With TOA energy being the ultimate overall driving force behind climate change, our predictions are still subject to the fact we aren't yet able to predict TOA energy.
So the short version is climate models are worse than useless as a policy and planing tool, because we don't understand how the highest order component behaves.
Except back in 1859 it was not a terrorist or state actor that did it to us; it was SOL and the sun certainly could do it again. While we have some ability to detect and predict when the risk of such an event occurring is higher than usual there ain't much we can do about it either.
So some EMP resilience would be a nice to have. Now the doom sayers are always telling us how after only a few days without electricity we all start dying. Well an EMP is likely to damage transmission lines (because of their length) and possibly some sensitive electronics most stuff won't likely be affected unless its a very very high intensity event. The big east coast power failure of what was it 2k4? Kinda proved we can get on for at least a few days without mains power.
The bigger question is would a China or Russia who might not be similarly given their relationship to the sun at that moment of the event try and take advantage of our condition with a conventional force.
Ever since Exchange 2007 came a long its been a few trivial powershell commands to copy the contents of one mailbox into another. What he probably should do is have his exchange admin copy his mails to a folder in his managers mailbox; so they won't be subject to delete.
That way the person likely to be responsible for anything the submitter would have been will have the information at his finger tips, and in a format that is easy to forward the relevant parts to whomever (s)he finds to do the actual work.
Once a designated replacement is hired that folder can be copied/moved to that persons mailbox.
Maybe it is maybe it isn't. The question is why do you and honestly why did the couple care. This isn't like civil rights battles of the past with Jim Crowe and such.
If blacks were being turned away from a specific lunch counter there would have been no big movement the issue was they were truned away at EVERY counter. We don't have that problem today, certainly not with the GLBTt community.
The fact the so much outrage over the incident exists proves that. They could said well "a fuck you too than" and headed to any other bakery in town. The vast vast majority of which would have said "hey your money is as good as anyone else's is just tell us what you want on the cake."
I can understand their being upset and telling everyone what bigoted assholes the people at the bakery that rejected them are. I can totally understand and support anyone who says "you know what I'd rather spend my money at bakery #2 because they treat everyone like a person and I would rather do business with a place like that". I think asked government to FORCE bakery one to serve any specific client is a bridge to far. We have a freedom of association under the first amendment. Reasonably for that mean anything there is an implied freedom from association. if the American Nazi party tried to hire me to do some work for them I'd turn them down. They are not a client I want, I don't want be associated with them and their ideas in any way. If a Christan baker sincerely believes that openly homosexual people are hell bound unrepentant sinners I can understand they'd feel the same. Why should the rest of us force our value one them?
You do realize that even the dessert is a complex ecosystem of micro flora and fona that would be greatly harmed by being permanently covered in solar cells. You must also be aware that transmission loss with electricity is well HUGE. So you are discussing a large ecosystem altering deployment of solar cells, much larger than anticipated, in place where there is nobody to maintain them. Sounds like a pretty stupid plan.
Right up there with daming another river or installing another giant bird migration path altering wind farm. Those are okay in Europe because the Europeans already killed all the birds in past centuries but they kinda suck in the states.
Someday folks are going to wake up and realize their is more to protecting our the environment than CO2 emissions. All the greenies want to do is run around and spoil the last few unspoiled places are earth to stand up their renewables; personally I'd rather burn a little more oil.
If you actually plan to meet your stated goal yes. If the objective is to score some political points by saying something that sounds good, than it means no such thing. 5 years out and then 10 years out, then 20 years out, when opponents are making noise that threatens you political you just tell supports that "there is still plenty of time, and with the economy....now isn't the time to...."
Don't you seem to want it both ways too. You have to have some responsibility for your car. Ever see someone have a suspension collapse? That does not just happen, that happens because the dipshit could not be arsed to either look at or have someone look at the suspension to make sure it was not dangerously corded and that rubber bushings were not failing etc.
You can automate most aspects of something like a car, but this is a high performance machine that operates in a wide variety of weather and abusive conditions. It has to be serviced and inspected from time to time. dipshit who does no do that now isn't going to start when the thing becomes more automatic than it already is, (s)he will pay even less attention.
So the automaker supposed to be on the hook because YOU last decided to check break fluid six years ago?
Um not the loans are EXACTLY the problem. Tution grows without bounds because everybody smart enough to graduate from college does recognize it has great value, both in the direct economics of employable and the more intelligible things like connections with other people you make and knowledge and thinking skills that really will enable you to make better more informed decisions in the future.
