out of the cockpit entirely - they wouldn't be managing the autopilot - it would be managing itself.
Plus, if updates to the plane's mission were made while in-flight, it would be done by a team working from desks. They would have time to properly follow procedures, and wouldn't have long stretches of idle time (it would be like a call center - they just move from one plane to the next).
This would require changes to how we manage planes, ATC, etc in general. However, I think they're changes that are going to be inevitable at some point.
Good points. If humans were to be taken out of the loop obviously it will be necessary to change how the automation works, sometimes substantially. Anything that causes an autopilot disconnect, for example, obviously has to be redesigned (well, aside from pilot-triggered disconnects). There may also need to be an increase in redundancies as well so that the plane can remain fully automation even with failures. The algorithms also have to be designed to better handle a lack of sensor input, since all the pitot tubes icing up is always a possibility and so on.
No reason you couldn't have satellite telemetry on aircraft and a room full of test pilots somewhere standing by to assist if there is an emergency. Granted, you can't always guarantee communications, but if there is a failure it would be better to have the seasoned disaster recovery guy at the controls instead of whoever the seniority rules put on the route. Plus, the emergency team isn't limited to two crew members - they can have one guy who does nothing but fly the plane, another guy who does nothing but navigate, three engineers who do nothing but try to fix the broken systems, an overall command guy who does nothing but coordinate, one guy who handles communications, one guy who talks to the cabin crew, and so on - and they're all fresh having not spent 30 hours this week stuck on a plane.
But, I suspect that in many emergencies such a crew would often just manage the automation and provide supervision.
Even in a case where pitot tubes fail and such the automation CAN be improved, eliminating a potential source of accidents in the future. When a human learns, only that pilot improves unless you spend a LOT of time retraining the fleet (and the Air France pilots should have been trained in that maneuver anyway). When a computer program is adjusted, every plane in service improves, 100% of the time.
In addition, STUFF BREAKS. Your UAS that depends on ADS-B for sense-and-avoid isn't going to see that Bonanza with a transponder failure.
So, require every plane to have 2 of them then, with independent everything. Require them to have fallback to a non-GPS satellite positioning system as well.
And that's all irrelevant anyway, as there is never going to be a requirement (at least probably not in my lifetime) for manned aircraft to have an ADS-B transponder anywhere they don't already need a Mode C transponder. That will never fly, pun intended. The vast majority of private pilots will never need ADS-B out, as they don't fly where it matters. There are huge swaths of airspace you can fly in WITHOUT A RADIO, much less a transponder. This is a matter of philosophy: the airspace of the United States belongs to the people, and they should have free use of it. The FAA is only supposed to provide the minimum amount of regulation and oversight to keep everyone safe.
The problem is that this kind of mindset keeps general aviation (and aviation in general) stuck in the 20s. Why do aircraft spin on turn to final? Well, for starters, because there IS a turn to final - something completely unnecessary if you have the ability to do a precision approach to any runway with an RNAV with traffic awareness.
Of course, it is a sword that cuts both ways, because legally right now you can fly an unmanned drone anywhere in the US, commercial or not, monitored or not. Cite a law or regulation that says otherwise (hint, you can't, which is why a Federal court ruled against the FAA recently in the only case to go to a ruling that I'm aware of) - no, advisory circulars are not laws or regulations.
Sure, we could make it cheaper by cutting out certification requirements, but that goes back to my original statement: We'd have to accept lower safety levels.
Or we could just have the government bless a reference design and sell it for cost, with the manufacturer having no liability for failure (responsibility for quality would rest with the FAA), and other manufacturers would be able to freely manufacture the same design at any price they wish, with no liability as long as they conform to the reference.
The problem with aviation is that the regulations GREATLY lag technology, and the certification requirements drive everybody to openly avoid modernization. Then everything gets grandfathered in, so procedures have to assume that there is a piper cub with no electrical system nearby all the time.
