just about every purchasing department in the Federal Government waits until the very last day to fill out their orders. Doing so allows them to negotiate for better deals to benefit us taxpayers
I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. You get to pay more for the privilege of buying at the last moment.
Having said that, a lot of these deals are too big to have been negotiated in a short, rushed time frame. They probably were agreed to, months in advance and the funding broke loose in that last week. It still increases the cost of such transactions (due to factors such as charging interest for payments months delayed), but by less than the implied above route would.
There is a reason why the ACA passed. The current system was no longer working for well over half of the country.
And what does PPACA do to change that? It makes health insurance more costly for everyone - both due to the relaxation of pre-existing conditions and the subsidies. And it doesn't actually improve the health care part. Doctors aren't forced to work at below cost. So the new system allows a bunch of people to buy health insurance, often with other peoples' money, but it also makes that health insurance more costly for whoever doesn't have those increased costs covered by subsidy.
This results in a situation similar to education loans where the cost of the service is only bounded by what people can pay after the subsidies and the like are taken into account.
My predictions for this are that we'll see an end to most employer-based health insurance, that costs of medical care will continue to rise at well above the rate of growth of GDP, and we'll have a two tier system consisting of people who can pay for their own health care and as a result get it, and people who can't who will get some sort of token health care support. There might be a third group who can exploit the system in order to obtain well above average benefit.
6. Increasing supply of health care (your "hire more doctors and nurses" is part of that). There isn't a physical law of the universe that restricts the number of staff or hospitals to current levels. Instead, it is substantial barriers to entry at all levels of the health care sector. And when you do such things, the costs tend to go down due to competition.
Well, then maybe a case could be made for contracting out to say Canada or France to run the US's health care system. But having the US run its own health care system when it has so profoundly demonstrated its inability to do so? Have you looked into mental health treatment options? Hopefully, they're affordable in your country of residence.
while you're repeating the same old arguments everybody against ObamaCare have been saying
Those arguments are also correct. I'd rather be right. This law was found to be unconstitutional. Yet they chose an unconstitutional way to keep it going.
So maybe you should take your own advice about what to do about health care: don't do anything. Not doing anything might just be the best thing you can do to fight ObamaCare than arguing against it.
I think you give rather bad advice which is surprisingly rare for Slashdot. Most people are worth hearing out to some degree, even if they won't follow their own words.
But perhaps you should listen to your own advice and get lost? I wouldn't have any problems with that.
Personally, I think Obamacare comes with its own self-destruction switch - and that may be an intended consequence in order to usher in single payer or some similar scheme. But when it does, are we going to turn back to the people who created the mess? Who ignore law? Who would rather force us to do things because it's cheaper and more convenient that way? Sounds like a lot of us would. Which is why I speak.
So what? There's a lot we don't know with any certainty. And as that AC noted, you could have educated yourself on this subject and be further along than "don't know".
I agree with the people complaining about white space. There's too much unused space on the screen. I also don't like the mouse-over popups. And I agree that the "featured topics" are worthless. I'm not here to read about Slashdot cloud.
And those little people icons? Meh. As long as it doesn't affect my load time.
Ok, what do I like? It doesn't break threading. That's still fairly easy to read (though it still has the usual problem with multiple replies of not being able to figure out from a glance who is replying to whom).
The color scheme is tolerable and I get the strong brand sense I'm on Slashdot not some other site that happens to have threaded comments. The webpages loaded pretty fast for me despite the eye candy.
What I would like? The ability to search Slashdot comments from normal web search engines. It is remarkably hard to do so. Normally, when I do so, half of the papers are ever changing "search page" junk that doesn't even show on topic stuff.
An edit button would be nice, but I understand that we're bad people and can't have nice things.
And of course, the ability to stab people in the face via the internet. I'd like to do it and I know various parties which vigorously disagree with me would like to do it in turn. Come on. It'd be fun!
No good or service has been generated by the leak.
So obviously there's no good there. Snowden's leak didn't make a car or a basket. But to claim that there is no service there?
Warning us (who for the most part aren't trees) about several abuses of government power by one of the more unaccountable organizations of the US. That has value to me and hence, is a service. Especially, when it gets confirmed by the powers that be.
