I take it you are someone who never has actually had nothing. There are millions of homeless whose health statistics aren't on this report in New York. Somehow I suspect when you include the actual poorest people in New York in the report vs the rest of the country, especially more rural locations, you'll find those health disparity stats stark looking a lot more bleak.
There is a very simple answer to a large skew in New York's favor.
"according to a study of more than a billion Social Security and tax records"
"That trend may appear surprising. New York is one of the country's most unequal and expensive cities, where the poor struggle to find affordable housing and the money and time to take care of themselves."
That wouldn't get most of the poor in NYC. The poor who fail in that struggle neither pay social security nor taxes.
"Since a single electron isn't sentient, it likely feels nothing, and cannot report on how it felt."
That's a bold assumption. Human beings used to think birds had no notable intelligence and birds can actually create words/sounds and use them in fairly obvious forms of meaningful communication. Who could say what complexity lives beyond the event horizon of the noble electron. That is like making the assumption that a massive bolder isn't sentient. The complex processes undergone by a bolder and the changes over time are certainly as complex as those undergone by a person or animal but the timescale is such that it is likely a bolder couldn't even perceive you if you were sentient. You would seem no more likely to be sentient to the bolders and mountains of the world than the electron is to you. How could anything that flits in and out of existence so rapidly and has no notable lasting impact be complex let alone sentient?
Is it really so difficult for people to grasp the concept of relative perspectives and timescales?
Actually the heart of it seems to be very simple from a logical perspective. Our most complete and proven models are arithmetic and algebra, so many people use it to prove models but fail to realize arithmetic itself may well be the model. Arithmetic boils down to:
Where A is a number ranging from negative infinity to positive infinity which much include 1 and 0 regardless of base. Op represents an infinite number of potential logical operations and yet the results have a potential range that is identical to A. At this point A is not any specific number, it represents the entire range of values you can plug in there. Even reduced to the smallest base (2 or binary) the range must include 0, 1 and Infinity. This is the most raw and basic reality.
A op A = A
What can we determine from this model? Actually quite a bit.
1. In order to derive any information we must limit perspective, meaning reduce the infinite possibilities or collapse it to a discrete value but it must always follow the rules above since they are the rules of the universes "stuff."
2. Collapsing to either 0 or 1 requires the other as well as an infinite element. In other words as soon as an observer looks at the "stuff" through a limiting perspective you create not only the possibility of the "thing" which defines the limit but also the possibility of the things absence and the anti-thing which negates it thereby making that absence possible.
3. If you model reality as absolutely constrained in any fashion there will always be a window to higher and lower dimensions. This also means that patterning will emerge.
4. Information can be derived entangling things with other things. The information is paradoxically real and not real because infinite is the nature of "stuff."
A + A = 2A
There are quite a lot more. Especially when you think about yourself as an aware "thing" that is defining the constraints,
"If you think that building new server instances is the main function of sysadmins then you have a very strange view of the job. I agree that the new configuration tools will make a job that VMs & scripting had made easy even easier. It looks like you're mostly engaged in a game of "rename the job" in order to show it going away."
You seem to be confusing the pre-devops world with the devops world I am describing. What a sysadmin does now is irrelevant. Of course in a dinosaur IT env you aren't spawning instances left and right. You are patching, fixing tuning problems, fixing permissions, deploying new versions of custom apps from the dev team, fixing issues your applications are having, etc. Depending on the size of your org you might be dealing with network issues as well, fixing routes, fixing firewall policies, making adjustments to the db, and so on.
In a real dev ops environment those things are all worked out in the dev environment and encoded in a module that performs the required actions and further maintains the state of the host. That module then gets promoted to testing when load testing is performed and tuning resolved. By the time it hits dev it works. There is a module for every aspect of the system, including spawning new instances, provisioning them, etc. The combination of these modules for any given role results in a gold standard perfect working instance. If a service stops it gets restarted automatically. If permissions get mangled they are corrected automatically, deploying new versions of custom apps or new applications is as simple as incrementing a version number in a git repo or associating a new module with a role and whether it is 4 hosts or 4000 it simply happens. If an instance has an issue that is not able to be resolved by restarting the service the entire instance is simply destroyed and a new one created to replace it on the fly, you scale horizontally so the impact to operations is minimal to non-existent. Your remediation against a larger scale issue is simply to rollback which one person can do across an entire organization in maybe 5-15min.
