That's a fair point. I believe we can, but if not, then the appropriate response will be to improve the ACA until it becomes workable and affordable.
I'd suggest starting by reversing the law. It's that bad. We could fix it for the next few decades, but there are so many problems (such as the incentive for part time employment, the individual mandate, the incentives to increase health care costs by restricting supply and increasing demand, and the political bribes that were necessary to pass this law) or we could start over and fix actual health care problems.
Then you can target problem areas like malpractice reform, equalizing of taxes for individual versus employer insurance (preferably by ending the tax subsidy altogether), removal of routine and elective health care procedures from required health insurance, and some sort of standardization of health care across state lines so that a business can offer a single health insurance policy applicable in multiple states.
If at this point, there is still a health insurance or health care coverage problem, we can address it. But my view is that it is much more important to cut health care costs than to provide health care coverage. Lowering health care costs would also help improve coverage. That is a nice side benefit.
Actually, if you'll read to the bottom of your link, Obama freely admits that he was voting for political reasons and he has now come to understand that it was the wrong way to go. Yes, a politician admitted he was wrong once. AMAZING!
He lies well, doesn't he? He became the president of the US on the strength of those "political reasons" so no matter how wrong he claims to understand himself to be, I see no reason to expect him to act differently should the occasion arise again.
This reminds me of the event that turned me off of Obama in the first place. After he secured the Democrat nomination in 2008, he promptly turned around and dropped his opposition to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Everyone expects some "triangulation" to the center, but the brazenness and complete lack of contrition of the turnaround is what got me, The moment the deal was sealed, he dropped the stance that won him the nomination, issued a perfunctory excuse (just as he did above), and moved on.
Your wrong assumption is that the problem is with the spending. But a deficit is not a problem of high spending, it is a problem of spending more than you have. You can fix it by reducing your spending, or by increasing your income.
It's not a "wrong" assumption. The US, for example, has demonstrated both that it will expand spending when revenue is increased and that a persistent, high deficit is tolerated.
As long as the government invests the $1 billion cash in a way that earns a greater rate of return than the interest rate that they pay out, it's a profit center.
And when they don't, which is most of the time, then it isn't a profit center. My view is that if the US cut away non-profit center spending, it'd be returning a lot of tax money. For example, none of the big three spending items are profit centers - Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and military spending. Cutting those away would put the US budget into the black right there.
The goal should be to make sure we take only as much as we can invest well, and the way to do that is to improve the efficiency of our investments.
Isn't happening. If I were to "cut to the bone", I'd get a budget perhaps as large as a third the size of the present one. We're not even remotely close to "cut to the bone" territory here.
No, no, no, no, no! Government spending reduces when then the economy is booming. But attempting to reduce spending does not trigger a boom!. Correlation does not imply causation.
[...]
Look how well austerity programs have been working in the rest of the world.
Remember, "correlation does not imply causation"? Here, the problem is that only countries in really bad shape get austerity programs forced upon them. So why are we blaming austerity programs rather than decades of poor behavior that led to this course of action?
So the obvious place to invest is in neighborhood center revitalization, encouragement of high quality urban development, and slowly getting rid of the semi-tenements that exist here and there. But that's long slow hard work. Gadgets are more fun.
The thing is, Oakland is not unusual in its physical layout. The whole of the south Bay area is even worse. I think it's a combination of the criminals have to go somewhere and Oakland is the weakest link in the area.
A common fallacy is that governments should run their finances like a family. A family does not (1) live forever, (2) print its own currency, (3) collect revenue as a matter of law, or (4) have a duty to provide public goods like a national defense.
None of which is actually relevant. Note that 1) doesn't matter since governments don't live forever either and it wouldn't be relevant if they did. Point 2) is constrained by inflation. You can print arbitrary amounts of money and make your currency worthless. And as a result, you would lose the power to borrow in that currency.
Point 3) is just irrelevant. A family doesn't need to "collect revenue" as a matter of law, but in practice, they collect revenue via wages and investments, just the same. And point 4) holds for families as well. They take on obligations which require them to do things.
Maintaining debt in perpetuity makes sense as long as the economy grows over the long term and as long as that debt doesn't get "too big" (with pretty fierce debate over what that means -- 100% of GDP is not necessarily too big by historical standards, but reputable minds can disagree).