They said what they had to say, to organize people to fight.
So speaking words to organize people to fight tyranny? That's a service in my book.
If it offends you, you should probably disconnect from the internet and go live in a tree somewhere.
There's no need here to QQ the internet. Just stop being an idiot for a time.
As I replied here, just because there was a civil war going on in Algeria doesn't mean that there wasn't terrorism going on. IMHO, most of those deaths had nothing to do with the rules of war, clearly marked combatants targeting only each other.
Terrorism is fundamentally the targeting via acts of destruction of civilian populations by non-government organizations. That last weasel phrase is needed to distinguish terrorism in the US legal sense from government-backed terrorism. And many acts of terrorism are indeed parts of some sort of war.
I haven't. So what? I'll just note here that I'm arguing for the protection of society from some really bad law and you're arguing that you got your swag.
(Your 'unconstitutionality' swipe also brands you as a radical; it's been found constitutional, so suck it up and deal with it)
I found differently: individual mandate, the financial imposition on the states, and not deep-sixing the whole law due to the lack of a severability clause. It's worth noting that the Supreme Court did note that the first two were unconstitutional as well. You think about how one gets a fucked up ruling where a law is upheld which is determined by a majority of the court to be unconstitutional in two ways and inconvenient portions are severed even though the law didn't allow for such severability. For example, from Wikipedia:
A majority of the justices, including Chief Justice Roberts, agreed that the individual mandate was not a proper use of Congress's Commerce Clause or Necessary and Proper Clause powers, though they did not join in a single opinion. A majority of the justices also agreed that another challenged provision of the Act, a significant expansion of Medicaid, was not a valid exercise of Congress's spending power, as it would coerce states to either accept the expansion or risk losing existing Medicaid funding.
There's also the game where two different majorities decided the individual mandate was and wasn't a tax.
This is your "it's been found constitutional". To summarize, the Supreme Court found that the law was unconstitutional in two ways and even revoked one of the two parts in question because they determined it was unconstitutional. But they did so in a way that was unconstitutional since the court didn't have the legal authority to sever the unconstitutional part of the law from the rest.
Why is some CEO's right to get a gold-plated cellphone or even your right to spend $20 at the movie theater worth more than their right to maybe live without being in constant pain -- or to live at all?
Because otherwise there's no reason to respect any rights.
Not that I'm a fan of Obamacare...it's a corporate handout, nothing more; what we really need is a single-payer system...but saying you're being "betrayed" because someone doesn't want to have to choose between food and healthcare is frankly kind of disgusting.
Of course, you're disgusted. I don't care. Life sucks. You should have to make choices about health care based in large part on what you have. That's how we keep it from overwhelming the rest of our society.
So basically you say, since USA has imported all the crazies from Europe, you are the balanced one and everyone else is provincial?
Well, there the US imported certain sorts of crazies and not other sorts of crazies. My point is that it's all relative and no one has a claim to be any sort of standard for political beliefs.
Due process free everything, expanding war in Afghanistan, trying to extend Iraq (but failing), war in Libya w/o Congressional authorization, war on whistleblowers and the press, NSA, pro cluster bombs, and on and on.
Ok, he's a leftist then. I have ample pigeon-holes for this exercise.
In accordance with due process, anyone "getting caught" through a well-regulated surveillance system would first have been caught through normal means.
I see the source of your confusion. Like just about everyone else, law enforcement or whatever would instead use the easiest way. They'd filter through the NSA data for the desired information, then manufacture a legitimate seeming way to get that information (say, via an "anonymous phone call" from a confederate) to hide how they illegally got the data.
And that's assuming erroneously that they are trying to follow the forms of legal law enforcement. Instead, they might use the information to create a proscription list of dissenters and rivals within the US or without for some future US leader's thugs to kill.
The NSA has built the ability to find evidence on an unprecedented scale. We should not fear such an ability, but rather we should be demanding that such power directly and visibly serves the people.
What's the point of this "demand"? This power is easy to abuse and there's no such means to put in safeguards and accountability - aside from removing the power in the first place.