I don't mean to pick on collision avoidance and ADS-B in particular. Problems like this exist all over the aviation industry, especially in general aviation. Cars have had FADEC and automatic transmissions for decades now, the typical training aircraft that costs $100/hr to operate lacks both (indeed even fairly expensive new piston aircraft still tend to lack them).
Sometimes I think the solution to the aviation problem isn't to think about how to allow drones to safely operate in a world of piloted aircraft, but rather to to think about how to allow passenger-carrying aircraft to safely operate in a world of drones.
Yup. If you're just going to throw up your hands and say that bug-free software is impossible, why not just intentionally write software that doesn't work at all?
My Linux kernel HAS to be broken. So, why not just edit the source and put an infinite loop at the entry point? The resulting black screen when I boot up must be just as useless as the OS I'm typing on right now, right?
If somebody who didn't do anything bad is suspected of breaking the law, that somebody will have to be investigated, and is well advised to defend himself or herself.
By all means let them provide the investigators with information, but that shouldn't require being physically present in a courtroom at a specified time.
Since you're trying to establish good or bad here rather than legal or illegal, you need to do a lot of investigation and consideration, and get the facts nailed down to make a good decision. That's going to occupy the defendant for some time.
I don't see why it has to. A defendant should only be tried if it is clear they did something wrong.
I'm not suggesting that defendants won't end up spending ANY time resolving issues that come up. However, the system needs to be optimized for their convenience, not the convenience of the court. Also, investigators should be personally liable if they contribute to an investigation that comes to an incorrect conclusion.
I'm fairly confident that this will GREATLY increase the costs of running the courts, but I don't think that jailing the most accused per dollar spent should really be a metric we use to evaluate the performance of the "justice" system.
Well, Snowden is clearly a pawn, but in some sense so is Putin. Why shouldn't Snowden play this game? His goal is to get some accountability for the US surveillance state and rein it in a bit. So he stirs the pot.
Right now the US and EU are struggling to find an approach they can agree on for dealing with Russia. Snowden brings up the NSA which is a sore subject with the EU, making it harder for the US to get them on-board. If the US ends up agreeing to more transparency or less surveillance in order to get the EU to back more sanctions against Russia, how is that a bad deal for anybody but Putin?
So you would rather that he should have stayed to be broken like Manning?
A safer, and more intellectually sound, option would be to become an anonymous whistleblower, like Deep Throat / Mark Felt. You don't get the notoriety, but then you also don't become Vladimir Putin's sock puppet when it becomes convenient.
That is REALLY hard to pull off these days. There are only so many people with access to that kind of data, and the NSA/CIA/etc could do quite a bit to try to figure out who he was. If he remained in a country friendly to the US he could have been extradited.
I don't think he went to Russia because he's sympathetic to the Russians. He just knows they would do anything to embarrass the US so they'd be likely to harbor him. This just seems like mutual interest.
Well, it might be hypocrisy, but pretty much every nation both engages in espionage and outlaws it at the same time. That's how it has worked since as long as anybody can tell. Some nations admit that they do it, some don't, but they basically all do it anyway. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the Vatican engaged in espionage.
Do the cells not form a blastula? The article was a bit fuzzy on the details. If these form embryonic stem cells it just seems like a matter of degree to outright produce a whole embryo, which of course means the possibility of human cloning.
Well, I can't say that my SSD sustains much more read/write throughput than my 4-drive 2-copies-per-block RAID1ish btrfs. It certainly seeks faster. Maybe my SSD just isn't particularly fast.
Sure, it would be easy for people who live in the exurbs to commute to a Google office in their particular exurb, but there just aren't enough potential Google employees to run a Google office living in a single exurb.
Hardly. The office I work at has about 7k people working at, in a suburb 20 miles from the major city (which isn't NYC). It used to have over 10k - mostly with STEM majors. Sure, most of them wouldn't work at Google, but the point is that you can find people with advanced skills in suburbs. Quite a few are willing to drive a fair distance to get there as well, but with a LOT less hassle than a commute into a major city.
Agree. I run an SSD myself for my OS drive, and RAID for general storage (which keeps the cost WAY down). Things go WAY faster on the SSD, though not quite as fast as I'd expected, actually.