A college education IS VALUABLE, exactly how valuable is difficult to quantify. So now you make large sums of unsecured monies available to young people many of whom have never seen or worked with an account balance that large before and surprise surprise they are willing to spend it. They don't have an appreciate for how much work it might be to pay that back. What they do see is that Crazy Go Nuts University has a new fancy new recreation facility and bigger dorm rooms than Podunk College. Its difficult to compare the actual education quality but dorm and recreation facilities are things you can see. Podunk has no choice if they want to continue to attract students they have to build these things.
In order to build that stuff they raise tuition, which they can because people are paying with loans anyway and everyone qualifies!
If it was not for government secured loans college cost expansion would probably mostly track with inflation. After all with the exception of some leading edge research schools, almost all the cost would be salary if you take away the billion dollar construction projects.
Price insensitivity is the reason costs have gone up, if you can't afford CGNU's 40K tuition you might very well choose Podunk's $12K tuition and lack of fancy building and giant rooms if the alternative is no college for you. If we just got rid of Sally Mea and college loans need to be secured with some kind of collateral or simply small enough lender were willing to fork over on credit history alone, the problem would solve it self.
Okay, but for the sake of argument Mass is an open carry state (with permit). I don't know the specific details because I don't live there.
Hypothetically if someone has a gun permit in Mass. and walks down a public street past a school, not on school grounds mind you, only the street in front of it, while having a gun on their hip or even their bushmaster for that matter can they be charged with "disrupting a s school".
See I don't understand how doing something that without probably cause to suspect otherwise (ie you know the guy does not have permit) doing something that is most likely perfect legal on public, though not school grounds, in the vacinity of a school can be a crime. It sounds like "loitering" on of the laws that every municipality keeps on the books to hassle people with but rarely press whenever anyone lawyers up demonstrats intent to contest the matter rather than entering a quick plea of guilty. They know if fought to its logical conclusion that statute will be struck for vagueness.
I think the underlying thinking behind most educational technology is take the work out of the hands of the local practitioner, deskill the teacher. While the sellers and developers of edtech will never admit this is the case and my not even realize it themselves it basically amounts to central planning.
If a computer program is going to teach a kid math the pedagogical approaches it takes will be more or less fixed and ones designed at some central facility somewhere. It wont be the paradigm the local instructor was using and it may or may not add to clarity.
I am in my early 30's depending on who you ask I am either the last of the gen X'ers or among the first of the so called millennials. Outside of some of the education television experiments tried in classrooms on boomers, I saw most of the early experiments in edtech. I had a number of older teachers who had spend years drawing their own little cartoons, crafting their own little narratives to help us understand. I also had younger ones who wanted to try out all the new MECC stuff. I was in Minnesota. If that worked for you great, if not the instructors were mostly caught flat footed with no alternative ideas about how to convey the lesson, unlike the other teachers that had taken the time to develop their own materials.
Central planning isn't any better for education than it is for economies. When edtech stops trying to teach and really starts trying to make teachers more effective it might work. A better hammer will allow a good carpenter to get his framing done faster and possibly even done better. A better hammer isn't a robotic carpenter though, but most edtech attempts to be a robotic teacher.
My sister teaches Highschool math subjects. She loves Mathmatica. She says it lets throw up a visualization on the screen the really helps some of her students get it. Its faster and better than anything she could scribble on the whiteboards. She is using it though in the context of her own lessons to explain her own contrivances that show how to apply the math. Its a generic tool though, while lots of educators use it isn't designed only for education and it isn't designed to teach any specific lessons.
Edtech needs to focus on giving teachers quality general use tools and class room appropriate hardware on which to run them. It does not need to be trying to create a digital textbook equivalent or play instructor on its own.
Actually being in ones early 20s and male is highly correlated with auto accidents that is why the actuaries tell them to do that. Just like being in ones early 20s and female is highly correlated with requiring more frequent and more expensive medical care for a number of conditions including pregnancy.
For some reason though charging more for one is a prudent insurance practice and discrimination blocked by the ACA for another.
If you show positive for HIV the insurance company already has a problem. I think it would work more like this. You show positive for having once had the clap or have HPV. Now you are marked as someone who has/had risky sex, ie outside a monogmous relationship where your partners health status is known or unprotected sex with anyone else. Your risk of contracting something expensive to treat like herpes or HIV went from very low to reasonably possible. Now the insurance company has a good reason to get you off their books.
