The streaky offcuts they call bacon in the US is not bacon, same deal with that white liquid that lasts for weeks, it's not milk, it's not even homogonised milk.
"Neither side can get their point across to the other in any meaningful way."
This is because of the irrational extremes that occur when you let ideology replace rational judgement (which seems to be a popular fad in the US at the moment). Allowing people to add poision to fast food becuase you belive in "feedom" is irrational, banning people from adding salt to fast food because you belive in "the greater good" is irrational.
"...that is either a philosophy you agree with or do not."
Philosophy is a guide to life it is not a replacement for rational thought.
A single on $50K would pay $750/yr for full cover, which as you say is nowhere near 10X what you would pay in the US. However on a per capita basis the WHO gives the following statistics...
"In 2005, Australia spent 8.8% of GDP on health care, or US$3,181 per capita. Of that, approximately 67% was government expenditure.
In 2005, the United States spent 15.2% of GDP on health care, or US$6,347 per capita. Of that, approximately 45% was government expenditure."
So it would seem that you guys (under the old system) were already paying a similar amount in tax as we do in total, and then doubling down with private insurance. Yet somehow the mulitude of US systems still end up bankrupting some patients?
Clearly neither your politicians or your insurance industry have any idea how to implement an efficient system. Maybe it's time for the health proffesionals to take over running the US system as they have done in the UK and Oz?
BTW: The WHO consistently rates France as the "best overall health care" in the world. In 2005, France spent 11.2% of GDP on health care, or US$3,926 per capita. Of that, approximately 80% was government expenditure.
"Within a few decades it will be proven that neither dark matter nor dark energy exists; they're just hypotheses to fill the gaps between the observed behavior of the universe and our current understanding of the laws of physics."
Dark energy/matter are the names of the observed phenomena just as energy/matter are names for similar phenomena. If they are (as you claim) the names of specific hypotheses then what are the phenomena called?
"These theories just happen to be the best explanations for what scientists observe."
Exactly! Dark matter and dark energy are just tags for unexplained phenomena that appear to have similar properties to matter and energy. They are not simply mathematical entities, they are phenomena that can be observed but cannot (yet) be explained with our mathematical models. This is no different to any other physics, Newton didn't discover gravity he discovered it could be described with maths.
The UNKNOWN software/electronic fault theory has fallen over at the "prove it" stage, the cars that suffred sudden acceleration have been examined and the electronics found to be working. OTOH Toyota has recalled 3.8 million cars to replace the floor pan so that the KNOWN problem of floor mats intefering with the pedal can be fixed.
Finally, a wayward floor mat doesn't make a good news story unless you're writing it up for the Darwin awards.
"A much more likely explanation for this is corruption with kickbacks to someone with the authority to cover the entire thing up."
Kickbacks are usually paid by the sales force to get the contract in the first place, a project that runs way over time and budget is usually just incompetence and nowhere near as uncommon a you seem to think. In politics it is much safer to throw money at a problem in the hope it will go away than it is to "lose face" by admiting you spent $750M on a white elephant. An even better option is to pin the blame on your political opponents. This is true even in commercial board room politics. In a commercial project that is struggling the sales executive will say that engineering can't deliver what they promised, the principle engineer will say sales are changing the goal posts. If the board have any brains they will see the problem as a failure to communicate and amend the processes accordingly.
"Someone who can order his subordinates to keep on going, and doesn't have to give a strict account of his spending to his bosses"
The bold type is to highlight the incompetent bosses failure to follow due process, he is practically begging for a white collar criminal to rip him off.
"What has kept project management from being help accountable? More incompetence? What about their boss? More incompetence? In your estimation, by your defense of this, the entire chain of command in this is incompetent."
Following an incompetent command does not in itself make you incompetent, failing to point out the consequences or refusing to accept the bosses decision after doing so does make you incompetent. IIRC it was a US president who coined the phrase "the buck stops here", in this case the buck stops with the NYC council.
Apple to Orangatangs! Berlusconi is the prime minister of Italy, a country who's politics is so chaotic they have had over 60 diffrent governments since WW2. Murdoch has no chance of becoming PM of a nation with a stable political landscape such as the UK or Oz, for a start he would have change citiezenship (again) which would also mean renouncing a large chunk of his US media holdings.
I'm not saying the BBC/ABC are untouchable but their history and the vigalance of the public does make them highly resiliant to politically inspired hatchet jobs.