The advantage of RAID1 is in parallel seeks, which is a big advantage if your drives have a lot of reads. However, the latency of any read is still the same so if reads must be sequential they will be slow.
They're going to have to investigate. To work at all efficiently, the courts have to abide by procedures. If you want the judge to handhold people's hands in general, we're going to have to put a lot more money into the court system. This means that the alleged lawbreaker is going to have to do things on the court's schedule, and is going to have to know what sort of arguments to make. I suspect this gets into what you mean by harassment.
I don't see how the one follows from the other. Sure, they need to investigate. I don't see why that requires everybody to show up in a room at the same time. Investigate and figure out whether there is any truth to the defense. If there is, then dismiss charges before wasting time on anything more formal.
Also, saying that the courts should be about justice rather than legality is a dangerous way to go. Laws both restrict and protect you, but they're written down. It would be better to have the courts about legality with an eye to justice. If the courts are given discretion to dispense justice sometimes, they will do so to somebody who makes a clear argument of injustice and is otherwise cooperative. LavaBit was in contempt because they demonstrated contempt for the legal system.
Why should one have respect for the legal system, if it isn't about justice? I'm fine with there being laws as guidelines so that we can all agree on what right/wrong generally looks like. However, following the law should not be an excuse when you do something that harms others, and breaking the law shouldn't be reason to punish somebody who does nobody else harm.
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The vast majority of medical spending is on chronic illness for the elderly. You should have your argument focus on this type of common outcome rather than "suddenly gets sick/hurt".
Sure, but it doesn't really change anything. In fact, most people become elderly so it only stands to reason that most people are going to need insurnace, and the money they pay in when they're young makes up for the money they take out when they're old.
Required purchase of health insurance is NOT Socialism!
Many will still not be able to afford it or obtain sufficient assistance to do so.
True, on its own it isn't. ACA does include subsidies for the poor which is a form of socialism, though limited in scope.
Prices will continue to go up.
Well, they don't have to under a system like this if it is done right (aside from inflation, or rising levels of service). I don't think the ACA was really done right - it was a compromise all-around. The US health system is a nest of problems, and ACA really only hits a few of them. There is no one thing that you can do to fix it.
Do you even understand this question? What happens if I purchase insurance for 2 months and get sick. It doesn't matter, I purchased the insurance just the same as if I purchased it 20 years ago.
The whole point of insurance is that in order for it to work, people need to pay MORE than they consume on average. If people wait until they're sick to sign up, it can't work.
And some people do not and will not need it. Why are they forced to pay for it when they do not want to? Why are normal law abiding citizens being told they are no longer free and must do as the government says and purchase something from a third party when they do nothing wrong?
So, your choices are force everybody to buy insurance even if they don't "need" it, or let people die when it turns out that they needed it after all.
In most cases insurance is voluntary, but then you suffer the loss if you don't have it. That's how health care was supposed to work before the ACA. The problem with that is that insurance companies were scumbags and if there was any lapse in coverage they assumed that your sickness started during the lapse and denied coverage. On the other hand, if you get rid of that loophole then everybody else behaves like scumbags and avoids paying for insurance until they start to feel sick.
What happens when some gun nut tea party gets elected and declares that anyone who doesn't own a gun has to pay a $2000 a year penalty?
If people who didn't own guns cost the average citizen money, then I'd be fine with such a law. People without health insurance DO cost others money, unless we as a society choose to let them die.
lol.. so the last 200+ years of this country didn't happen and everything starts right now because you though of something you pretend is the only possible logic?
Yeah, I guess everything being peachy is the reason Obama won the election... The previous system worked reasonably well for anybody with a job with a large employer. The problem is that costs are spiraling out of control and the model just wasn't sustainable, and MANY people had no healthcare at all.
And that happens every day in the previous 200+ years of our country's existence? Am I right or are you making things up in order to justify your worldview?