In Germany, currently, not in the Middle East or Africa. Algeria for example lost somewhere between 40k and 200k people to a nasty ten year civil war and it has a population about a third that of Germany. Even at the lower estimate, that's more than an order of magnitude greater than the alleged death rate from fishbones.
And if as I suspect, the 700 choking deaths from fish bones per year is over the world's population rather than Germany's population, then you're looking at a three orders of magnitude difference.
Um, he just wears cameras on his head. That doesn't make him a cyborg.
Ok, why doesn't that make him a cyborg? Obviously, not as hardcore as implanting machines/high tech in yourself, but it's a matter of degree not of nature.
Unless you want to get super-literal
Well, we do have to go by the definitions of words.
I'll just note here that some people think Obama is "conservative" because of his inability to implement all the wonderful policies they think he should be implementing. In other words, an incompetent or outnumbered liberal or leftist is also considered a conservative as is anyone who doesn't fully implement whatever the speaker thinks they should be implementing - even if the reason is because they don't have the authority to do so.
It does make you wonder, with such a large group of disparate people in a single category, what the point of the classification scheme is.
Europe exported their conservatives and ambitious for many generations, then drove the nails into the coffin with the fallout from the Second World War. The far right in a number of countries (for example, France, Norway, Germany, and Italy) had some degree of collaboration with Nazis or other Fascist groups at the time, and that marginalizes them to this day.
Most of the Third World is just dysfunctional politically with disagreement being mostly on the basis of who gets to legally steal from who.
The US's political quirks are par for the course.
So the US's "far right" and "far left" makes little sense from your provincial and skewed viewpoint as opposed to that of the original poster? Who really cares?
Slashdot Mirror
This is the corporate welfare that liberals whine about, but that the conservative electorate seems completely oblivious to.
Unless it involves renewable energy or electric cars. Then the obliviousness kicks in.
just about every purchasing department in the Federal Government waits until the very last day to fill out their orders. Doing so allows them to negotiate for better deals to benefit us taxpayers
I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. You get to pay more for the privilege of buying at the last moment.
Having said that, a lot of these deals are too big to have been negotiated in a short, rushed time frame. They probably were agreed to, months in advance and the funding broke loose in that last week. It still increases the cost of such transactions (due to factors such as charging interest for payments months delayed), but by less than the implied above route would.
There is a reason why the ACA passed. The current system was no longer working for well over half of the country.
And what does PPACA do to change that? It makes health insurance more costly for everyone - both due to the relaxation of pre-existing conditions and the subsidies. And it doesn't actually improve the health care part. Doctors aren't forced to work at below cost. So the new system allows a bunch of people to buy health insurance, often with other peoples' money, but it also makes that health insurance more costly for whoever doesn't have those increased costs covered by subsidy.
This results in a situation similar to education loans where the cost of the service is only bounded by what people can pay after the subsidies and the like are taken into account.
My predictions for this are that we'll see an end to most employer-based health insurance, that costs of medical care will continue to rise at well above the rate of growth of GDP, and we'll have a two tier system consisting of people who can pay for their own health care and as a result get it, and people who can't who will get some sort of token health care support. There might be a third group who can exploit the system in order to obtain well above average benefit.
6. Increasing supply of health care (your "hire more doctors and nurses" is part of that). There isn't a physical law of the universe that restricts the number of staff or hospitals to current levels. Instead, it is substantial barriers to entry at all levels of the health care sector. And when you do such things, the costs tend to go down due to competition.
Well, then maybe a case could be made for contracting out to say Canada or France to run the US's health care system. But having the US run its own health care system when it has so profoundly demonstrated its inability to do so? Have you looked into mental health treatment options? Hopefully, they're affordable in your country of residence.
Since when does a foreign citizen who actively works AGAINST the interests of the US government allowed freedoms to enter the United States?
What's the evidence for that claim?
Bro, that just makes you look more pathetic.
I'd rather have pathos than evil.
while you're repeating the same old arguments everybody against ObamaCare have been saying
Those arguments are also correct. I'd rather be right. This law was found to be unconstitutional. Yet they chose an unconstitutional way to keep it going.