"Are you sure you really want to defend that kind of behavior as just the "normal cost of development".....spells nothing but corruption to me.
No, he's right - it's the incompetent NYC managers who are wasting the money because they can't manage the project properly. Anyone who has any experience managing a large project will have seen something similar. The difference you point out between $10M and $750M is just scale, in the GP's senario the $10M project was supposed to cost $300K and by anyone's reckoning that sort of budget blowout is a huge failure in management.
I've seen the same thing happen in commerce but with a different outcome. A telco was building several systems that interfaced with each other and contracted a well known vendor I was working for, our $100M project had to intergrate with another $20M project (bult by the same vendor) and we spent considerable time and effort on our end getting the interface right.
The other project got into trouble (not sure who's fault), arguments about requirements arose between our company and the telco. Our company said they would do the "extra work" for $230K on top of the $20M already spent. The telco's beancounters shelved the project because $20M was their line in the sand. Now that might sound crazy but IMHO it was the correct business decision by both parties.
The same telco hauled one of their executives over the coals because his $9M projcet was completed $5M under budget. The beancounters weren't pissed because he "saved" $5M, they were pissed because he had overestimated and tied up that $5M for 2yrs.
Some other exmples where the vendor has pulled the plug themselves because the customer couldn't get thier processes straight are; IBM pulled out of an $800M contract with the NZ government in the late 90's; Fujitsu pulled out of a $1B contract with the UK government a couple of years ago.
"Just how can those costs ever be recovered?"
They can't. That's why I say the NYC managrs are incompetent rather than corrupt, they should have stopped throwing money at it long before it got this bad. As for the consultant's pay I doubt they are getting the whole $600K. At one point during the 90's I was on $600/day as a contractor but the outsourcing company I was working for was charging the customer $3K/day for my services. They were able to do this because I had some unique bussiness knowledge about the systems, I was a fool not to hit the boss for $1200/day.
"But he will use political presure to complain about unfair competition in, I reckon, 5 years."
He's already complained loudly about the BBC and Australia's ABC/SBS "unfair advantage" but nobody is paying any attention to him since fucking with those institutions has always ended badly for politicians that have tried it in the past. It simply won't wash with the public in AU/UK, state sponsered media generally enjoys a much better reputation than the commercial offerings and has been around for well over 50yrs. Given that history it doesn't take a genius to work out that "unfair competition" from the BBC/ABC hasn't stopped him from becoming mega rich in the past.
Sure he's got friends in high places and is a strong influence on government policy in the western world but there are some things even Rupert can't change.
"In my opinion (i am a physicist) the only good scientific field for highly functioning autists is math"
Temple Grandin would disagree, she is autistic and the worlds foremost expert on animal handling facilities. She is known as the woman who thinks like a cow because she believes her autisim gives her insights into animal behaviour.
Here in Oz queue jumping via cash or private insurance is illegal, there is one queue for everyone and in my experience it's usually a short one. You can pick your own doctor (often without an appointment), and get as many second opinions as you like.
Private insurance or cash is for "luxuries" like first dibs on a private room, fake tits, hair transplants, etc. The most obvious "hole" is that dentistry is not covered by UHC. Some doctors charge marginally above the schedule price but it's not worth getting private insurance to cover the margin.
A family on $100,000/yr pays a $1500/yr levy on their tax and is gaurenteed never to pay more than $1200/yr for medicine, I hear it costs almost 10X as much to fully insure a family in the US.
"Am I the only one who thinks this guy is getting off on all the attention he is getting by pretending to be a recluse who doesn't want any attention or money."
No there are a couple of other posters who also don't get it.
Spinoza..."is considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy, laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism.....Spinoza is considered to be one of Western philosophy's most important philosophers...Spinoza lived quietly as a lens grinder, turning down rewards and honors throughout his life, including prestigious teaching positions"
That's not what I was doing. If you don't like my suggestion to your stated problem in the first post then ignore it, there is no need to get your knickers in a knot just because YOU changed the original statement. Nor do you have to write a book to use "locally acceptable language".
"They are relying upon someone else's code to translate down to that, and if those methods are flawed they're screwed....If you ignore the basics, you're going to be fucked later on."
And the machine code depends on logic circits which in turn depend on complex software tools that design those circits, which depend in turn on, blah, blah, blah,.... Sooner or later you have to face the fact that if you can't trust anyone to do thier job properly then you're fucked before you even start.