Maintaining debt in perpetuity makes sense, if you're doing something productive with the money that you borrow. If you aren't, then it doesn't make sense.
You don't think America can do it better? Why do you hate America?
The same government that thinks you don't have privacy rights for your prescription medication? Is this a trick question? Of course, I don't think America can do it better.
FIFY. This new and improved list came from averaging estimates of publicly held debt by the various countries as reported by the CIA and IMF, according to Wikipedia. In particular, this drops Social Security bonds from the US which is imaginary debt owed by one part of the government to another part of the government.
It does tremendously for the people who would otherwise not buy an insurance at all.
At everyone else's expense. This is the nature of wealth transfers. They are inherently zero sum games.
Seen from the outside by someone who has so far lived in three different countries with obligatory health insurance, this fight against ACA by a large minority in the US is really stupid and irrational.
It's simple economics. The act restricts supply and increases demand. Both force prices up. The world's puzzlement will be banished in the next few years as health care costs continue to climb.
Obamacare doesn't fix the problem, but only makes it worse. That's what a lot of people don't get.
If they're still testing computer models, they could do that with far smaller reactors. And you bring up a good point with the opportunity costs of running one very large experimental reactor rather than a smaller one that would allow for funding of other fusion research projects.
Also, they should be looking at ways to reduce the technology requirements - such as using high temperature superconductors (liquid nitrogen temperatures are a lot easier to maintain than liquid helium temperatures and ease the engineering needed) and using a somewhat compromised vacuum (so that larger, cheaper, somewhat leakier vacuum chambers can be used).
Do you have any actual complaint to make about my post? I stand by my words. The US could have had a space program for what it spent on the Space Shuttle.
I guess you don't understand just how huge of an effect on the global economy there would be if the US defaulted on its debt.
Oh, I do. It won't be that big a deal. Odds are good that everyone who cared in the least about the outcome has already sold off the bonds at risk.
I suggest you go read some articles about it; there's no shortage of them in the popular press explaining it to layman like us.
Keep in mind that the primary role of the economist is as a credentialed reader of chicken entrails. I don't take those articles seriously because the markets don't. They would have far more to lose in the event of a "disaster" than I would.
It's an economics/reliability problem not a fusion problem. Let's consider ITER, for example. It's too expensive and plodding for use as a prototype. Cost is 10 billion euro with first plasma scheduled for 2020. At this point, I can say that it's about two orders of magnitude too expensive for a power plant prototype and the schedule is ludicrous. They should be starting construction of the next prototype in 2020. With such long construction/R&D cycles they're losing a lot of time.
The equipment list is an experimental physicist's playground, but it's a huge jump for a commercial power plant to use this gear (such as liquid helium cooled superconductors). I also don't see any signs of ability or intent to transfer that technology to commercial application. So we have extremely costly and specialized gear and no serious effort to apply it commercially.
Power is pretty high for a prototype - 500 MW for 1000 seconds. That may be a restriction of the fusion approach since you have to scale up a bunch in order to get to break even. But it still strikes me that power output is a good corner to cut - 500 KW for 1000 seconds is just as good experimentally.
Finally, what sort of power plant is going to come out of this? 10 billion euro gets you roughly 2-5 GW generating capacity of power plant, depending on country. That's the power output of a large nuclear or coal burning plant. And the next generation after ITER probably will be a lot more expensive.
If you're spending that much or more on a fusion plant due to the peculiar gear it uses, then you need a lot of generation capacity in the final product. That limits where you can fit it into a power grid.
For example, the current largest power generation plant is the Three Gorges Dam which has a generating capacity of around 22.5 GW. I think the way costs for the ITER lineage are going that any fusion plants derived from the approach are going to be considerably larger than that. That doesn't fit well with a power system that consists mostly of plants far smaller than 5GW.
I suppose things could change, but currently it appears to me that there's a trend towards cheap decentralized power generation rather than expensive centralized power generation.
I get that ITER is really a jobs program for physicists disguised as research into commercially viable fusion. It's still way too expensive and slow for that. You don't need to burn that much money just to keep some ivory tower and pocket protector types employed.