I didn't say it was a good plan, I said it is the way things are going. HTML5 actually was made for this to a certain degree and asm.js certainly was. The web is evolving, see webassembly and websockets.
For better or worse developers are building out on ever higher layers of abstraction.
And modern automation isn't home grown anymore. So just like the auto-pilot on aircraft, it just gets closer and closer to target, each thing you fix goes back in the pool for everyone else and vice versa. Of course, there is still some administration and customization to be done but that is 1-2 automation experts where you had 10-20 sysadmins before. And lets be honest, if you didn't drive the automation effort and/or build it then you are H1B fodder soon enough.
We aren't talking about off the cuff bash scripts here. You can very much automate almost everything with puppet and similar/related tools already from bare metal to vm or container which naturally will be either on a cloud provider or your internal openstack cloud system, spawn the instance, configure the instance, and deploy the instance. You can automate the address assignment, the dns, logging, backup, and the load balancing, even configure the network gear. With the right choices you can spawn and configure new instances on the fly if any instance has a fault or load is increasing and decom them on-the-fly as well.
You still need the architect to build it out and tune stacks for new things, which can be a consultant. You might still need your DBA depending on what you are running and how much of it you are running. Your vendors likely provide your rack and stack needs/hardware support. You still need your help desk for the edge cases the automation doesn't cover or misses. But your team of 20 unix admins drops to 1-2 guys who have the combination of development/administration skills to run and manage your automations. Those guys aren't really sysadmins anymore, they are automations experts and developers as much as admins.
So like I said, be one of those 1-2 guys by being the one who builds it out or be one of the 18 guys who get canned. For the second of that 1-2 guys, you might want to think just developing the skillset will do it and it MIGHT for the moment but more likely you'll be rejected in favor of an H1B. The admin who enables sending 18 of his peers to the chopping block, he'll be considered a hero and some flavor of architect level untouchable. He's safe for a few more years.
That's true but in this regard the important users are developers. Other users are sheep who much choose among what they are given.
In the modern world apps are web based, the OS should be minimal and fast, expose as many non-blocking calls as possible and get out of the way. Developers already treat everything as a uri and run their apps as a single process/thread per core managing all the parallel processing, overhead, and task management within their app instead of using the OS and modern application libraries coupled with competent design allow for doing a far better and lighter job of it than the OS. In the end they always will just like a competent custom wheel reinvention of an applications core bottleneck library will always be faster than a generic one with overhead and design decisions to cover other use cases.
Of course there is nothing new under the sun, now the virtualization system is the OS and the new minimal OS will be the process overhead.
The sysadmin of the future is a few automated scripts managed by developers and a few call center guys clicking buttons in a browser that trigger scripts worked out by those developers. The OS of the future is an ultra lightweight piece that does nothing more than provide a minimal hardware abstraction to an app that manages it's own processes and priorities.
It's happening already, with process overhead being discovered as the limiting factor applications are being designed to use a single process and thread and all non-blocking design to get past 10k simultaneous connections to 1M connections. At least on the server side. On the client side the future OS does nothing but run a browser.
As a sysadmin your best bet is to focus on your coding skills with regard to automation otherwise your wiser co-worker or a third party consultant will do it for you and you'll be out of the job.
I haven't tried it but from what I gather the closed portion is now userspace, the open portion is the kernel module. So that resolves the biggest headache.
As long as the API's to utilize them are open and can be reasonably targeted. The big problem right now is in the space of laptop docks. Currently, all non-proprietary docks (usb3) use the same chipsets and all say they don't support linux. The manufacturer of the chipset actually does produce an open driver for linux but that driver requires you to replace your fast closed driver with the open driver because they needed access to the features in it so they could turn around and re-route the display image through the usb port.
People are quick to mock saying just get a usb hub. That's fine if all you want is a keyboard, mouse, you could even shoehorn in a usb nic but if you want to be able to reliably support external dual displays without a proprietary (as in laptop manufacturer) dock you need a usb3 dock not a hub.
While I am a fan of all open source, on the utilitarian side that does sound like a somewhat reasonable compromise to me.
There are two big issues we run into with the closed drivers. The first is obviously the problem of kernel support which this solves. The second is the x.org issue that comes up when having to route the display through something like a usb3 laptop dock which is currently only possible with open drivers.
