For people that are unable to get insurance without selling their souls, yes it's better.
They just sold everyone else's souls. As I see it, everyone who brags here about how they're getting cheap health care due to this law at everyone else's expense is betraying the rest of their society.
I don't know if ACA is necessarily going to resolve this issue but I do know its the best effort I've seen in my adult lifetime.
Better than merely doing nothing? I don't buy it. There's some deep problems with it such as large incentives for demand and cost increases and the unconstitutionality of various parts of the law.
Decreasing the cost for the poor, and increasing it for the middle class and rich who can afford it.
That's nice, but it really works only if the middle class and rich can afford it. There are a number of problems with this view, such as the continuing increase in health care costs in the US faster than the rate of GDP growth and the open-ended demand.
, but I'm not about to let lack of a perfect system get in the way of implementing a good one.
What "good" system? This story makes specific predictions, namely, that health care will be demoted as a major risk for US citizens. I believe we'll see in the near future that this doesn't happen. In other places, it is claimed that health care costs will decline. Again, I believe we will not see that happen.
While we can hope it's a "good" system by whatever measure you happen to have, I think there's already plenty of evidence that this will be a substantial train wreck.
It also provides rebates for people who make under a certain threshold, increasing costs.
Fixed it for you. Just because someone else ends up paying for the "rebate" doesn't mean it costs less. Traditionally, using other peoples' money ended up increasing the costs of whatever good or service was being purchased.
I know I've turned down employment opportunities for a lack of viable health insurance for my family, I have to imagine that I'm far from the only one. What happens when people are no longer held back by this very practical concern and can go for broke like the immigrant entrepreneur?
Probably not much. I hate to be cynical here, but the risk of start ups is far greater than just the risk of going without health care. I don't think the risk equation changed enough for those people who cared so much about health care.
Third graders have a problem with them for the same reason my grandparents do: they're unfamiliar with the paradigms.
My bet is that any normal human of any age, with reasonable eyesight, manual dexterity, and mental ability is familiar with the paradigms. I would as many others do here, place blame on the implementation of the paradigms.
Well, look at what the previous poster was typing for. Communication. Competently communicating with others is one of the basics and computers connected to the internet are an effective tool for that.
And 3) a more sensible contract structure with stable requirements. Cost plus is rather impressive in its ability to drive up cost without getting much for it. And when you change requirements on the fly, you pay out the nose. There's also 4) projects are a dumping ground for ideas. NASA couldn't just build a Shuttle replacement, for example, the prototype also had to test a dozen new ideas on top of it.
However it just pisses me off when people rail against NASA for expensive tech when they fail to realize that cutting edge stuff is going to be expensive even when it involves private industry (hence the cost plus contracts you refer to)
Hence, why SpaceX spent a factor of ten less than NASA would for the same rocket development. It's not more expensive when you focus on the main goals of your project, not just add expensive tech willy nilly.
I'm sure people once thought students who only learned to type on PCs would be at a disadvantage compared to those who learned to type on a typewriter.
How is this supposed to be similar? A tablet does has some role for data entry, but only when nothing better is available within arm's reach. It's really a device for delivering information than for creating it.
Privatization didn't work that well with the Apollo lander.
Why do you consider that privatization? Paying someone with a lot of public funds to build a landing vehicle for you is not privatization. Instead, privatization is when you take a public asset or bit of infrastructure and sell or give it to a private party to run.
SpaceX is not a case of privatization because SpaceX never was a public asset or infrastructure in the first place.
Someone has to put in the "bloat" of basic research and it's rare for a private organization to invest in technology that will only yield results in 15+ years, if ever.
My view is that basic research of today is much more useless than basic research of the past because there is no interest in "results" any more. I've played this game with basic research proponents where they name a basic research field which has turned out to be useful in the long run, be it electromagnetism, integrated circuits, evolution, or category theory and I explain the short term benefits (which need not be explicitly monetary) of the research in question from the point of view of the people who were conducting the research in question.
I think the whole point of the argument is to evade accountability. In the past, I'm sure that researchers had to occasionally deal with funders who thought producing science was something like shoveling manure (with proper micromanagement, of course, resulting in faster shoveling of said research). Nowadays it seems an excuse to rationalize public fund of rather useless research (both now and in the future). Note in the above post, that it is claimed that private organizations don't invest in long term technology. There's plenty of counterexamples such as recent thorium reactor research in the US or a large number of astronomical observatories from around the beginning of the 20th Century.