It could be that an older plant is leaking more tritium, that's a reasonable scenario. Or it could be that detection thresholds are more sensitive than they used to be.
How do you explain the hordes of McKinsey/Accenture/pwc/BCG/Bain "consultants" who walk into a business and proclaim to the execs that they have all the answers?
Conflict of interest. They have a product to sell.
Katrina was a good example of the rest of the country not giving a shit.
Except that the rest of the country did give a shit and as a result we have both a considerable reduction in loss of life from the disaster and a rebuilt New Orleans today. The narrative is completely wrong.
I wonder why your assertions are so far off the mark? I think it's because you're trying to fit reality to a story you're attached to rather than trying to find a story that fits reality.
Oh dear, zero content, name calling on Slashdot! Who let all this riff raff into the room?
I stand by my comments. It takes a special sort of failure to make things cost several times what they should, even by the usual deficient funding and contracting processes present in Washington, DC. The Shuttle was a remarkable white elephant for its time.
Well, considering the US government is barely functioning and is one day away from defaulting on its debt for the first time in history, I'd say that signs are pointing to "deeply failed".
You make the current problem sound really bad. All it means is that the government is temporarily doing a bit less than normal and might have to pay moderately higher interest rates on its debt in the long run. That's not a "deeply failed" situation.
No they are not. Most cities (and states) have governments too.
I'm quite aware of that. They remain excellent examples of private cooperation despite the presence of a government.
So like I said, Americans do not value working together. If American labor "worked together" they might actually do something to make themselves more competitive on the global labor market. Alas, they don't, and as I said, it's ironic how they're only "working together" when it comes to doing the wrong thing. So instead of "working together", it's more like Americans like to "break and ruin things together". One of us cannot make as large as a mess as all of us!
As I noted, your assertion is wrong. I notice you don't actually have any concrete examples of your claims. I can point to most cities or businesses as examples of such cooperation.
Your attitude reminds me of the Hebrews in the Old Testament of the Bible. When things didn't go their way, say because they got their butt kicked by a vastly superior military force like the Assyrians, they blamed the defeat on the moral failings of the populace. So the problem wasn't that a poorly trained militia with bronze weapons went up against the best veteran troops in the world with iron weapons, but rather that they weren't living right.
Here, the problem isn't lack of cooperation, but merely that the US labor force is several times more expensive than a number of its primary competitors. "Working together" isn't going to compensate for that unless as part of the "working together" process everyone ends up working for a lot less pay.
So you can't be bothered to care about reality? I'm just telling it like it is.
I still can't be bothered to care. You can talk about reality all you want, but these beliefs aren't about reality. And trying to make something work which is so divorced from reality will just fail hard. I'm sure the failure will be blamed on "not working together". This sort of person might not be able to work together to get out of a wet paper bag, but they have mastered those excuses for why the universe keeps getting in the way.
A bad or dumb idea even if supported by several hundred million people remains a bad or dumb idea.
Sure, but that doesn't make the problem go away. Those "clueless fucks" with bad and wrong ideas did, are, and will get in your way towards your American ideal. Again, I'm just telling it like it is. I'm pointing to you the problem you have to deal with (not you specifically, but all you red blooded god fearing freedom loving Americans living the ideal)
Again, so what? I'm telling it like it is too. Recall, if you can, that the original poster was complaining about "working together is un-American", which basically boiled down to the far narrower complaint of a lack of mass support for their particular publicly funded fantasy. As I noted at the time, there was plenty of working together, it just wasn't being recognized by a particular Slashdot poster on a rant.
I'll note here that I haven't tried hard to make my
"ideal" American society, but rather to curb the worse excesses of stupidity in the US. Be it the Patriot Act or Obamacare this stuff needs to be opposed for the well-being of everyone in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a fair point. I believe we can, but if not, then the appropriate response will be to improve the ACA until it becomes workable and affordable.
I'd suggest starting by reversing the law. It's that bad. We could fix it for the next few decades, but there are so many problems (such as the incentive for part time employment, the individual mandate, the incentives to increase health care costs by restricting supply and increasing demand, and the political bribes that were necessary to pass this law) or we could start over and fix actual health care problems.