I neither agree nor disagree with the parent post since I do not know how much or little truth it contains but there is nothing in it that deserves a flamebait mod. If anything it deserves an interesting mod since it's expressing a very different (and plausible) view to 99% of the other (plausible) posts on this story.
There are limits to free speech (eg: shouting fire in a theater, etc) and the media can and do falcilitate and incite atrocities. For example the Ranawndan genocide was largely incited and subsequently organised via radio stations.
Again, I don't know what is going on in the Venezuelan media but I don't belive it's impossible that the TV owner is a sociopath who was attempting to incite violence for personal gain. And I certainly don't think it's flamebait to air that viewpoint.
I was educated in CS and operation research 20yrs ago, it didn't make me a genius but it did give me the ability to match a problem to the solution that a real genius had discovered in the past. Most people could work on the GP's problem for a lifetime and still not independently reinvent the kirkman and reiß wheel.
"Toyota — the guys who ate your lunch in the marketplace — can't even make a software-gas-pedal work correctly"
Toyota — the company that's replacing the floor pans on millions of cars because a small number of drivers in a certain country are too stupid to realise thier floor mat is on top of their gas pedal.
"I still have no idea how to shoehorn into a locally acceptable language the fact that I am ethnically Jewish yet an atheist"
Maybe you could find the words by listening to Christopher Hitchens - US immigrant, Jewish heritage, famous atheists/anti-theist. His book "God is not great" is still a massive best seller, so much so that amazon is currently out of stock.
Ugh-lympics still stands as the funniest game I've ever played, the "mate toss" event was also an early example of political incorrectness in a PC game. The mate toss event was similar to a hammer throw except instead of a hammer you swung your cave girl around by the hair and tossed her down the field.
The first truly addictive game I encoutered was Sopwith
Slashdot Mirror
The streaky offcuts they call bacon in the US is not bacon, same deal with that white liquid that lasts for weeks, it's not milk, it's not even homogonised milk.
"Neither side can get their point across to the other in any meaningful way."
This is because of the irrational extremes that occur when you let ideology replace rational judgement (which seems to be a popular fad in the US at the moment). Allowing people to add poision to fast food becuase you belive in "feedom" is irrational, banning people from adding salt to fast food because you belive in "the greater good" is irrational.
"...that is either a philosophy you agree with or do not."
Philosophy is a guide to life it is not a replacement for rational thought.
A single on $50K would pay $750/yr for full cover, which as you say is nowhere near 10X what you would pay in the US. However on a per capita basis the WHO gives the following statistics...
"In 2005, Australia spent 8.8% of GDP on health care, or US$3,181 per capita. Of that, approximately 67% was government expenditure.
In 2005, the United States spent 15.2% of GDP on health care, or US$6,347 per capita. Of that, approximately 45% was government expenditure."
So it would seem that you guys (under the old system) were already paying a similar amount in tax as we do in total, and then doubling down with private insurance. Yet somehow the mulitude of US systems still end up bankrupting some patients?
Clearly neither your politicians or your insurance industry have any idea how to implement an efficient system. Maybe it's time for the health proffesionals to take over running the US system as they have done in the UK and Oz?
BTW: The WHO consistently rates France as the "best overall health care" in the world. In 2005, France spent 11.2% of GDP on health care, or US$3,926 per capita. Of that, approximately 80% was government expenditure.
"Within a few decades it will be proven that neither dark matter nor dark energy exists; they're just hypotheses to fill the gaps between the observed behavior of the universe and our current understanding of the laws of physics."
Dark energy/matter are the names of the observed phenomena just as energy/matter are names for similar phenomena. If they are (as you claim) the names of specific hypotheses then what are the phenomena called?
"These theories just happen to be the best explanations for what scientists observe."
Exactly! Dark matter and dark energy are just tags for unexplained phenomena that appear to have similar properties to matter and energy. They are not simply mathematical entities, they are phenomena that can be observed but cannot (yet) be explained with our mathematical models. This is no different to any other physics, Newton didn't discover gravity he discovered it could be described with maths.
The UNKNOWN software/electronic fault theory has fallen over at the "prove it" stage, the cars that suffred sudden acceleration have been examined and the electronics found to be working. OTOH Toyota has recalled 3.8 million cars to replace the floor pan so that the KNOWN problem of floor mats intefering with the pedal can be fixed.