And merely spending money on research doesn't make it an "investment". For example, the governments of the world spend quite a bit on fusion research, but they aren't anywhere near producing a fusion reactor that would be commercially viable. This is in large part because the approaches they employ just don't make sense economically. For example, a reactor with the aspects of ITER just is too expensive for the mundane task of producing power. Even if they could somehow make an optimal machine with the cost of ITER, it wouldn't be able to compete with normal power plants. It just doesn't produce enough power to justify the cost of the reactor.
My view is that if basic research is useful over any reasonable time frame (including up to centuries) then private organizations can be created to do it. Government hasn't shown any notable competence in this matter and I haven't seen any particular utility to government funded research to rationalize the expenditure of funds in that way.
McDonald's coffee was about 50 degrees hotter than home-brewed
Uh, no. Fresh coffee is hotter than 135-140. I'm not playing this game. The "actual facts" include that the person knowingly put a cup of dangerous hot fluid between her legs. That careless activity voids her claim as far as I'm concerned.
Eh, I say this as an enthusiastic supporter, but they've been quite short on their predicted launch frequency. That's a critical part of their business model.
Unlike most other characters in the movies, he generated an emotional response in the audience.
I doubt disgust was the desired emotional response. And the character was a walking cliche. I guess that's something of a Star Wars tradition, but it wasn't done well.
Other characters reacted to him and their reactions defined them.
I think that's a limitation of current computer animation. The humans in the film apparently didn't have anything to push off of when acting with a CGI character. A lot of interesting acting comes from parties interacting with each other, sometimes going way off script.
I also think a lot of the problem with the movies was that what the creators spent a lot of time on, they then thought the audience should spend a lot of time on. Jar Jar clearly took a lot of work. But he got way too much screen time for what he had to offer.
I think a lot of that is also how much time the creator spends on the new works. I bet most creators spend far more time on their first few works than they do on later ones. And after a time, they tend to exhaust their store of ideas.
The standard argument one always hears is that "Nobody forces people go and be stupid".
Yep. It pretty much is a discussion ender.
All that means, IMO, is that some people don't have the backbone to stand up for decency.
Or that "decency" of your sort is worthless. As I see it, I live in a mostly free country. That means people have the freedom to make bad decisions. And lo and behold, they do indeed make bad decisions. Maybe you should do something about the weather while you're at it.
The situation actually looks lopsided in the other direction when you're making reasonable comparisons.
I just noted that the spending is more than ten times as large in favor of two proponents of climate change advocacy whose primary role is as advocacy groups, and you say it's incomparable? I also noted that the public funding for one of the above, the World Wildlife Fund swamped what funding was discovered of the climate change "denier" advocates.
120 million was spent to specifically fund climate change denial campaigns, while the WWF funds are mostly spend (84%) on actual conservation programs.
So what is the difference? It's well known that propaganda is more effective when it is done in conjunction with useful work or charity. Christian-themed soup kitchens do it all the time.
For example, I just glanced at the WWF International webpage. Every single article or blurb on the main page is either climate change or oil themed. Six of ten articles in their "Conservation news and stories" webpage are similarly themed. So if you went to their webpage to save the pandas, you got a big dose of climate change in the process.
My take is that their conservation work, while worthy, buys access for climate change propaganda. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Someone should advocate for that side. And if they're saving endangered species and promoting conservation efforts in the process, then so much the better.
But I tire of the unsubstantiated stories of Big Oil buying the debate. Again, where is the money? All I can see are relatively small advocacy groups like the Heartland Institute, which appears to be among the largest. Their $5 million a year budget sounds impressive until you look through the numbers I quoted earlier. Even the IPCC easily outspends them (almost $13 million last year).
Where's the Big Oil movie? Hollywood has always had money for making huge environmentalist-themed flicks, even crap like "The Day After Tomorrow" or "Waterworld" which are over the top, stereotypical morality plays almost to the point of parody of the environmentalist belief system.
Even when the industry adopts a standard, such as the National Electrical Code [wikipedia.org] it STILL requires the force of State, or Local law to make it enforceable. There are still parts of the US that don't mandate the code.
Contract law also can make it enforceable. If someone attests in a contract that they're wiring a building to the standards of the National Electrical Code, then that's enforceable. It still requires the force of contract law (or some private equivalent), but it's a generic sort of enforcement applicable to many things other than electrical standards.