Android is open source and it isn't just big cell phone companies that modify and develop it. It's installed in plenty of arm based devices beyond cell phones. Just because they aren't attacking open projects (other than Google at the source) doesn't mean they won't or can't.
If they are committed to open source then they must be opposed to software patents. The only logical course is to turn their software patent portfolio over in the same manner IBM did and help build the war chest to defend against patent suits, particularly against open source software, including their own.
Android is an open source system that runs on phones, tablets, and HTPC builds using ARM cpus. People can and do develop and modify the system and replace what is provided by any cell company or manufacturer.
Open source software should not be encumbered with potential patent threats, whether Microsoft is currently milking the patents or not is beside the point because they are always the silent borg letting people put more and more effort and resources into something then pull a SCO attempt and strike.
There are non-profit collaborative organizations they can contribute their patents to in order to use them to fight trolls like SCO and in the Google case Microsoft itself. IBM did just that with a huge portfolio of patents.
Software patents serve no valid purpose, they are evil in all forms and for all purposes.
"would you rather someone commercially benefit from using BSD code, or live with whatever fundamental security holes they can introduce starting from scratch"
Commercial benefit has nothing to do with it. You can commercially benefit while complying with the GPL. But would I rather someone is able to take my time in order to save their own without allowing others the same benefit or live with whatever fundamental security holes they can introduce starting from scratch?
I pick option C. I neither allow douchebags to benefit from my work not utilize the swiss cheese software produced by douchebags. Therefore do not have to live with their holes in my face.
"We're talking about open source software here, however. That means relinquishing control over how other people use the code."
No, that wouldn't be open source software. That would be public domain software.
"your intent is to control others (that is, to remove their freedom to act as they choose)."
Not at all, others are perfectly free to act as they choose. But my labor and efforts are not free, time is the one truly limited resource humanity has and the only freedom you are granted with a BSD/MIT license vs the GPL is the freedom to save yours at the expense of mine while selfishly refusing to pass that benefit along.
I said should be, I'm well aware that isn't how it is interpreted in the US. If it were there are plenty of common business practices imposed on employees that would go away.
Terms of employment are not the same as contracts on other matters. Treating them as if they were the same in most respects is a bug in the legal code.
I do. And the moment one stops utilizing any and all technology and/or infrastructure, or products produced with the aid of such, that was developed/built/supported by or is derived from that developed/built/supported by, anyone who now qualifies for SS/Medicare I will support their right to not contribute. There are probably handful somewhere living in the mountains although even those are probably using solar, housing technology, architecture, and well technology that wouldn't exist without the work of the generation now on SS.
Until that happens, pay your damn share of SS and if is more than you can get back with the caps then think of it as royalties you owe because you wouldn't make as much money or enjoy the quality of life you have without the work of the people you don't want to pay.
Medicare and Medicaid are two completely different things. Medicaid qualification is based on low income/expenses whereas medicare is based on an age or disability qualification, so if anything it is a form of insurance.
"And it is not a retirement plan if it cannot sustain itself, which is most certainly the case."
It's a retirement plan if you contribute pre-tax funds and it pays out at retirement. Which it does, no matter how much you make or how wealthy you are. When you retire you will get the benefits of any and all retirement plans you've contributed to, including SS/Medicare.
If you want to reduce the costs of those plans to make them solvent you don't need to dissolve the plans, you need to reduce the costs and overhead associated with them. You do that by slashing all the red tape that drives up the cost of healthcare. If MIT can build a prototype new inhouse designed MRI machine for $50k and MRI imaging is superior and ideally would be used for most imaging there is no reason the cost of that machine at scale shouldn't be more like $5-15k at scale and in most large doctors offices let alone hospitals. Currently these machines cost millions and insurance balks at even letting you have an MRI when it would be the best tool, demanding cancer causing x-rays and CT scans (which are still just x-rays) because they are cheaper.
The other reason these plans are insolvent isn't that you support people who make less it is that the plans are more or less structured with the assumption that subsequent generations will pay for previous generations and the previous generation hitting retirement age was the baby boomer generation. If you went back a generation before the plan would have been flush with cash. So maybe some restructuring needs to occur.