200 years ago if you dialed 911 you wouldn't get an answer, because you didn't have a phone. We hardly have 200 years of experience with modern medicine. Go take a l
A tax on living.
Guess that makes large numbers of the homeless etc into tax evaders too now.
What do you think socialized healthcare is? Socialism only works if you don't let people opt-out.
Granted, the homeless folks aren't really the problem, since for the most part they're the recipients in any socialized benefit. The issue is the person who makes plenty of money and doesn't feel they need to pay taxes (which mostly benefit others).
If it was a fine the Supreme Court would have struck down the law. But they recognized Congress' authority to impose taxes, so the law stands.
Semantics. But, whatever. s/fine/tax and my argument stands. You can't force insurance companies to treat pre-existing conditions unless you make people pay for insurance when they're healthy (or have somebody else pay for it for them).
If you want to understand how insurance works, first look at what the insurance pays for. Then figure out the total annual US cost of paying for that thing. Then divide that by the total population of the country, and add a few percent. That is the cost per-person of insurance if everybody buys it (whether they think they need it or not).
On the other hand, if you only want people who need it to pay for it, then instead of dividing it by the total population, divide it by the number of people who think they need insurance, and since you're dividing by a smaller number you get a bigger insurance premium.
In the case of health insurance, if only people who get sick want to pay for insurance then the cost will be something like 20x higher, and then the sick people won't want insurance since it costs more than their care.
Insurance is normally just voluntary socialism. The problem with healthcare is that we don't like making people die without treatment when they get really sick, so we don't want to make it voluntary. Insurance only works as a voluntary program if you actually let people who don't buy in suffer the full consequences of their decision. As soon as you create a "safety net" you've basically created an insurance program where all the taxpayers are paying for insurance for everybody, and that only works if you tax them enough to pay for it. However, Obamacare expects private insurance companies to actually pay the bills (aside from subsidies applied to premiums). So, you can't have a "safety net" in that case.
Such shallow thinking. How about forcing a penalty after needing treatment without insurance or the ability to pay it?
What happens if you have no insurance for 20 years, and never get sick. Then you sign up for insurance and pay your bills for 5 years. Then you get sick. What is the fine, and what happens if the person doesn't have the money to pay it at this point?
Why wait 20 years to charge them for 20 years of premiums?
The most sensible solution would be to just have the government buy insurance for anybody who does not do so, and then tax them for it. That is what happens if you don't mow your lawn - the local government will just mow it for you and send you a bill, and put a lein on your house if you don't pay it.
However, for whatever reason the government choosing your insurance policy turned people off, so instead we have a tax that people without insurance have to pay. The problem is that the tax is way too low, so for those who are young and healthy it just makes sense to pay the tax.
You do not need to force insurance purchased or allow preexisting condition exclusions. You can simply penalize the people who do not have coverage when they need it and also do not have the ability to pay for their treatment. You can also mandate as part of that penalty that they maintain coverage for a certain period of time.
If the penalty is less than the total of all the unpaid premiums, then there is no incentive to buy insurance, and the insurer loses money on the patient (since the premiums are calculated as the amount of money needed to cover losses on average, plus a profit).
What you propose is like a retirement plan where you tell people to save up for retirement, and then if they fail to do so and have no money you fine them, except they have no money so you can't fine them, and you still have to pay for their retirement. If you want people to invest in the future you have to give them incentive to do it when they can actually do it (whether investment is for retirement, or future health problems, or whatever).
What people want is to not pay for something until they need it. They don't want to buy new tires for their car until their old ones need replaced, They do not want to buy another gallon of milk until the other is almost empty. Can you blame them for not wanting to be forced into buying something they do not need at the moment?
This is INSURANCE. The whole point of insurance is that you don't know when you'll need it, so you pay money now so that in the event you need it you know you'll have it. I "waste" money on fire insurance every month. My house will probably never burn down, and thus I'll probably never get anything back. However, if my house does burn down, then I get a new house for very little money.