Your proposed "solution" clearly didn't work, otherwise the legislative one wouldn't have been proposed.
A problem doesn't have to exist. Bribes work too. But even when legislators/regulators are earnest, they're still going after things that appear to be problems. These need not be actual problems. I consider the matter of power adapters to be one such case of a non-problem and I agree with the grandparent on why.
Standardization is ALWAYS something that needs legislation.
But the "legislation" need not be provided by a government. For example,
A world standard almost exists for phone charging. There is really only ONE holdout.
In other words, it's an informal (or perhaps a formal standard - not like I looked here) standard that has only ONE holdout. Now, if you're trying to force the holdouts to use a particular standard, then well, you have a somewhat better case for government involvement.
If they were lying and trying to drive the science in warming direction because of an agenda do you really think they would have made such an alteration?
I've discussed this before on Slashdot. Yes, I do. They need to maintain a level of credibility. Being too far off would give ammunition to critics for decades to come.
My take is that the IPCC is an adversarial agent like a lawyer in a court trial and we should look at what it grudgingly admits. Here, they admit that the lower bound could be as low as 1.5 C increase in temperature per double of CO2. We probably should view that as pretty close to the actual parameter in question.
I would put similar constraints on their economic estimates. For example, I don't believe their CO2 emission estimates are likely to hold water. For example, I don't see the increasing levels of pollution in China, the primary source of CO2 emission increases today, as being sustainable even over a few decades. Nor will oil extraction remain as easy as it currently is. Things like fracking are remarkable innovations but they also deplete oil fields faster.
And finally, I view the claim that an increase of 2C should be a hard upper limit with suspicion. We have other goals and desires than merely maintaining a particular climate. I would point out that the very claim made here that human civilization will pass this point in 2040 as an indication that the temperature set point was unrealistic. I don't think any part of the world, much less the primary emitters of CO2 will be prepared for a hard stop or its economic consequences by 2040.
Slashdot Mirror
For people that are unable to get insurance without selling their souls, yes it's better.
They just sold everyone else's souls. As I see it, everyone who brags here about how they're getting cheap health care due to this law at everyone else's expense is betraying the rest of their society.
I don't know if ACA is necessarily going to resolve this issue but I do know its the best effort I've seen in my adult lifetime.
Better than merely doing nothing? I don't buy it. There's some deep problems with it such as large incentives for demand and cost increases and the unconstitutionality of various parts of the law.
Decreasing the cost for the poor, and increasing it for the middle class and rich who can afford it.
That's nice, but it really works only if the middle class and rich can afford it. There are a number of problems with this view, such as the continuing increase in health care costs in the US faster than the rate of GDP growth and the open-ended demand.
, but I'm not about to let lack of a perfect system get in the way of implementing a good one.
What "good" system? This story makes specific predictions, namely, that health care will be demoted as a major risk for US citizens. I believe we'll see in the near future that this doesn't happen. In other places, it is claimed that health care costs will decline. Again, I believe we will not see that happen.
While we can hope it's a "good" system by whatever measure you happen to have, I think there's already plenty of evidence that this will be a substantial train wreck.
It also provides rebates for people who make under a certain threshold, increasing costs.
Fixed it for you. Just because someone else ends up paying for the "rebate" doesn't mean it costs less. Traditionally, using other peoples' money ended up increasing the costs of whatever good or service was being purchased.
(1) she gets new insurance within 2 months
Even if it takes you longer than that to get a job, you can still get insurance to bridge the gap.
How about instead we just stop requiring people to presently have employment in order to get health care.
That's not currently the case.
I know I've turned down employment opportunities for a lack of viable health insurance for my family, I have to imagine that I'm far from the only one. What happens when people are no longer held back by this very practical concern and can go for broke like the immigrant entrepreneur?
Probably not much. I hate to be cynical here, but the risk of start ups is far greater than just the risk of going without health care. I don't think the risk equation changed enough for those people who cared so much about health care.
Third graders have a problem with them for the same reason my grandparents do: they're unfamiliar with the paradigms.
My bet is that any normal human of any age, with reasonable eyesight, manual dexterity, and mental ability is familiar with the paradigms. I would as many others do here, place blame on the implementation of the paradigms.