Obviously we have an obligation to previous generations in our country, the money we are making and the quality of life we enjoy exists because of their hard work, you owe them a royalty on every dollar you make. But maybe we should fund that from the tap of fed inflation instead of having that tap run to banks who then purchase bonds from the government. I can't think of any upside to giving banks funds at low interest and then selling them bonds at higher interest to get back the funds we gave them.
You are aware that social security is a retirement plan and medicare is the medical plan that goes alongside it and that participants get distributions based on how much they contributed? It isn't welfare.
Medicaid, that is welfare. Food stamps are welfare. I'm not saying it is welfare I'm opposed to, I actually want to go to my grave having supported making the world a better place. Having grown up the child of a single mother who needed both of those things and having received medical care only because of them as a child they no doubt contributed greatly to me being where I am today.
Are there losers and deadbeats on the programs? Sure there are, most of them, but then that is true of most of those holding large wall street power accounts as well. All the red tape thrown up trying to prevent abuse and minimize these programs costs more in administrative overhead than the abuse itself creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on the inefficiency of government.
If you want to reduce the cost of these programs stop fighting the public option and start fighting to cut the costs and complexity of bringing medical devices and drugs on to the market that keeps the large scale healthcare industry entrenched and raises the barrier to entry.
"As for weapons, most of what is being fired are AK-47s and RPGs, which are Soviet and Eastern Bloc licensed weapons. Yeah, we provided some of them indirectly but, they'd get the weapons no matter who gave them to them. The world is absolutely awash in small arms. If you were talking about more sophisticated weaponry, I might agree."
It's hard to get weapons no matter who gave them when you don't have CIA slush funds to pay for them. But let's be honest here, the real issue is the one neither side wants to tamper with. We directly take sides on a holy war in Israel. We picked a chunk of territory after WWII, declared it the nation of Israel and shipped a bunch of Jews from Germany there and we've been arming it the teeth ever since. Thus declaring a side. Israeli arms are almost all either US arms or funded directly by the US.
Stop funding ANYONE in the goddamn holy war and actual terrorism attempts (as opposed to the police matter of a random domestic nut) will curtail, slow, and stop.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it you are someone who never has actually had nothing. There are millions of homeless whose health statistics aren't on this report in New York. Somehow I suspect when you include the actual poorest people in New York in the report vs the rest of the country, especially more rural locations, you'll find those health disparity stats stark looking a lot more bleak.
There is a very simple answer to a large skew in New York's favor.
"according to a study of more than a billion Social Security and tax records"
"That trend may appear surprising. New York is one of the country's most unequal and expensive cities, where the poor struggle to find affordable housing and the money and time to take care of themselves."
That wouldn't get most of the poor in NYC. The poor who fail in that struggle neither pay social security nor taxes.
"Since a single electron isn't sentient, it likely feels nothing, and cannot report on how it felt."
That's a bold assumption. Human beings used to think birds had no notable intelligence and birds can actually create words/sounds and use them in fairly obvious forms of meaningful communication. Who could say what complexity lives beyond the event horizon of the noble electron. That is like making the assumption that a massive bolder isn't sentient. The complex processes undergone by a bolder and the changes over time are certainly as complex as those undergone by a person or animal but the timescale is such that it is likely a bolder couldn't even perceive you if you were sentient. You would seem no more likely to be sentient to the bolders and mountains of the world than the electron is to you. How could anything that flits in and out of existence so rapidly and has no notable lasting impact be complex let alone sentient?
Is it really so difficult for people to grasp the concept of relative perspectives and timescales?
Actually the heart of it seems to be very simple from a logical perspective. Our most complete and proven models are arithmetic and algebra, so many people use it to prove models but fail to realize arithmetic itself may well be the model. Arithmetic boils down to:
Where A is a number ranging from negative infinity to positive infinity which much include 1 and 0 regardless of base. Op represents an infinite number of potential logical operations and yet the results have a potential range that is identical to A. At this point A is not any specific number, it represents the entire range of values you can plug in there. Even reduced to the smallest base (2 or binary) the range must include 0, 1 and Infinity. This is the most raw and basic reality.
A op A = A
What can we determine from this model? Actually quite a bit.
1. In order to derive any information we must limit perspective, meaning reduce the infinite possibilities or collapse it to a discrete value but it must always follow the rules above since they are the rules of the universes "stuff."