Finally, a wayward floor mat doesn't make a good news story unless you're writing it up for the Darwin awards.
"A much more likely explanation for this is corruption with kickbacks to someone with the authority to cover the entire thing up."
Kickbacks are usually paid by the sales force to get the contract in the first place, a project that runs way over time and budget is usually just incompetence and nowhere near as uncommon a you seem to think. In politics it is much safer to throw money at a problem in the hope it will go away than it is to "lose face" by admiting you spent $750M on a white elephant. An even better option is to pin the blame on your political opponents. This is true even in commercial board room politics. In a commercial project that is struggling the sales executive will say that engineering can't deliver what they promised, the principle engineer will say sales are changing the goal posts. If the board have any brains they will see the problem as a failure to communicate and amend the processes accordingly.
"Someone who can order his subordinates to keep on going, and doesn't have to give a strict account of his spending to his bosses"
The bold type is to highlight the incompetent bosses failure to follow due process, he is practically begging for a white collar criminal to rip him off.
"What has kept project management from being help accountable? More incompetence? What about their boss? More incompetence? In your estimation, by your defense of this, the entire chain of command in this is incompetent."
Following an incompetent command does not in itself make you incompetent, failing to point out the consequences or refusing to accept the bosses decision after doing so does make you incompetent. IIRC it was a US president who coined the phrase "the buck stops here", in this case the buck stops with the NYC council.
The budgets of the BBC/ABC oscillate in the political wind but Murdoch's huffing and puffing will not blow them away.
Apple to Orangatangs! Berlusconi is the prime minister of Italy, a country who's politics is so chaotic they have had over 60 diffrent governments since WW2. Murdoch has no chance of becoming PM of a nation with a stable political landscape such as the UK or Oz, for a start he would have change citiezenship (again) which would also mean renouncing a large chunk of his US media holdings.
I'm not saying the BBC/ABC are untouchable but their history and the vigalance of the public does make them highly resiliant to politically inspired hatchet jobs.
"Are you sure you really want to defend that kind of behavior as just the "normal cost of development".....spells nothing but corruption to me.
No, he's right - it's the incompetent NYC managers who are wasting the money because they can't manage the project properly. Anyone who has any experience managing a large project will have seen something similar. The difference you point out between $10M and $750M is just scale, in the GP's senario the $10M project was supposed to cost $300K and by anyone's reckoning that sort of budget blowout is a huge failure in management.
I've seen the same thing happen in commerce but with a different outcome. A telco was building several systems that interfaced with each other and contracted a well known vendor I was working for, our $100M project had to intergrate with another $20M project (bult by the same vendor) and we spent considerable time and effort on our end getting the interface right.
The other project got into trouble (not sure who's fault), arguments about requirements arose between our company and the telco. Our company said they would do the "extra work" for $230K on top of the $20M already spent. The telco's beancounters shelved the project because $20M was their line in the sand. Now that might sound crazy but IMHO it was the correct business decision by both parties.
The same telco hauled one of their executives over the coals because his $9M projcet was completed $5M under budget. The beancounters weren't pissed because he "saved" $5M, they were pissed because he had overestimated and tied up that $5M for 2yrs.
Some other exmples where the vendor has pulled the plug themselves because the customer couldn't get thier processes straight are; IBM pulled out of an $800M contract with the NZ government in the late 90's; Fujitsu pulled out of a $1B contract with the UK government a couple of years ago.
"Just how can those costs ever be recovered?"
They can't. That's why I say the NYC managrs are incompetent rather than corrupt, they should have stopped throwing money at it long before it got this bad. As for the consultant's pay I doubt they are getting the whole $600K. At one point during the 90's I was on $600/day as a contractor but the outsourcing company I was working for was charging the customer $3K/day for my services. They were able to do this because I had some unique bussiness knowledge about the systems, I was a fool not to hit the boss for $1200/day.
"But he will use political presure to complain about unfair competition in, I reckon, 5 years."
He's already complained loudly about the BBC and Australia's ABC/SBS "unfair advantage" but nobody is paying any attention to him since fucking with those institutions has always ended badly for politicians that have tried it in the past. It simply won't wash with the public in AU/UK, state sponsered media generally enjoys a much better reputation than the commercial offerings and has been around for well over 50yrs. Given that history it doesn't take a genius to work out that "unfair competition" from the BBC/ABC hasn't stopped him from becoming mega rich in the past.