Then you can target problem areas like malpractice reform, equalizing of taxes for individual versus employer insurance (preferably by ending the tax subsidy altogether), removal of routine and elective health care procedures from required health insurance, and some sort of standardization of health care across state lines so that a business can offer a single health insurance policy applicable in multiple states.
If at this point, there is still a health insurance or health care coverage problem, we can address it. But my view is that it is much more important to cut health care costs than to provide health care coverage. Lowering health care costs would also help improve coverage. That is a nice side benefit.
Except you've just added a half million more people to the unemployment line.
So what? They'll find jobs. And elimination of a couple of the taxes for those entitlement programs means that US labor got more affordable.
Austerity did not work for Hoover, nor Europe recently. It just makes the problem worse.
I don't see the evidence for that. Keep in mind that a country has to be pretty desperate to get forced into austerity in the first place.
Actually, if you'll read to the bottom of your link, Obama freely admits that he was voting for political reasons and he has now come to understand that it was the wrong way to go. Yes, a politician admitted he was wrong once. AMAZING!
He lies well, doesn't he? He became the president of the US on the strength of those "political reasons" so no matter how wrong he claims to understand himself to be, I see no reason to expect him to act differently should the occasion arise again.
This reminds me of the event that turned me off of Obama in the first place. After he secured the Democrat nomination in 2008, he promptly turned around and dropped his opposition to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Everyone expects some "triangulation" to the center, but the brazenness and complete lack of contrition of the turnaround is what got me, The moment the deal was sealed, he dropped the stance that won him the nomination, issued a perfunctory excuse (just as he did above), and moved on.
Your wrong assumption is that the problem is with the spending. But a deficit is not a problem of high spending, it is a problem of spending more than you have. You can fix it by reducing your spending, or by increasing your income.
It's not a "wrong" assumption. The US, for example, has demonstrated both that it will expand spending when revenue is increased and that a persistent, high deficit is tolerated.
As long as the government invests the $1 billion cash in a way that earns a greater rate of return than the interest rate that they pay out, it's a profit center.
And when they don't, which is most of the time, then it isn't a profit center. My view is that if the US cut away non-profit center spending, it'd be returning a lot of tax money. For example, none of the big three spending items are profit centers - Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and military spending. Cutting those away would put the US budget into the black right there.
The goal should be to make sure we take only as much as we can invest well, and the way to do that is to improve the efficiency of our investments.
Isn't happening. If I were to "cut to the bone", I'd get a budget perhaps as large as a third the size of the present one. We're not even remotely close to "cut to the bone" territory here.
No, no, no, no, no! Government spending reduces when then the economy is booming. But attempting to reduce spending does not trigger a boom!. Correlation does not imply causation.
[...]
Look how well austerity programs have been working in the rest of the world.
Remember, "correlation does not imply causation"? Here, the problem is that only countries in really bad shape get austerity programs forced upon them. So why are we blaming austerity programs rather than decades of poor behavior that led to this course of action?
So the obvious place to invest is in neighborhood center revitalization, encouragement of high quality urban development, and slowly getting rid of the semi-tenements that exist here and there. But that's long slow hard work. Gadgets are more fun.
The thing is, Oakland is not unusual in its physical layout. The whole of the south Bay area is even worse. I think it's a combination of the criminals have to go somewhere and Oakland is the weakest link in the area.
A common fallacy is that governments should run their finances like a family. A family does not (1) live forever, (2) print its own currency, (3) collect revenue as a matter of law, or (4) have a duty to provide public goods like a national defense.
None of which is actually relevant. Note that 1) doesn't matter since governments don't live forever either and it wouldn't be relevant if they did. Point 2) is constrained by inflation. You can print arbitrary amounts of money and make your currency worthless. And as a result, you would lose the power to borrow in that currency.
Point 3) is just irrelevant. A family doesn't need to "collect revenue" as a matter of law, but in practice, they collect revenue via wages and investments, just the same. And point 4) holds for families as well. They take on obligations which require them to do things.
Maintaining debt in perpetuity makes sense as long as the economy grows over the long term and as long as that debt doesn't get "too big" (with pretty fierce debate over what that means -- 100% of GDP is not necessarily too big by historical standards, but reputable minds can disagree).
Maintaining debt in perpetuity makes sense, if you're doing something productive with the money that you borrow. If you aren't, then it doesn't make sense.