2. Collapsing to either 0 or 1 requires the other as well as an infinite element. In other words as soon as an observer looks at the "stuff" through a limiting perspective you create not only the possibility of the "thing" which defines the limit but also the possibility of the things absence and the anti-thing which negates it thereby making that absence possible.
3. If you model reality as absolutely constrained in any fashion there will always be a window to higher and lower dimensions. This also means that patterning will emerge.
4. Information can be derived entangling things with other things. The information is paradoxically real and not real because infinite is the nature of "stuff."
A + A = 2A
There are quite a lot more. Especially when you think about yourself as an aware "thing" that is defining the constraints,
"If you think that building new server instances is the main function of sysadmins then you have a very strange view of the job. I agree that the new configuration tools will make a job that VMs & scripting had made easy even easier. It looks like you're mostly engaged in a game of "rename the job" in order to show it going away."
You seem to be confusing the pre-devops world with the devops world I am describing. What a sysadmin does now is irrelevant. Of course in a dinosaur IT env you aren't spawning instances left and right. You are patching, fixing tuning problems, fixing permissions, deploying new versions of custom apps from the dev team, fixing issues your applications are having, etc. Depending on the size of your org you might be dealing with network issues as well, fixing routes, fixing firewall policies, making adjustments to the db, and so on.
In a real dev ops environment those things are all worked out in the dev environment and encoded in a module that performs the required actions and further maintains the state of the host. That module then gets promoted to testing when load testing is performed and tuning resolved. By the time it hits dev it works. There is a module for every aspect of the system, including spawning new instances, provisioning them, etc. The combination of these modules for any given role results in a gold standard perfect working instance. If a service stops it gets restarted automatically. If permissions get mangled they are corrected automatically, deploying new versions of custom apps or new applications is as simple as incrementing a version number in a git repo or associating a new module with a role and whether it is 4 hosts or 4000 it simply happens. If an instance has an issue that is not able to be resolved by restarting the service the entire instance is simply destroyed and a new one created to replace it on the fly, you scale horizontally so the impact to operations is minimal to non-existent. Your remediation against a larger scale issue is simply to rollback which one person can do across an entire organization in maybe 5-15min.
I didn't say it was a good plan, I said it is the way things are going. HTML5 actually was made for this to a certain degree and asm.js certainly was. The web is evolving, see webassembly and websockets.
For better or worse developers are building out on ever higher layers of abstraction.
And modern automation isn't home grown anymore. So just like the auto-pilot on aircraft, it just gets closer and closer to target, each thing you fix goes back in the pool for everyone else and vice versa. Of course, there is still some administration and customization to be done but that is 1-2 automation experts where you had 10-20 sysadmins before. And lets be honest, if you didn't drive the automation effort and/or build it then you are H1B fodder soon enough.
We aren't talking about off the cuff bash scripts here. You can very much automate almost everything with puppet and similar/related tools already from bare metal to vm or container which naturally will be either on a cloud provider or your internal openstack cloud system, spawn the instance, configure the instance, and deploy the instance. You can automate the address assignment, the dns, logging, backup, and the load balancing, even configure the network gear. With the right choices you can spawn and configure new instances on the fly if any instance has a fault or load is increasing and decom them on-the-fly as well.
You still need the architect to build it out and tune stacks for new things, which can be a consultant. You might still need your DBA depending on what you are running and how much of it you are running. Your vendors likely provide your rack and stack needs/hardware support. You still need your help desk for the edge cases the automation doesn't cover or misses. But your team of 20 unix admins drops to 1-2 guys who have the combination of development/administration skills to run and manage your automations. Those guys aren't really sysadmins anymore, they are automations experts and developers as much as admins.
So like I said, be one of those 1-2 guys by being the one who builds it out or be one of the 18 guys who get canned. For the second of that 1-2 guys, you might want to think just developing the skillset will do it and it MIGHT for the moment but more likely you'll be rejected in favor of an H1B. The admin who enables sending 18 of his peers to the chopping block, he'll be considered a hero and some flavor of architect level untouchable. He's safe for a few more years.
That's true but in this regard the important users are developers. Other users are sheep who much choose among what they are given.