Sure he's got friends in high places and is a strong influence on government policy in the western world but there are some things even Rupert can't change.
"So if you've got a Darwin sticker on your car you shouldn't be in favor of any health care since "only the strong survive."
Your conflating the evolution of societies with the evolution of individuals.
"In my opinion (i am a physicist) the only good scientific field for highly functioning autists is math"
Temple Grandin would disagree, she is autistic and the worlds foremost expert on animal handling facilities. She is known as the woman who thinks like a cow because she believes her autisim gives her insights into animal behaviour.
You appear to be confusing socialisim with totalitarianisim in the same way as some people confuse freedom with anarchy.
Here in Oz queue jumping via cash or private insurance is illegal, there is one queue for everyone and in my experience it's usually a short one. You can pick your own doctor (often without an appointment), and get as many second opinions as you like.
Private insurance or cash is for "luxuries" like first dibs on a private room, fake tits, hair transplants, etc. The most obvious "hole" is that dentistry is not covered by UHC. Some doctors charge marginally above the schedule price but it's not worth getting private insurance to cover the margin.
A family on $100,000/yr pays a $1500/yr levy on their tax and is gaurenteed never to pay more than $1200/yr for medicine, I hear it costs almost 10X as much to fully insure a family in the US.
Whooooosh
"Am I the only one who thinks this guy is getting off on all the attention he is getting by pretending to be a recluse who doesn't want any attention or money."
No there are a couple of other posters who also don't get it.
Spinoza..."is considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy, laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism.....Spinoza is considered to be one of Western philosophy's most important philosophers...Spinoza lived quietly as a lens grinder, turning down rewards and honors throughout his life, including prestigious teaching positions"
That's not what I was doing. If you don't like my suggestion to your stated problem in the first post then ignore it, there is no need to get your knickers in a knot just because YOU changed the original statement. Nor do you have to write a book to use "locally acceptable language".
"They are relying upon someone else's code to translate down to that, and if those methods are flawed they're screwed....If you ignore the basics, you're going to be fucked later on."
And the machine code depends on logic circits which in turn depend on complex software tools that design those circits, which depend in turn on, blah, blah, blah,.... Sooner or later you have to face the fact that if you can't trust anyone to do thier job properly then you're fucked before you even start.
I neither agree nor disagree with the parent post since I do not know how much or little truth it contains but there is nothing in it that deserves a flamebait mod. If anything it deserves an interesting mod since it's expressing a very different (and plausible) view to 99% of the other (plausible) posts on this story.
There are limits to free speech (eg: shouting fire in a theater, etc) and the media can and do falcilitate and incite atrocities. For example the Ranawndan genocide was largely incited and subsequently organised via radio stations.
Again, I don't know what is going on in the Venezuelan media but I don't belive it's impossible that the TV owner is a sociopath who was attempting to incite violence for personal gain. And I certainly don't think it's flamebait to air that viewpoint.
I was educated in CS and operation research 20yrs ago, it didn't make me a genius but it did give me the ability to match a problem to the solution that a real genius had discovered in the past. Most people could work on the GP's problem for a lifetime and still not independently reinvent the kirkman and reiß wheel.
"Sometimes I wonder why the rest of the world hasn't just wiped us off the map as a sensible preventive measure."
Because a preemptive strike would imply the Bush doctrine was a good idea.
"Toyota — the guys who ate your lunch in the marketplace — can't even make a software-gas-pedal work correctly"
Toyota — the company that's replacing the floor pans on millions of cars because a small number of drivers in a certain country are too stupid to realise thier floor mat is on top of their gas pedal.
"I still have no idea how to shoehorn into a locally acceptable language the fact that I am ethnically Jewish yet an atheist"
Maybe you could find the words by listening to Christopher Hitchens - US immigrant, Jewish heritage, famous atheists/anti-theist. His book "God is not great" is still a massive best seller, so much so that amazon is currently out of stock.
Ugh-lympics still stands as the funniest game I've ever played, the "mate toss" event was also an early example of political incorrectness in a PC game. The mate toss event was similar to a hammer throw except instead of a hammer you swung your cave girl around by the hair and tossed her down the field.
The first truly addictive game I encoutered was Sopwith