So maybe you should take your own advice about what to do about health care: don't do anything. Not doing anything might just be the best thing you can do to fight ObamaCare than arguing against it.
I think you give rather bad advice which is surprisingly rare for Slashdot. Most people are worth hearing out to some degree, even if they won't follow their own words.
But perhaps you should listen to your own advice and get lost? I wouldn't have any problems with that.
Personally, I think Obamacare comes with its own self-destruction switch - and that may be an intended consequence in order to usher in single payer or some similar scheme. But when it does, are we going to turn back to the people who created the mess? Who ignore law? Who would rather force us to do things because it's cheaper and more convenient that way? Sounds like a lot of us would. Which is why I speak.
That was quite the rabbit hole. You do wonder why someone like him is allowed anywhere near a lever of power.
I don't know with any certainty
So what? There's a lot we don't know with any certainty. And as that AC noted, you could have educated yourself on this subject and be further along than "don't know".
I agree with the people complaining about white space. There's too much unused space on the screen. I also don't like the mouse-over popups. And I agree that the "featured topics" are worthless. I'm not here to read about Slashdot cloud.
And those little people icons? Meh. As long as it doesn't affect my load time.
Ok, what do I like? It doesn't break threading. That's still fairly easy to read (though it still has the usual problem with multiple replies of not being able to figure out from a glance who is replying to whom).
The color scheme is tolerable and I get the strong brand sense I'm on Slashdot not some other site that happens to have threaded comments. The webpages loaded pretty fast for me despite the eye candy.
What I would like? The ability to search Slashdot comments from normal web search engines. It is remarkably hard to do so. Normally, when I do so, half of the papers are ever changing "search page" junk that doesn't even show on topic stuff.
An edit button would be nice, but I understand that we're bad people and can't have nice things.
And of course, the ability to stab people in the face via the internet. I'd like to do it and I know various parties which vigorously disagree with me would like to do it in turn. Come on. It'd be fun!
No good or service has been generated by the leak.
So obviously there's no good there. Snowden's leak didn't make a car or a basket. But to claim that there is no service there?
Warning us (who for the most part aren't trees) about several abuses of government power by one of the more unaccountable organizations of the US. That has value to me and hence, is a service. Especially, when it gets confirmed by the powers that be.
They said what they had to say, to organize people to fight.
So speaking words to organize people to fight tyranny? That's a service in my book.
If it offends you, you should probably disconnect from the internet and go live in a tree somewhere.
There's no need here to QQ the internet. Just stop being an idiot for a time.
As I replied here, just because there was a civil war going on in Algeria doesn't mean that there wasn't terrorism going on. IMHO, most of those deaths had nothing to do with the rules of war, clearly marked combatants targeting only each other.
Terrorism is fundamentally the targeting via acts of destruction of civilian populations by non-government organizations. That last weasel phrase is needed to distinguish terrorism in the US legal sense from government-backed terrorism. And many acts of terrorism are indeed parts of some sort of war.
I have personally seen benefits
I haven't. So what? I'll just note here that I'm arguing for the protection of society from some really bad law and you're arguing that you got your swag.
(Your 'unconstitutionality' swipe also brands you as a radical; it's been found constitutional, so suck it up and deal with it)
I found differently: individual mandate, the financial imposition on the states, and not deep-sixing the whole law due to the lack of a severability clause. It's worth noting that the Supreme Court did note that the first two were unconstitutional as well. You think about how one gets a fucked up ruling where a law is upheld which is determined by a majority of the court to be unconstitutional in two ways and inconvenient portions are severed even though the law didn't allow for such severability. For example, from Wikipedia:
A majority of the justices, including Chief Justice Roberts, agreed that the individual mandate was not a proper use of Congress's Commerce Clause or Necessary and Proper Clause powers, though they did not join in a single opinion. A majority of the justices also agreed that another challenged provision of the Act, a significant expansion of Medicaid, was not a valid exercise of Congress's spending power, as it would coerce states to either accept the expansion or risk losing existing Medicaid funding.
There's also the game where two different majorities decided the individual mandate was and wasn't a tax.