In the modern world apps are web based, the OS should be minimal and fast, expose as many non-blocking calls as possible and get out of the way. Developers already treat everything as a uri and run their apps as a single process/thread per core managing all the parallel processing, overhead, and task management within their app instead of using the OS and modern application libraries coupled with competent design allow for doing a far better and lighter job of it than the OS. In the end they always will just like a competent custom wheel reinvention of an applications core bottleneck library will always be faster than a generic one with overhead and design decisions to cover other use cases.
Of course there is nothing new under the sun, now the virtualization system is the OS and the new minimal OS will be the process overhead.
The sysadmin of the future is a few automated scripts managed by developers and a few call center guys clicking buttons in a browser that trigger scripts worked out by those developers. The OS of the future is an ultra lightweight piece that does nothing more than provide a minimal hardware abstraction to an app that manages it's own processes and priorities.
It's happening already, with process overhead being discovered as the limiting factor applications are being designed to use a single process and thread and all non-blocking design to get past 10k simultaneous connections to 1M connections. At least on the server side. On the client side the future OS does nothing but run a browser.
As a sysadmin your best bet is to focus on your coding skills with regard to automation otherwise your wiser co-worker or a third party consultant will do it for you and you'll be out of the job.
I haven't tried it but from what I gather the closed portion is now userspace, the open portion is the kernel module. So that resolves the biggest headache.
As long as the API's to utilize them are open and can be reasonably targeted. The big problem right now is in the space of laptop docks. Currently, all non-proprietary docks (usb3) use the same chipsets and all say they don't support linux. The manufacturer of the chipset actually does produce an open driver for linux but that driver requires you to replace your fast closed driver with the open driver because they needed access to the features in it so they could turn around and re-route the display image through the usb port.
People are quick to mock saying just get a usb hub. That's fine if all you want is a keyboard, mouse, you could even shoehorn in a usb nic but if you want to be able to reliably support external dual displays without a proprietary (as in laptop manufacturer) dock you need a usb3 dock not a hub.
While I am a fan of all open source, on the utilitarian side that does sound like a somewhat reasonable compromise to me.
There are two big issues we run into with the closed drivers. The first is obviously the problem of kernel support which this solves. The second is the x.org issue that comes up when having to route the display through something like a usb3 laptop dock which is currently only possible with open drivers.
Android is open source and it isn't just big cell phone companies that modify and develop it. It's installed in plenty of arm based devices beyond cell phones. Just because they aren't attacking open projects (other than Google at the source) doesn't mean they won't or can't.
If they are committed to open source then they must be opposed to software patents. The only logical course is to turn their software patent portfolio over in the same manner IBM did and help build the war chest to defend against patent suits, particularly against open source software, including their own.
Android is an open source system that runs on phones, tablets, and HTPC builds using ARM cpus. People can and do develop and modify the system and replace what is provided by any cell company or manufacturer.
Open source software should not be encumbered with potential patent threats, whether Microsoft is currently milking the patents or not is beside the point because they are always the silent borg letting people put more and more effort and resources into something then pull a SCO attempt and strike.
There are non-profit collaborative organizations they can contribute their patents to in order to use them to fight trolls like SCO and in the Google case Microsoft itself. IBM did just that with a huge portfolio of patents.
Software patents serve no valid purpose, they are evil in all forms and for all purposes.
"would you rather someone commercially benefit from using BSD code, or live with whatever fundamental security holes they can introduce starting from scratch"
Commercial benefit has nothing to do with it. You can commercially benefit while complying with the GPL. But would I rather someone is able to take my time in order to save their own without allowing others the same benefit or live with whatever fundamental security holes they can introduce starting from scratch?
I pick option C. I neither allow douchebags to benefit from my work not utilize the swiss cheese software produced by douchebags. Therefore do not have to live with their holes in my face.
"We're talking about open source software here, however. That means relinquishing control over how other people use the code."
No, that wouldn't be open source software. That would be public domain software.
"your intent is to control others (that is, to remove their freedom to act as they choose)."
Not at all, others are perfectly free to act as they choose. But my labor and efforts are not free, time is the one truly limited resource humanity has and the only freedom you are granted with a BSD/MIT license vs the GPL is the freedom to save yours at the expense of mine while selfishly refusing to pass that benefit along.
I said should be, I'm well aware that isn't how it is interpreted in the US. If it were there are plenty of common business practices imposed on employees that would go away.
Terms of employment are not the same as contracts on other matters. Treating them as if they were the same in most respects is a bug in the legal code.
If I hadn't already commented on this story I would.