Well, look at what the previous poster was typing for. Communication. Competently communicating with others is one of the basics and computers connected to the internet are an effective tool for that.
However it just pisses me off when people rail against NASA for expensive tech when they fail to realize that cutting edge stuff is going to be expensive even when it involves private industry (hence the cost plus contracts you refer to)
Hence, why SpaceX spent a factor of ten less than NASA would for the same rocket development. It's not more expensive when you focus on the main goals of your project, not just add expensive tech willy nilly.
I'm sure people once thought students who only learned to type on PCs would be at a disadvantage compared to those who learned to type on a typewriter.
How is this supposed to be similar? A tablet does has some role for data entry, but only when nothing better is available within arm's reach. It's really a device for delivering information than for creating it.
Privatization didn't work that well with the Apollo lander.
Why do you consider that privatization? Paying someone with a lot of public funds to build a landing vehicle for you is not privatization. Instead, privatization is when you take a public asset or bit of infrastructure and sell or give it to a private party to run.
SpaceX is not a case of privatization because SpaceX never was a public asset or infrastructure in the first place.
Someone has to put in the "bloat" of basic research and it's rare for a private organization to invest in technology that will only yield results in 15+ years, if ever.
My view is that basic research of today is much more useless than basic research of the past because there is no interest in "results" any more. I've played this game with basic research proponents where they name a basic research field which has turned out to be useful in the long run, be it electromagnetism, integrated circuits, evolution, or category theory and I explain the short term benefits (which need not be explicitly monetary) of the research in question from the point of view of the people who were conducting the research in question.
I think the whole point of the argument is to evade accountability. In the past, I'm sure that researchers had to occasionally deal with funders who thought producing science was something like shoveling manure (with proper micromanagement, of course, resulting in faster shoveling of said research). Nowadays it seems an excuse to rationalize public fund of rather useless research (both now and in the future). Note in the above post, that it is claimed that private organizations don't invest in long term technology. There's plenty of counterexamples such as recent thorium reactor research in the US or a large number of astronomical observatories from around the beginning of the 20th Century.
And merely spending money on research doesn't make it an "investment". For example, the governments of the world spend quite a bit on fusion research, but they aren't anywhere near producing a fusion reactor that would be commercially viable. This is in large part because the approaches they employ just don't make sense economically. For example, a reactor with the aspects of ITER just is too expensive for the mundane task of producing power. Even if they could somehow make an optimal machine with the cost of ITER, it wouldn't be able to compete with normal power plants. It just doesn't produce enough power to justify the cost of the reactor.
My view is that if basic research is useful over any reasonable time frame (including up to centuries) then private organizations can be created to do it. Government hasn't shown any notable competence in this matter and I haven't seen any particular utility to government funded research to rationalize the expenditure of funds in that way.
I'd say because they can't launch more often. They seem to have plenty of potential customers.
McDonald's coffee was about 50 degrees hotter than home-brewed
Uh, no. Fresh coffee is hotter than 135-140. I'm not playing this game. The "actual facts" include that the person knowingly put a cup of dangerous hot fluid between her legs. That careless activity voids her claim as far as I'm concerned.
Eh, I say this as an enthusiastic supporter, but they've been quite short on their predicted launch frequency. That's a critical part of their business model.
Unlike most other characters in the movies, he generated an emotional response in the audience.
I doubt disgust was the desired emotional response. And the character was a walking cliche. I guess that's something of a Star Wars tradition, but it wasn't done well.
Other characters reacted to him and their reactions defined them.
I think that's a limitation of current computer animation. The humans in the film apparently didn't have anything to push off of when acting with a CGI character. A lot of interesting acting comes from parties interacting with each other, sometimes going way off script.
I also think a lot of the problem with the movies was that what the creators spent a lot of time on, they then thought the audience should spend a lot of time on. Jar Jar clearly took a lot of work. But he got way too much screen time for what he had to offer.
I think a lot of that is also how much time the creator spends on the new works. I bet most creators spend far more time on their first few works than they do on later ones. And after a time, they tend to exhaust their store of ideas.
The standard argument one always hears is that "Nobody forces people go and be stupid".
Yep. It pretty much is a discussion ender.
All that means, IMO, is that some people don't have the backbone to stand up for decency.
Or that "decency" of your sort is worthless. As I see it, I live in a mostly free country. That means people have the freedom to make bad decisions. And lo and behold, they do indeed make bad decisions. Maybe you should do something about the weather while you're at it.