That is probably the most likely example I can think of.
I can't understand how why anyone chooses satellite service for Internet access. If they do they are somewhere so remote that Verizon does not have LTE service, they havent looked in years, or they are stupid.
Verizon's "Installed LTE" (fixed antenna on the outside of the building) is price and speed competitive with the sat com providers has essentially the same usage caps, without the latency an weather related problems.
My guess is Verizon and probably AT&T (why the hell does AT&T not have a similar offering currently?) will be better positioned to add capacity and than the SAT providers ever will. Its easier to shrink the size of cell by erecting another tower than to put up another bird. So the 15/20/30/60GB caps will lift on that side first.
If those caps get large enough that people can reasonably afford to do streaming media, and more Internet based offerings in addition to Netflix show up, my guess would be Direct TV and DIsh's days will be numbered.
Except that many of the founders and our first president were very much against the idea of the USA engaging in treaties and entanglements with other nations. The fact that they designed a system that would nearly always fail to reach such agreements isn't a surprise.
What I think is sad is rather than deal with it, either by embracing their wisdom and not making so many damned agreements, or by having a serious debate about the subject an amending the Constitution rather than running around it with 'Fast Track" authority legislative bunk.
Back in the 20s and 30s in the US, the mob ran roughshod over the land. The only way devised to corral them-- because of massive corruption on local, state, and federal levels-- was to invoke tax laws.
The statement is largely true but the libertarian in me wishes to suggest that stopping the mob was the WRONG priority. The mob was doing plenty of things they could have been prosecuted for besides tax evasion, etc. The actual crimes like assaulting people should have put them away. Society would have been better served then as now, had 'we' gone after those corrupt officials protecting the criminals at all levels.
I'd feel safer having got one crooked cop off the street than I would removing 10 guys who sell a little weed and untaxed liquor now and then.
Finally private property, emphasis private is the very corner stone of all other freedoms. Interfering and spying on with reporting requirements with the exchange of money between individuals threatens that most basic freedom. Is a tool that can be used to detect crimes sure, but there are other ways to do that, and much like mass phone record collection I don't believe its one that is justified.
I think its an interesting idea but as you say congress would be almost entirely bogged down in re-upping existing/good/ laws. Even if a vote to 're-approve the federal statute against murder' takes only 60 seconds to execute you still won't get much done in a congressional session.
What I think might be more interesting is to require every legislative act to have preamble like the Constitution does. It should be required to be written in plain language at a 4th grade reading level, stating the acts broad objectives and intent. After say a period of 5 years anyone who is subject to the law should be permitted to challenge it in federal court for 'performance'. If the court finds the Act:
does not materially satisfy the objectives in its preamble OR has material unintended consequences (positive or negative the court should not be permitted to make a value judgement) OR has been materially used be the Executive for purposes not covered by the preamble
The trouble if you are OBL type is that people are only so dumb. You can convience them to die for the cause but far fewer want to volunteer for a job that most like will result in their being captured not killed and living out there days being force fed at camp X-Ray.
IMHO the real vulnerability is the security line itself and the Boston bombing proves it. You can pack plenty of explosive to cause all kinds of carnage in bag that will plausibly be allowed as a carry on. Pick a busier airport, wait until you are in the middle of the security queue with people cordoned all around you in a big mass and BOOM! Most of these airports haven't got high ceilings and the screening area is in a corridor like space to prevent people from bypassing it. Look what the bomb in Boston did outdoors, think what harm it would do to people indoors!
Such an act would certainly have the effect of terrifying people, of going anywhere near an airport and probably anywhere else they might be forced to queue. Is it as spectacular as slamming a airliner into sky scraper, nope, but if executed well still stands to kill or maim 1000 people give or take. It will still make folks afraid to travel with all the associated knock-on economic impacts. The current system does nothing to defend against this type of thread in fact it makes it far more likely.
The whole cockpit door thing has more or less eliminated the reason a terrorist might have any interest of bringing weapons on a aircraft. If you can't control the plane anymore than all that is left to you is a Libyan style attack where you attempt to cause the plane to crash over a populated area. I suppose you might just want to transport weapons to an unrelated target as well but even the stupidest terrorists has to realize that there are ways to transport weapons with much lower detection risk than by airline. So I just don't see airliners being probably targets any more, when the airport offers a high probability of success, and will make a fine spectacle.