Can we afford ACA?
Are you asking, can we afford to provide health care to our citizens?
No, the previous poster was asking "Can we afford ACA?" It's disingenuous to conflate the providing of health care with a particular piece of bad law.
You don't think America can do it better? Why do you hate America?
The same government that thinks you don't have privacy rights for your prescription medication? Is this a trick question? Of course, I don't think America can do it better.
Debt as a percentage of GDP:
Japan: 214%
Greece: 161%
Italy: 126%
France: 90%
UK: 89%
USA: 74%
Argentinia: 42%
FIFY. This new and improved list came from averaging estimates of publicly held debt by the various countries as reported by the CIA and IMF, according to Wikipedia. In particular, this drops Social Security bonds from the US which is imaginary debt owed by one part of the government to another part of the government.
They are inherently zero sum games.
Or negative sum games. I forgot that important note. I think Obamacare qualifies as a negative sum game here.
It does tremendously for the people who would otherwise not buy an insurance at all.
At everyone else's expense. This is the nature of wealth transfers. They are inherently zero sum games.
Seen from the outside by someone who has so far lived in three different countries with obligatory health insurance, this fight against ACA by a large minority in the US is really stupid and irrational.
It's simple economics. The act restricts supply and increases demand. Both force prices up. The world's puzzlement will be banished in the next few years as health care costs continue to climb.
Obamacare doesn't fix the problem, but only makes it worse. That's what a lot of people don't get.
If they're still testing computer models, they could do that with far smaller reactors. And you bring up a good point with the opportunity costs of running one very large experimental reactor rather than a smaller one that would allow for funding of other fusion research projects.
Also, they should be looking at ways to reduce the technology requirements - such as using high temperature superconductors (liquid nitrogen temperatures are a lot easier to maintain than liquid helium temperatures and ease the engineering needed) and using a somewhat compromised vacuum (so that larger, cheaper, somewhat leakier vacuum chambers can be used).
Do you have any actual complaint to make about my post? I stand by my words. The US could have had a space program for what it spent on the Space Shuttle.
I guess you don't understand just how huge of an effect on the global economy there would be if the US defaulted on its debt.
Oh, I do. It won't be that big a deal. Odds are good that everyone who cared in the least about the outcome has already sold off the bonds at risk.
I suggest you go read some articles about it; there's no shortage of them in the popular press explaining it to layman like us.
Keep in mind that the primary role of the economist is as a credentialed reader of chicken entrails. I don't take those articles seriously because the markets don't. They would have far more to lose in the event of a "disaster" than I would.
Are you an expert in fusion?
It's an economics/reliability problem not a fusion problem. Let's consider ITER, for example. It's too expensive and plodding for use as a prototype. Cost is 10 billion euro with first plasma scheduled for 2020. At this point, I can say that it's about two orders of magnitude too expensive for a power plant prototype and the schedule is ludicrous. They should be starting construction of the next prototype in 2020. With such long construction/R&D cycles they're losing a lot of time.
The equipment list is an experimental physicist's playground, but it's a huge jump for a commercial power plant to use this gear (such as liquid helium cooled superconductors). I also don't see any signs of ability or intent to transfer that technology to commercial application. So we have extremely costly and specialized gear and no serious effort to apply it commercially.
Power is pretty high for a prototype - 500 MW for 1000 seconds. That may be a restriction of the fusion approach since you have to scale up a bunch in order to get to break even. But it still strikes me that power output is a good corner to cut - 500 KW for 1000 seconds is just as good experimentally.
Finally, what sort of power plant is going to come out of this? 10 billion euro gets you roughly 2-5 GW generating capacity of power plant, depending on country. That's the power output of a large nuclear or coal burning plant. And the next generation after ITER probably will be a lot more expensive.
If you're spending that much or more on a fusion plant due to the peculiar gear it uses, then you need a lot of generation capacity in the final product. That limits where you can fit it into a power grid.
For example, the current largest power generation plant is the Three Gorges Dam which has a generating capacity of around 22.5 GW. I think the way costs for the ITER lineage are going that any fusion plants derived from the approach are going to be considerably larger than that. That doesn't fit well with a power system that consists mostly of plants far smaller than 5GW.