Standards wouldn't be needed if general public was comprised of rational actors with a know-how in the subject matter.
Most standards have nothing to do with the general public, but are specific to groups that do have the know-how.
So really, this whole mess really is just to force a single company to play ball?
Does your coffee typically give you third-degree burns?
There are plenty of things that will hurt you, if you are careless with them. Most hot coffee is indeed that hot.
The situation actually looks lopsided in the other direction when you're making reasonable comparisons.
I just noted that the spending is more than ten times as large in favor of two proponents of climate change advocacy whose primary role is as advocacy groups, and you say it's incomparable? I also noted that the public funding for one of the above, the World Wildlife Fund swamped what funding was discovered of the climate change "denier" advocates.
120 million was spent to specifically fund climate change denial campaigns, while the WWF funds are mostly spend (84%) on actual conservation programs.
So what is the difference? It's well known that propaganda is more effective when it is done in conjunction with useful work or charity. Christian-themed soup kitchens do it all the time.
For example, I just glanced at the WWF International webpage. Every single article or blurb on the main page is either climate change or oil themed. Six of ten articles in their "Conservation news and stories" webpage are similarly themed. So if you went to their webpage to save the pandas, you got a big dose of climate change in the process.
My take is that their conservation work, while worthy, buys access for climate change propaganda. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Someone should advocate for that side. And if they're saving endangered species and promoting conservation efforts in the process, then so much the better.
But I tire of the unsubstantiated stories of Big Oil buying the debate. Again, where is the money? All I can see are relatively small advocacy groups like the Heartland Institute, which appears to be among the largest. Their $5 million a year budget sounds impressive until you look through the numbers I quoted earlier. Even the IPCC easily outspends them (almost $13 million last year).
Where's the Big Oil movie? Hollywood has always had money for making huge environmentalist-themed flicks, even crap like "The Day After Tomorrow" or "Waterworld" which are over the top, stereotypical morality plays almost to the point of parody of the environmentalist belief system.
Even when the industry adopts a standard, such as the National Electrical Code [wikipedia.org] it STILL requires the force of State, or Local law to make it enforceable. There are still parts of the US that don't mandate the code.
Contract law also can make it enforceable. If someone attests in a contract that they're wiring a building to the standards of the National Electrical Code, then that's enforceable. It still requires the force of contract law (or some private equivalent), but it's a generic sort of enforcement applicable to many things other than electrical standards.
Your proposed "solution" clearly didn't work, otherwise the legislative one wouldn't have been proposed.
A problem doesn't have to exist. Bribes work too. But even when legislators/regulators are earnest, they're still going after things that appear to be problems. These need not be actual problems. I consider the matter of power adapters to be one such case of a non-problem and I agree with the grandparent on why.
Standardization is ALWAYS something that needs legislation.
But the "legislation" need not be provided by a government. For example,
A world standard almost exists for phone charging. There is really only ONE holdout.
In other words, it's an informal (or perhaps a formal standard - not like I looked here) standard that has only ONE holdout. Now, if you're trying to force the holdouts to use a particular standard, then well, you have a somewhat better case for government involvement.
If they were lying and trying to drive the science in warming direction because of an agenda do you really think they would have made such an alteration?
I've discussed this before on Slashdot. Yes, I do. They need to maintain a level of credibility. Being too far off would give ammunition to critics for decades to come.
My take is that the IPCC is an adversarial agent like a lawyer in a court trial and we should look at what it grudgingly admits. Here, they admit that the lower bound could be as low as 1.5 C increase in temperature per double of CO2. We probably should view that as pretty close to the actual parameter in question.
I would put similar constraints on their economic estimates. For example, I don't believe their CO2 emission estimates are likely to hold water. For example, I don't see the increasing levels of pollution in China, the primary source of CO2 emission increases today, as being sustainable even over a few decades. Nor will oil extraction remain as easy as it currently is. Things like fracking are remarkable innovations but they also deplete oil fields faster.
And finally, I view the claim that an increase of 2C should be a hard upper limit with suspicion. We have other goals and desires than merely maintaining a particular climate. I would point out that the very claim made here that human civilization will pass this point in 2040 as an indication that the temperature set point was unrealistic. I don't think any part of the world, much less the primary emitters of CO2 will be prepared for a hard stop or its economic consequences by 2040.