Another thing that must be kept in mind is this is not some issue about funding some obscure little program to feed a certain variety of pigeon in a specific park some place. This is in fact a large news making issue that the public has become quite familiar with it, its also an issue that is closely tied to very fundamental questions about who we are as nation, and what the Constitution means in the 21st century..
You can't be POTUS and not have a strong opinion on an issue like this, Its your job as leader to form one even if you don't have personal convictions. Obama can't duck this one and be fulfilling his responsibilities any more than an umpire can refuse to call "ball" or "strike".
You are either for it, and should be willing and able to articulate why or you are against and ought to be willing to take a strong position there too.
For or against as President in a post Snowden political landscape he owes us more than backing the USA FREEDOM ACT, which as near as I can tell changes nothing other than who owns the building the hard-drives sit in and some nonspecific language about "tools to fight the terrorists".
I would expect much like digital telephony lag is not much of challenge to overcome unless its really really big.
Jitter would be a problem. The human brain is pretty good at adapting to consistent latency, anticipating events, delaying or cramming inputs as required to compensate. Where that breaks down is when the latenecy is sometimes 200ms and other-times 500ms without predictability. Controlling jitter on the public parts of the Internet is hard.
Yes the Windows 3.1x UI was pretty terrible, but NDW (Norton Desktop Windows) replaced a number of shell functions (file pickers, etc), the file manager, gave you desktop icons, a task bar along with user definable buttons, multiple 'views' (list, detail, icon, etc) for program groups and directories, a powerful scripting environment and more.
Windows 3 was damn near unusable without it. It was actually probably the best UI out there with it.
Keep in mind our 'use' of electricity has changed a lot too. In Edison and Tesla's day there were basically two applications light, and running motors.
For practical applications lighting (incandescent) AC/DC are more or less equally efficient. Running a motor though AC is a clear win. If you are not highly sensitive to the rate of revolution because its part of a machine tools and you can gear it however you want, or its running a compressor and the cycle on time is flexible etc, than AC means you can build a simple motor with few parts and more importantly fewer wearing parts, no brushes.
As far as early 20th century commercial and home electrical needs DC would have been aggressively stupid.
AC did other good things too, it provided a time signal that everyone could cheaply use, so clocks no longer had to run independently at least solved drift. Was useful for governing analog recording a playback devices as well.
Then came the post war burst of electronics! Now the vast majority of stuff needs DC and with the exception of the vacuum cleaner all the stuff that could benefits from AC, furnace fans, heat pump compressors, refrigerator compressor, are fixed position and frequently on their own circuits. I can see AC to the doorstep a big efficient whole house power supply that has 12vdc and 48vdc rails that are distributed thorough the house and battery backed, and few 220v "appliance circuits" off the AC.
I also agree with you. I do think we need to make a couple more considerations though.
First "those unavoidably out of town" should not be an excuse unless the distance between postal zip codes is greater than say 200 miles, and if the post marks indicate otherwise your ballot is invalid. That is the only way to prevent abuse.
Second right now it is possible for your boss to intimidate you into not voting and certain companies probably have a pretty good idea of the voting blocks their employees fall into. We need to be fair and make election day a National Holiday! So that everyone has the day off. We probably need to make exceptions for the groups for which anti-strike laws already exist, Health, Safety and infrastructure folks who potentially have to work the holiday. There also needs to be some kind of penalty for employees who try to ignore election day like its just another MLK day have have nonessential personnel work anyway.
I agree the only way to ensure any sort of integrity is to have people GO to the polls, but we need to make sure everyone can.
Ever since around 2009-10 my bias has been against those with Gmail accounts.
Why because using something different gives you a sense of superiority. AOL was an ad laden mess once it go big. It really was foolish to use it if you did not have to do so.
GMAIL's only real issue is privacy concerns. Which *is* a huge issue, but other services are far from immune to that as well; short of running your own mail server you can't really know and it does matter really because chances are the person you are mailing is using Google anyway.
The reality is GMAIL works well and meets a lot of peoples needs. It also has good IMAP support if you like a local client. So I don't judge GMAIL users to harshly, because I don't know where they could go that would be demonstratively better for them, unlike AOL users back in the day where there usually was clearly superior and obvious choice for anyone's specific use cases.
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With TOA energy being the ultimate overall driving force behind climate change, our predictions are still subject to the fact we aren't yet able to predict TOA energy.