I suppose things could change, but currently it appears to me that there's a trend towards cheap decentralized power generation rather than expensive centralized power generation.
I get that ITER is really a jobs program for physicists disguised as research into commercially viable fusion. It's still way too expensive and slow for that. You don't need to burn that much money just to keep some ivory tower and pocket protector types employed.
It could be that an older plant is leaking more tritium, that's a reasonable scenario. Or it could be that detection thresholds are more sensitive than they used to be.
How do you explain the hordes of McKinsey/Accenture/pwc/BCG/Bain "consultants" who walk into a business and proclaim to the execs that they have all the answers?
Conflict of interest. They have a product to sell.
Katrina was a good example of the rest of the country not giving a shit.
Except that the rest of the country did give a shit and as a result we have both a considerable reduction in loss of life from the disaster and a rebuilt New Orleans today. The narrative is completely wrong.
I wonder why your assertions are so far off the mark? I think it's because you're trying to fit reality to a story you're attached to rather than trying to find a story that fits reality.
Oh dear, zero content, name calling on Slashdot! Who let all this riff raff into the room?
I stand by my comments. It takes a special sort of failure to make things cost several times what they should, even by the usual deficient funding and contracting processes present in Washington, DC. The Shuttle was a remarkable white elephant for its time.
Lots of plants are leaking tritium without fixing the problem.
If you're generating tritium, then you're leaking it. The real question is how much tritium is the nuclear plant leaking? Dose makes the poison.
Well, considering the US government is barely functioning and is one day away from defaulting on its debt for the first time in history, I'd say that signs are pointing to "deeply failed".
You make the current problem sound really bad. All it means is that the government is temporarily doing a bit less than normal and might have to pay moderately higher interest rates on its debt in the long run. That's not a "deeply failed" situation.
No they are not. Most cities (and states) have governments too.
I'm quite aware of that. They remain excellent examples of private cooperation despite the presence of a government.
So like I said, Americans do not value working together. If American labor "worked together" they might actually do something to make themselves more competitive on the global labor market. Alas, they don't, and as I said, it's ironic how they're only "working together" when it comes to doing the wrong thing. So instead of "working together", it's more like Americans like to "break and ruin things together". One of us cannot make as large as a mess as all of us!
As I noted, your assertion is wrong. I notice you don't actually have any concrete examples of your claims. I can point to most cities or businesses as examples of such cooperation.
Your attitude reminds me of the Hebrews in the Old Testament of the Bible. When things didn't go their way, say because they got their butt kicked by a vastly superior military force like the Assyrians, they blamed the defeat on the moral failings of the populace. So the problem wasn't that a poorly trained militia with bronze weapons went up against the best veteran troops in the world with iron weapons, but rather that they weren't living right.
Here, the problem isn't lack of cooperation, but merely that the US labor force is several times more expensive than a number of its primary competitors. "Working together" isn't going to compensate for that unless as part of the "working together" process everyone ends up working for a lot less pay.
So you can't be bothered to care about reality? I'm just telling it like it is.
I still can't be bothered to care. You can talk about reality all you want, but these beliefs aren't about reality. And trying to make something work which is so divorced from reality will just fail hard. I'm sure the failure will be blamed on "not working together". This sort of person might not be able to work together to get out of a wet paper bag, but they have mastered those excuses for why the universe keeps getting in the way.
A bad or dumb idea even if supported by several hundred million people remains a bad or dumb idea.
Sure, but that doesn't make the problem go away. Those "clueless fucks" with bad and wrong ideas did, are, and will get in your way towards your American ideal. Again, I'm just telling it like it is. I'm pointing to you the problem you have to deal with (not you specifically, but all you red blooded god fearing freedom loving Americans living the ideal)
Again, so what? I'm telling it like it is too. Recall, if you can, that the original poster was complaining about "working together is un-American", which basically boiled down to the far narrower complaint of a lack of mass support for their particular publicly funded fantasy. As I noted at the time, there was plenty of working together, it just wasn't being recognized by a particular Slashdot poster on a rant.
I'll note here that I haven't tried hard to make my "ideal" American society, but rather to curb the worse excesses of stupidity in the US. Be it the Patriot Act or Obamacare this stuff needs to be opposed for the well-being of everyone in the US.