The only way to allow people to not buy health insurance is if we as a society refuse to provide care for them when they get sick unless they can pay the full bill themselves. If we were all sociopaths that system would work just fine, and people WOULD buy insurance because they would understand the consequences i
I suspect that a big part of the problem is that the fine for not having insurance is too low. That discourages healthy young people from signing up, since they can always sign up later with little penalty (pre-existing conditions must be covered).
And before you go all authoritarianism on me, you can't have it both ways. Either you have to allow insurance companies to deny pre-existing conditions, or you have to force people to buy insurance. If you don't do either then people wait until they're sick to buy insurance, and then insurance companies go out of business. Socialist healthcare systems like in Europe do the second one by basically buying insurance for everybody through tax receipts (I didn't say that the insured had to directly pay the premium).
So, either you get people complaining about having to pay for insurance they don't want/need, or you get people being ripped off by insurance companies who claim that they must have first contracted their diabetes 6 years ago when they were unemployed and uninsured for two months and it just went undetected all the remaining time so they refuse to pay for it. The thing is, the people who say they don't want/need insurance are more than happy to sign up for it once they get an expensive medical condition, so what they usually really want is to have the benefits of insurance without actually paying for it.
If you want to have an idea of how reliable automation is, just look at the number of military drones that have crashed so far. Their mission couldn't be simpler: take off, fly over some area, come back and land. They only fly in relatively nice weather, there are vaslty less drones than passenger aircraft, yet there are many more drone crashes than passenger aircraft crashes.
I hate to reply twice, but I was giving this some thought. How many of these crashes are the result of faulty automation?
Virtually all airliners have redundant everything, especially for critical components like engines. Drones usually don't have these things - if the predator's single engine fails, then it crashes. Sure, they could put two engines on them, but the cost of doing that is higher than the cost of buying a new one from time to time. They're designed to be expendable.
A computer-piloted passenger aircraft would obviously be designed with all the same reliability standards as any other passenger aircraft.
All my other comments still apply - I do agree that the automation would still need some improvement beyond what we have today. However, I just wanted to point out that you can't project from military drone failure rates to the failure rate of a 777 controlled by automation.
The whole concept is to get the pilot out of the cockpit entirely - they wouldn't be managing the autopilot - it would be managing itself.
Plus, if updates to the plane's mission were made while in-flight, it would be done by a team working from desks. They would have time to properly follow procedures, and wouldn't have long stretches of idle time (it would be like a call center - they just move from one plane to the next).
This would require changes to how we manage planes, ATC, etc in general. However, I think they're changes that are going to be inevitable at some point.
Docking and leaving might require the presence of crews on ships, but crews could be shuttled between their ships and the docks.
Or just use remote telemetry to do these operations. Ships already use harbor pilots who relieve the regular crew when in highly congested areas.
Good points. If humans were to be taken out of the loop obviously it will be necessary to change how the automation works, sometimes substantially. Anything that causes an autopilot disconnect, for example, obviously has to be redesigned (well, aside from pilot-triggered disconnects). There may also need to be an increase in redundancies as well so that the plane can remain fully automation even with failures. The algorithms also have to be designed to better handle a lack of sensor input, since all the pitot tubes icing up is always a possibility and so on.
No reason you couldn't have satellite telemetry on aircraft and a room full of test pilots somewhere standing by to assist if there is an emergency. Granted, you can't always guarantee communications, but if there is a failure it would be better to have the seasoned disaster recovery guy at the controls instead of whoever the seniority rules put on the route. Plus, the emergency team isn't limited to two crew members - they can have one guy who does nothing but fly the plane, another guy who does nothing but navigate, three engineers who do nothing but try to fix the broken systems, an overall command guy who does nothing but coordinate, one guy who handles communications, one guy who talks to the cabin crew, and so on - and they're all fresh having not spent 30 hours this week stuck on a plane.
But, I suspect that in many emergencies such a crew would often just manage the automation and provide supervision.
Even in a case where pitot tubes fail and such the automation CAN be improved, eliminating a potential source of accidents in the future. When a human learns, only that pilot improves unless you spend a LOT of time retraining the fleet (and the Air France pilots should have been trained in that maneuver anyway). When a computer program is adjusted, every plane in service improves, 100% of the time.