So the short version is climate models are worse than useless as a policy and planing tool, because we don't understand how the highest order component behaves.
Except back in 1859 it was not a terrorist or state actor that did it to us; it was SOL and the sun certainly could do it again. While we have some ability to detect and predict when the risk of such an event occurring is higher than usual there ain't much we can do about it either.
So some EMP resilience would be a nice to have. Now the doom sayers are always telling us how after only a few days without electricity we all start dying. Well an EMP is likely to damage transmission lines (because of their length) and possibly some sensitive electronics most stuff won't likely be affected unless its a very very high intensity event. The big east coast power failure of what was it 2k4? Kinda proved we can get on for at least a few days without mains power.
The bigger question is would a China or Russia who might not be similarly given their relationship to the sun at that moment of the event try and take advantage of our condition with a conventional force.
Ever since Exchange 2007 came a long its been a few trivial powershell commands to copy the contents of one mailbox into another. What he probably should do is have his exchange admin copy his mails to a folder in his managers mailbox; so they won't be subject to delete.
That way the person likely to be responsible for anything the submitter would have been will have the information at his finger tips, and in a format that is easy to forward the relevant parts to whomever (s)he finds to do the actual work.
Once a designated replacement is hired that folder can be copied/moved to that persons mailbox.
Maybe it is maybe it isn't. The question is why do you and honestly why did the couple care. This isn't like civil rights battles of the past with Jim Crowe and such.
If blacks were being turned away from a specific lunch counter there would have been no big movement the issue was they were truned away at EVERY counter. We don't have that problem today, certainly not with the GLBTt community.
The fact the so much outrage over the incident exists proves that. They could said well "a fuck you too than" and headed to any other bakery in town. The vast vast majority of which would have said "hey your money is as good as anyone else's is just tell us what you want on the cake."
I can understand their being upset and telling everyone what bigoted assholes the people at the bakery that rejected them are. I can totally understand and support anyone who says "you know what I'd rather spend my money at bakery #2 because they treat everyone like a person and I would rather do business with a place like that". I think asked government to FORCE bakery one to serve any specific client is a bridge to far. We have a freedom of association under the first amendment. Reasonably for that mean anything there is an implied freedom from association. if the American Nazi party tried to hire me to do some work for them I'd turn them down. They are not a client I want, I don't want be associated with them and their ideas in any way. If a Christan baker sincerely believes that openly homosexual people are hell bound unrepentant sinners I can understand they'd feel the same. Why should the rest of us force our value one them?
You do realize that even the dessert is a complex ecosystem of micro flora and fona that would be greatly harmed by being permanently covered in solar cells. You must also be aware that transmission loss with electricity is well HUGE. So you are discussing a large ecosystem altering deployment of solar cells, much larger than anticipated, in place where there is nobody to maintain them. Sounds like a pretty stupid plan.
Right up there with daming another river or installing another giant bird migration path altering wind farm. Those are okay in Europe because the Europeans already killed all the birds in past centuries but they kinda suck in the states.
Someday folks are going to wake up and realize their is more to protecting our the environment than CO2 emissions. All the greenies want to do is run around and spoil the last few unspoiled places are earth to stand up their renewables; personally I'd rather burn a little more oil.
2030 commitment implies 2020 commitment
If you actually plan to meet your stated goal yes. If the objective is to score some political points by saying something that sounds good, than it means no such thing. 5 years out and then 10 years out, then 20 years out, when opponents are making noise that threatens you political you just tell supports that "there is still plenty of time, and with the economy....now isn't the time to...."
Don't you seem to want it both ways too. You have to have some responsibility for your car. Ever see someone have a suspension collapse? That does not just happen, that happens because the dipshit could not be arsed to either look at or have someone look at the suspension to make sure it was not dangerously corded and that rubber bushings were not failing etc.
You can automate most aspects of something like a car, but this is a high performance machine that operates in a wide variety of weather and abusive conditions. It has to be serviced and inspected from time to time. dipshit who does no do that now isn't going to start when the thing becomes more automatic than it already is, (s)he will pay even less attention.
So the automaker supposed to be on the hook because YOU last decided to check break fluid six years ago?
Um not the loans are EXACTLY the problem. Tution grows without bounds because everybody smart enough to graduate from college does recognize it has great value, both in the direct economics of employable and the more intelligible things like connections with other people you make and knowledge and thinking skills that really will enable you to make better more informed decisions in the future.