This is your "it's been found constitutional". To summarize, the Supreme Court found that the law was unconstitutional in two ways and even revoked one of the two parts in question because they determined it was unconstitutional. But they did so in a way that was unconstitutional since the court didn't have the legal authority to sever the unconstitutional part of the law from the rest.
Why is some CEO's right to get a gold-plated cellphone or even your right to spend $20 at the movie theater worth more than their right to maybe live without being in constant pain -- or to live at all?
Because otherwise there's no reason to respect any rights.
Not that I'm a fan of Obamacare...it's a corporate handout, nothing more; what we really need is a single-payer system...but saying you're being "betrayed" because someone doesn't want to have to choose between food and healthcare is frankly kind of disgusting.
Of course, you're disgusted. I don't care. Life sucks. You should have to make choices about health care based in large part on what you have. That's how we keep it from overwhelming the rest of our society.
So basically you say, since USA has imported all the crazies from Europe, you are the balanced one and everyone else is provincial?
Well, there the US imported certain sorts of crazies and not other sorts of crazies. My point is that it's all relative and no one has a claim to be any sort of standard for political beliefs.
Due process free everything, expanding war in Afghanistan, trying to extend Iraq (but failing), war in Libya w/o Congressional authorization, war on whistleblowers and the press, NSA, pro cluster bombs, and on and on.
Ok, he's a leftist then. I have ample pigeon-holes for this exercise.
That still leaves the peg leg and the false teeth. They give tactile feedback to the host.
In accordance with due process, anyone "getting caught" through a well-regulated surveillance system would first have been caught through normal means.
I see the source of your confusion. Like just about everyone else, law enforcement or whatever would instead use the easiest way. They'd filter through the NSA data for the desired information, then manufacture a legitimate seeming way to get that information (say, via an "anonymous phone call" from a confederate) to hide how they illegally got the data.
And that's assuming erroneously that they are trying to follow the forms of legal law enforcement. Instead, they might use the information to create a proscription list of dissenters and rivals within the US or without for some future US leader's thugs to kill.
The NSA has built the ability to find evidence on an unprecedented scale. We should not fear such an ability, but rather we should be demanding that such power directly and visibly serves the people.
What's the point of this "demand"? This power is easy to abuse and there's no such means to put in safeguards and accountability - aside from removing the power in the first place.
In Germany, currently, not in the Middle East or Africa. Algeria for example lost somewhere between 40k and 200k people to a nasty ten year civil war and it has a population about a third that of Germany. Even at the lower estimate, that's more than an order of magnitude greater than the alleged death rate from fishbones.
And if as I suspect, the 700 choking deaths from fish bones per year is over the world's population rather than Germany's population, then you're looking at a three orders of magnitude difference.
Um, he just wears cameras on his head. That doesn't make him a cyborg.
Ok, why doesn't that make him a cyborg? Obviously, not as hardcore as implanting machines/high tech in yourself, but it's a matter of degree not of nature.
Unless you want to get super-literal
Well, we do have to go by the definitions of words.
And why would pedantry go for that? We'd have to give the score to the first person with a wooden leg, fake teeth, or glass eye in that case.
What part of Pelosi/Ried/Obama are right wing?
I'll just note here that some people think Obama is "conservative" because of his inability to implement all the wonderful policies they think he should be implementing. In other words, an incompetent or outnumbered liberal or leftist is also considered a conservative as is anyone who doesn't fully implement whatever the speaker thinks they should be implementing - even if the reason is because they don't have the authority to do so.
It does make you wonder, with such a large group of disparate people in a single category, what the point of the classification scheme is.
Well, who is balanced ideologically?
Europe exported their conservatives and ambitious for many generations, then drove the nails into the coffin with the fallout from the Second World War. The far right in a number of countries (for example, France, Norway, Germany, and Italy) had some degree of collaboration with Nazis or other Fascist groups at the time, and that marginalizes them to this day.
Most of the Third World is just dysfunctional politically with disagreement being mostly on the basis of who gets to legally steal from who.
The US's political quirks are par for the course.
So the US's "far right" and "far left" makes little sense from your provincial and skewed viewpoint as opposed to that of the original poster? Who really cares?