In addition, STUFF BREAKS. Your UAS that depends on ADS-B for sense-and-avoid isn't going to see that Bonanza with a transponder failure.
So, require every plane to have 2 of them then, with independent everything. Require them to have fallback to a non-GPS satellite positioning system as well.
And that's all irrelevant anyway, as there is never going to be a requirement (at least probably not in my lifetime) for manned aircraft to have an ADS-B transponder anywhere they don't already need a Mode C transponder. That will never fly, pun intended. The vast majority of private pilots will never need ADS-B out, as they don't fly where it matters. There are huge swaths of airspace you can fly in WITHOUT A RADIO, much less a transponder. This is a matter of philosophy: the airspace of the United States belongs to the people, and they should have free use of it. The FAA is only supposed to provide the minimum amount of regulation and oversight to keep everyone safe.
The problem is that this kind of mindset keeps general aviation (and aviation in general) stuck in the 20s. Why do aircraft spin on turn to final? Well, for starters, because there IS a turn to final - something completely unnecessary if you have the ability to do a precision approach to any runway with an RNAV with traffic awareness.
Of course, it is a sword that cuts both ways, because legally right now you can fly an unmanned drone anywhere in the US, commercial or not, monitored or not. Cite a law or regulation that says otherwise (hint, you can't, which is why a Federal court ruled against the FAA recently in the only case to go to a ruling that I'm aware of) - no, advisory circulars are not laws or regulations.
Sure, we could make it cheaper by cutting out certification requirements, but that goes back to my original statement: We'd have to accept lower safety levels.
Or we could just have the government bless a reference design and sell it for cost, with the manufacturer having no liability for failure (responsibility for quality would rest with the FAA), and other manufacturers would be able to freely manufacture the same design at any price they wish, with no liability as long as they conform to the reference.
The problem with aviation is that the regulations GREATLY lag technology, and the certification requirements drive everybody to openly avoid modernization. Then everything gets grandfathered in, so procedures have to assume that there is a piper cub with no electrical system nearby all the time.
I don't mean to pick on collision avoidance and ADS-B in particular. Problems like this exist all over the aviation industry, especially in general aviation. Cars have had FADEC and automatic transmissions for decades now, the typical training aircraft that costs $100/hr to operate lacks both (indeed even fairly expensive new piston aircraft still tend to lack them).
Sometimes I think the solution to the aviation problem isn't to think about how to allow drones to safely operate in a world of piloted aircraft, but rather to to think about how to allow passenger-carrying aircraft to safely operate in a world of drones.
crime and corruption IS there. well, the ceo's will like it, at least; but the rest of us, not so much..
CEOs are drawn to the kind of crime you find on Wall Street, not the kind of crime you find in most of Detroit.
Yup. If you're just going to throw up your hands and say that bug-free software is impossible, why not just intentionally write software that doesn't work at all?
My Linux kernel HAS to be broken. So, why not just edit the source and put an infinite loop at the entry point? The resulting black screen when I boot up must be just as useless as the OS I'm typing on right now, right?
Hmm, the electric company will still spot and report your usage, unless you supply your own power.
If somebody who didn't do anything bad is suspected of breaking the law, that somebody will have to be investigated, and is well advised to defend himself or herself.
By all means let them provide the investigators with information, but that shouldn't require being physically present in a courtroom at a specified time.
Since you're trying to establish good or bad here rather than legal or illegal, you need to do a lot of investigation and consideration, and get the facts nailed down to make a good decision. That's going to occupy the defendant for some time.
I don't see why it has to. A defendant should only be tried if it is clear they did something wrong.
I'm not suggesting that defendants won't end up spending ANY time resolving issues that come up. However, the system needs to be optimized for their convenience, not the convenience of the court. Also, investigators should be personally liable if they contribute to an investigation that comes to an incorrect conclusion.