A college education IS VALUABLE, exactly how valuable is difficult to quantify. So now you make large sums of unsecured monies available to young people many of whom have never seen or worked with an account balance that large before and surprise surprise they are willing to spend it. They don't have an appreciate for how much work it might be to pay that back. What they do see is that Crazy Go Nuts University has a new fancy new recreation facility and bigger dorm rooms than Podunk College. Its difficult to compare the actual education quality but dorm and recreation facilities are things you can see. Podunk has no choice if they want to continue to attract students they have to build these things.
In order to build that stuff they raise tuition, which they can because people are paying with loans anyway and everyone qualifies!
If it was not for government secured loans college cost expansion would probably mostly track with inflation. After all with the exception of some leading edge research schools, almost all the cost would be salary if you take away the billion dollar construction projects.
Price insensitivity is the reason costs have gone up, if you can't afford CGNU's 40K tuition you might very well choose Podunk's $12K tuition and lack of fancy building and giant rooms if the alternative is no college for you. If we just got rid of Sally Mea and college loans need to be secured with some kind of collateral or simply small enough lender were willing to fork over on credit history alone, the problem would solve it self.
Okay, but for the sake of argument Mass is an open carry state (with permit). I don't know the specific details because I don't live there.
Hypothetically if someone has a gun permit in Mass. and walks down a public street past a school, not on school grounds mind you, only the street in front of it, while having a gun on their hip or even their bushmaster for that matter can they be charged with "disrupting a s school".
See I don't understand how doing something that without probably cause to suspect otherwise (ie you know the guy does not have permit) doing something that is most likely perfect legal on public, though not school grounds, in the vacinity of a school can be a crime. It sounds like "loitering" on of the laws that every municipality keeps on the books to hassle people with but rarely press whenever anyone lawyers up demonstrats intent to contest the matter rather than entering a quick plea of guilty. They know if fought to its logical conclusion that statute will be struck for vagueness.
I think the underlying thinking behind most educational technology is take the work out of the hands of the local practitioner, deskill the teacher. While the sellers and developers of edtech will never admit this is the case and my not even realize it themselves it basically amounts to central planning.
If a computer program is going to teach a kid math the pedagogical approaches it takes will be more or less fixed and ones designed at some central facility somewhere. It wont be the paradigm the local instructor was using and it may or may not add to clarity.
I am in my early 30's depending on who you ask I am either the last of the gen X'ers or among the first of the so called millennials. Outside of some of the education television experiments tried in classrooms on boomers, I saw most of the early experiments in edtech. I had a number of older teachers who had spend years drawing their own little cartoons, crafting their own little narratives to help us understand. I also had younger ones who wanted to try out all the new MECC stuff. I was in Minnesota. If that worked for you great, if not the instructors were mostly caught flat footed with no alternative ideas about how to convey the lesson, unlike the other teachers that had taken the time to develop their own materials.
Central planning isn't any better for education than it is for economies. When edtech stops trying to teach and really starts trying to make teachers more effective it might work. A better hammer will allow a good carpenter to get his framing done faster and possibly even done better. A better hammer isn't a robotic carpenter though, but most edtech attempts to be a robotic teacher.
My sister teaches Highschool math subjects. She loves Mathmatica. She says it lets throw up a visualization on the screen the really helps some of her students get it. Its faster and better than anything she could scribble on the whiteboards. She is using it though in the context of her own lessons to explain her own contrivances that show how to apply the math. Its a generic tool though, while lots of educators use it isn't designed only for education and it isn't designed to teach any specific lessons.
Edtech needs to focus on giving teachers quality general use tools and class room appropriate hardware on which to run them. It does not need to be trying to create a digital textbook equivalent or play instructor on its own.
Actually being in ones early 20s and male is highly correlated with auto accidents that is why the actuaries tell them to do that. Just like being in ones early 20s and female is highly correlated with requiring more frequent and more expensive medical care for a number of conditions including pregnancy.
For some reason though charging more for one is a prudent insurance practice and discrimination blocked by the ACA for another.
If you show positive for HIV the insurance company already has a problem. I think it would work more like this. You show positive for having once had the clap or have HPV. Now you are marked as someone who has/had risky sex, ie outside a monogmous relationship where your partners health status is known or unprotected sex with anyone else. Your risk of contracting something expensive to treat like herpes or HIV went from very low to reasonably possible. Now the insurance company has a good reason to get you off their books.