"However, according to the Privacy Authority it is impossible to truly give 'free consent' when there is a 'financial dependency.'"
This is true in the US as well. It should be impossible to lose your rights regardless of what you agree to as a condition of employment.
I do. And the moment one stops utilizing any and all technology and/or infrastructure, or products produced with the aid of such, that was developed/built/supported by or is derived from that developed/built/supported by, anyone who now qualifies for SS/Medicare I will support their right to not contribute. There are probably handful somewhere living in the mountains although even those are probably using solar, housing technology, architecture, and well technology that wouldn't exist without the work of the generation now on SS.
Until that happens, pay your damn share of SS and if is more than you can get back with the caps then think of it as royalties you owe because you wouldn't make as much money or enjoy the quality of life you have without the work of the people you don't want to pay.
Medicare and Medicaid are two completely different things. Medicaid qualification is based on low income/expenses whereas medicare is based on an age or disability qualification, so if anything it is a form of insurance.
"And it is not a retirement plan if it cannot sustain itself, which is most certainly the case."
It's a retirement plan if you contribute pre-tax funds and it pays out at retirement. Which it does, no matter how much you make or how wealthy you are. When you retire you will get the benefits of any and all retirement plans you've contributed to, including SS/Medicare.
If you want to reduce the costs of those plans to make them solvent you don't need to dissolve the plans, you need to reduce the costs and overhead associated with them. You do that by slashing all the red tape that drives up the cost of healthcare. If MIT can build a prototype new inhouse designed MRI machine for $50k and MRI imaging is superior and ideally would be used for most imaging there is no reason the cost of that machine at scale shouldn't be more like $5-15k at scale and in most large doctors offices let alone hospitals. Currently these machines cost millions and insurance balks at even letting you have an MRI when it would be the best tool, demanding cancer causing x-rays and CT scans (which are still just x-rays) because they are cheaper.
The other reason these plans are insolvent isn't that you support people who make less it is that the plans are more or less structured with the assumption that subsequent generations will pay for previous generations and the previous generation hitting retirement age was the baby boomer generation. If you went back a generation before the plan would have been flush with cash. So maybe some restructuring needs to occur.
Obviously we have an obligation to previous generations in our country, the money we are making and the quality of life we enjoy exists because of their hard work, you owe them a royalty on every dollar you make. But maybe we should fund that from the tap of fed inflation instead of having that tap run to banks who then purchase bonds from the government. I can't think of any upside to giving banks funds at low interest and then selling them bonds at higher interest to get back the funds we gave them.
You are aware that social security is a retirement plan and medicare is the medical plan that goes alongside it and that participants get distributions based on how much they contributed? It isn't welfare.
Medicaid, that is welfare. Food stamps are welfare. I'm not saying it is welfare I'm opposed to, I actually want to go to my grave having supported making the world a better place. Having grown up the child of a single mother who needed both of those things and having received medical care only because of them as a child they no doubt contributed greatly to me being where I am today.
Are there losers and deadbeats on the programs? Sure there are, most of them, but then that is true of most of those holding large wall street power accounts as well. All the red tape thrown up trying to prevent abuse and minimize these programs costs more in administrative overhead than the abuse itself creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on the inefficiency of government.
If you want to reduce the cost of these programs stop fighting the public option and start fighting to cut the costs and complexity of bringing medical devices and drugs on to the market that keeps the large scale healthcare industry entrenched and raises the barrier to entry.
"As for weapons, most of what is being fired are AK-47s and RPGs, which are Soviet and Eastern Bloc licensed weapons. Yeah, we provided some of them indirectly but, they'd get the weapons no matter who gave them to them. The world is absolutely awash in small arms. If you were talking about more sophisticated weaponry, I might agree."
It's hard to get weapons no matter who gave them when you don't have CIA slush funds to pay for them. But let's be honest here, the real issue is the one neither side wants to tamper with. We directly take sides on a holy war in Israel. We picked a chunk of territory after WWII, declared it the nation of Israel and shipped a bunch of Jews from Germany there and we've been arming it the teeth ever since. Thus declaring a side. Israeli arms are almost all either US arms or funded directly by the US.
Stop funding ANYONE in the goddamn holy war and actual terrorism attempts (as opposed to the police matter of a random domestic nut) will curtail, slow, and stop.