I'm fairly confident that this will GREATLY increase the costs of running the courts, but I don't think that jailing the most accused per dollar spent should really be a metric we use to evaluate the performance of the "justice" system.
Well, Snowden is clearly a pawn, but in some sense so is Putin. Why shouldn't Snowden play this game? His goal is to get some accountability for the US surveillance state and rein it in a bit. So he stirs the pot.
Right now the US and EU are struggling to find an approach they can agree on for dealing with Russia. Snowden brings up the NSA which is a sore subject with the EU, making it harder for the US to get them on-board. If the US ends up agreeing to more transparency or less surveillance in order to get the EU to back more sanctions against Russia, how is that a bad deal for anybody but Putin?
So you would rather that he should have stayed to be broken like Manning?
A safer, and more intellectually sound, option would be to become an anonymous whistleblower, like Deep Throat / Mark Felt. You don't get the notoriety, but then you also don't become Vladimir Putin's sock puppet when it becomes convenient.
That is REALLY hard to pull off these days. There are only so many people with access to that kind of data, and the NSA/CIA/etc could do quite a bit to try to figure out who he was. If he remained in a country friendly to the US he could have been extradited.
I don't think he went to Russia because he's sympathetic to the Russians. He just knows they would do anything to embarrass the US so they'd be likely to harbor him. This just seems like mutual interest.
Well, it might be hypocrisy, but pretty much every nation both engages in espionage and outlaws it at the same time. That's how it has worked since as long as anybody can tell. Some nations admit that they do it, some don't, but they basically all do it anyway. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the Vatican engaged in espionage.
Do the cells not form a blastula? The article was a bit fuzzy on the details. If these form embryonic stem cells it just seems like a matter of degree to outright produce a whole embryo, which of course means the possibility of human cloning.
Well, I can't say that my SSD sustains much more read/write throughput than my 4-drive 2-copies-per-block RAID1ish btrfs. It certainly seeks faster. Maybe my SSD just isn't particularly fast.
Sure, it would be easy for people who live in the exurbs to commute to a Google office in their particular exurb, but there just aren't enough potential Google employees to run a Google office living in a single exurb.
Hardly. The office I work at has about 7k people working at, in a suburb 20 miles from the major city (which isn't NYC). It used to have over 10k - mostly with STEM majors. Sure, most of them wouldn't work at Google, but the point is that you can find people with advanced skills in suburbs. Quite a few are willing to drive a fair distance to get there as well, but with a LOT less hassle than a commute into a major city.
Agree. I run an SSD myself for my OS drive, and RAID for general storage (which keeps the cost WAY down). Things go WAY faster on the SSD, though not quite as fast as I'd expected, actually.
The advantage of RAID1 is in parallel seeks, which is a big advantage if your drives have a lot of reads. However, the latency of any read is still the same so if reads must be sequential they will be slow.
They're going to have to investigate. To work at all efficiently, the courts have to abide by procedures. If you want the judge to handhold people's hands in general, we're going to have to put a lot more money into the court system. This means that the alleged lawbreaker is going to have to do things on the court's schedule, and is going to have to know what sort of arguments to make. I suspect this gets into what you mean by harassment.
I don't see how the one follows from the other. Sure, they need to investigate. I don't see why that requires everybody to show up in a room at the same time. Investigate and figure out whether there is any truth to the defense. If there is, then dismiss charges before wasting time on anything more formal.
Also, saying that the courts should be about justice rather than legality is a dangerous way to go. Laws both restrict and protect you, but they're written down. It would be better to have the courts about legality with an eye to justice. If the courts are given discretion to dispense justice sometimes, they will do so to somebody who makes a clear argument of injustice and is otherwise cooperative. LavaBit was in contempt because they demonstrated contempt for the legal system.
Why should one have respect for the legal system, if it isn't about justice? I'm fine with there being laws as guidelines so that we can all agree on what right/wrong generally looks like. However, following the law should not be an excuse when you do something that harms others, and breaking the law shouldn't be reason to punish somebody who does nobody else harm.