That is probably the most likely example I can think of.
I can't understand how why anyone chooses satellite service for Internet access. If they do they are somewhere so remote that Verizon does not have LTE service, they havent looked in years, or they are stupid.
Verizon's "Installed LTE" (fixed antenna on the outside of the building) is price and speed competitive with the sat com providers has essentially the same usage caps, without the latency an weather related problems.
My guess is Verizon and probably AT&T (why the hell does AT&T not have a similar offering currently?) will be better positioned to add capacity and than the SAT providers ever will. Its easier to shrink the size of cell by erecting another tower than to put up another bird. So the 15/20/30/60GB caps will lift on that side first.
If those caps get large enough that people can reasonably afford to do streaming media, and more Internet based offerings in addition to Netflix show up, my guess would be Direct TV and DIsh's days will be numbered.
Except that many of the founders and our first president were very much against the idea of the USA engaging in treaties and entanglements with other nations. The fact that they designed a system that would nearly always fail to reach such agreements isn't a surprise.
What I think is sad is rather than deal with it, either by embracing their wisdom and not making so many damned agreements, or by having a serious debate about the subject an amending the Constitution rather than running around it with 'Fast Track" authority legislative bunk.
Back in the 20s and 30s in the US, the mob ran roughshod over the land. The only way devised to corral them-- because of massive corruption on local, state, and federal levels-- was to invoke tax laws.
The statement is largely true but the libertarian in me wishes to suggest that stopping the mob was the WRONG priority. The mob was doing plenty of things they could have been prosecuted for besides tax evasion, etc. The actual crimes like assaulting people should have put them away. Society would have been better served then as now, had 'we' gone after those corrupt officials protecting the criminals at all levels.
I'd feel safer having got one crooked cop off the street than I would removing 10 guys who sell a little weed and untaxed liquor now and then.
Finally private property, emphasis private is the very corner stone of all other freedoms. Interfering and spying on with reporting requirements with the exchange of money between individuals threatens that most basic freedom. Is a tool that can be used to detect crimes sure, but there are other ways to do that, and much like mass phone record collection I don't believe its one that is justified.
I think its an interesting idea but as you say congress would be almost entirely bogged down in re-upping existing /good/ laws. Even if a vote to 're-approve the federal statute against murder' takes only 60 seconds to execute you still won't get much done in a congressional session.
What I think might be more interesting is to require every legislative act to have preamble like the Constitution does. It should be required to be written in plain language at a 4th grade reading level, stating the acts broad objectives and intent. After say a period of 5 years anyone who is subject to the law should be permitted to challenge it in federal court for 'performance'. If the court finds the Act:
does not materially satisfy the objectives in its preamble
OR
has material unintended consequences (positive or negative the court should not be permitted to make a value judgement)
OR
has been materially used be the Executive for purposes not covered by the preamble
the law should be vacated.
The trouble if you are OBL type is that people are only so dumb. You can convience them to die for the cause but far fewer want to volunteer for a job that most like will result in their being captured not killed and living out there days being force fed at camp X-Ray.
IMHO the real vulnerability is the security line itself and the Boston bombing proves it. You can pack plenty of explosive to cause all kinds of carnage in bag that will plausibly be allowed as a carry on. Pick a busier airport, wait until you are in the middle of the security queue with people cordoned all around you in a big mass and BOOM! Most of these airports haven't got high ceilings and the screening area is in a corridor like space to prevent people from bypassing it. Look what the bomb in Boston did outdoors, think what harm it would do to people indoors!
Such an act would certainly have the effect of terrifying people, of going anywhere near an airport and probably anywhere else they might be forced to queue. Is it as spectacular as slamming a airliner into sky scraper, nope, but if executed well still stands to kill or maim 1000 people give or take. It will still make folks afraid to travel with all the associated knock-on economic impacts. The current system does nothing to defend against this type of thread in fact it makes it far more likely.
The whole cockpit door thing has more or less eliminated the reason a terrorist might have any interest of bringing weapons on a aircraft. If you can't control the plane anymore than all that is left to you is a Libyan style attack where you attempt to cause the plane to crash over a populated area. I suppose you might just want to transport weapons to an unrelated target as well but even the stupidest terrorists has to realize that there are ways to transport weapons with much lower detection risk than by airline. So I just don't see airliners being probably targets any more, when the airport offers a high probability of success, and will make a fine spectacle.
Another thing that must be kept in mind is this is not some issue about funding some obscure little program to feed a certain variety of pigeon in a specific park some place. This is in fact a large news making issue that the public has become quite familiar with it, its also an issue that is closely tied to very fundamental questions about who we are as nation, and what the Constitution means in the 21st century..
You can't be POTUS and not have a strong opinion on an issue like this, Its your job as leader to form one even if you don't have personal convictions. Obama can't duck this one and be fulfilling his responsibilities any more than an umpire can refuse to call "ball" or "strike".
You are either for it, and should be willing and able to articulate why or you are against and ought to be willing to take a strong position there too.
For or against as President in a post Snowden political landscape he owes us more than backing the USA FREEDOM ACT, which as near as I can tell changes nothing other than who owns the building the hard-drives sit in and some nonspecific language about "tools to fight the terrorists".
I would expect much like digital telephony lag is not much of challenge to overcome unless its really really big.
Jitter would be a problem. The human brain is pretty good at adapting to consistent latency, anticipating events, delaying or cramming inputs as required to compensate. Where that breaks down is when the latenecy is sometimes 200ms and other-times 500ms without predictability. Controlling jitter on the public parts of the Internet is hard.
Yes the Windows 3.1x UI was pretty terrible, but NDW (Norton Desktop Windows) replaced a number of shell functions (file pickers, etc), the file manager, gave you desktop icons, a task bar along with user definable buttons, multiple 'views' (list, detail, icon, etc) for program groups and directories, a powerful scripting environment and more.
Windows 3 was damn near unusable without it. It was actually probably the best UI out there with it.
Keep in mind our 'use' of electricity has changed a lot too. In Edison and Tesla's day there were basically two applications light, and running motors.
For practical applications lighting (incandescent) AC/DC are more or less equally efficient. Running a motor though AC is a clear win. If you are not highly sensitive to the rate of revolution because its part of a machine tools and you can gear it however you want, or its running a compressor and the cycle on time is flexible etc, than AC means you can build a simple motor with few parts and more importantly fewer wearing parts, no brushes.
As far as early 20th century commercial and home electrical needs DC would have been aggressively stupid.
AC did other good things too, it provided a time signal that everyone could cheaply use, so clocks no longer had to run independently at least solved drift. Was useful for governing analog recording a playback devices as well.
Then came the post war burst of electronics! Now the vast majority of stuff needs DC and with the exception of the vacuum cleaner all the stuff that could benefits from AC, furnace fans, heat pump compressors, refrigerator compressor, are fixed position and frequently on their own circuits. I can see AC to the doorstep a big efficient whole house power supply that has 12vdc and 48vdc rails that are distributed thorough the house and battery backed, and few 220v "appliance circuits" off the AC.
Windows 3 + The Norton Desktop; is STILL a better UI than anything offered in the Windows world for '95 on.
The dirty little part left unsaid by many is that they think being truly objective IS being a bad person.
I also agree with you. I do think we need to make a couple more considerations though.
First "those unavoidably out of town" should not be an excuse unless the distance between postal zip codes is greater than say 200 miles, and if the post marks indicate otherwise your ballot is invalid. That is the only way to prevent abuse.
Second right now it is possible for your boss to intimidate you into not voting and certain companies probably have a pretty good idea of the voting blocks their employees fall into. We need to be fair and make election day a National Holiday! So that everyone has the day off. We probably need to make exceptions for the groups for which anti-strike laws already exist, Health, Safety and infrastructure folks who potentially have to work the holiday. There also needs to be some kind of penalty for employees who try to ignore election day like its just another MLK day have have nonessential personnel work anyway.
I agree the only way to ensure any sort of integrity is to have people GO to the polls, but we need to make sure everyone can.
Ever since around 2009-10 my bias has been against those with Gmail accounts.
Why because using something different gives you a sense of superiority. AOL was an ad laden mess once it go big. It really was foolish to use it if you did not have to do so.
GMAIL's only real issue is privacy concerns. Which *is* a huge issue, but other services are far from immune to that as well; short of running your own mail server you can't really know and it does matter really because chances are the person you are mailing is using Google anyway.
The reality is GMAIL works well and meets a lot of peoples needs. It also has good IMAP support if you like a local client. So I don't judge GMAIL users to harshly, because I don't know where they could go that would be demonstratively better for them, unlike AOL users back in the day where there usually was clearly superior and obvious choice for anyone's specific use cases.