Pre-existing condition exclusions are required because of adverse selection. Flood insurance works the same way; you've got no coverage at all until the policy has been in effect for 30 days. If your house washes away on Day 29 you're SOL.
In any case, I didn't share my story to indict the insurance companies. It was more of an indictment of the healthcare system in general. There was one unavoidable expense: the $4,500 immunoglobulin shot. Why then did the total bill come to nearly $7,000? It came to that much because treatment was routed through the most expensive delivery system (the ER) available in our healthcare system. Why is that? The rabies series is not time sensitive, waiting a few days causes no ill effects. The taxpayers ostensibly pay for it anyway so why not just have it at the County Health Department Monday through Friday?
I try to route my healthcare through my PCP, because 1) I like him, 2) It's cheaper (both for me and society) than the alternatives. Of course, we're killing the PCP providers, they're barely paid cost as it is (less than cost for medicare patients) and there's no incentives for med students to pursue primary/family medicine as a specialty. The ACA didn't do anything to address this either, a fat lot of good having insurance for the first time is going to do you when you can't find an MD that's taking new patients.
You're right, please support HR-27-1337, placing a 200% tax on politicizing random science discussions.
I'd like to support your tax but I fear that the climate change discussions will see a massively improved signal to noise ratio with corresponding decrease in the eye rolling ratio.
That's a valid point but you kind of missed the bigger picture. With my history and health status they shouldn't be on the hook for more than $300-$500 annually. That's the cost of an annual physical and standard blood/urine lab work. All it took was one incident to largely wipe out their earnings on me and in this case the costs really weren't inflated all that much. Despite what the other poster thinks, the immunoglobulin really is that expensive. It has a very short shelf life, production is a bitch, and there's little economy of scale because it's so rarely needed. Socialized medicine won't fix any of that....
Yes, since the bills would be covered by insurance.
After the deductibles and co-pays. I have a "platinum" plan through my employer; better insurance than anyone else I know and the co-pays still total up to a considerable amount. No deductibles for in-network on my plan, which makes me extremely fortunate. As a single guy I can afford the co-pays even with my modest salary but I can see how quickly they would bankrupt someone with a family, particularly if said family had one or more members with a chronic illness.
Incidentally, I was just exposed to rabies a few months ago:
Strike One: The only place to get the immunoglobulin is the ER, because it's very expensive (>$4,500) and has a short shelf-life. ER co-pay: $150
Strike Two: There's a set schedule for the vaccine, Days 0, 3, 7, and 14. You can get the vaccine from your primary, in theory, but of course my primary has a months long waiting list because we're driving PCPs out of business. Bottom line, I can't get appointments with them for Days 3 or 7, so that's two more trips to the ER. Additional co-pay total: $300
Strike Three: New York State ostensibly has a fund to pay for out of pocket expenses related to rabies exposures, but they only reimburse for the rabies vaccine and immunoglobulin. Since the ER decided to give me a tetanus shot on Day 0 NYS won't reimburse me, even though my out of pocket would have been $150 with or without this extra shot. Hooray for bureaucracy!
Totaling all this up, that stupid bat that found its way into my apartment has personally cost me $465 ($450 of ER co-pays, $15 of PCP co-pay) while my insurance company is on the hook for close to $7,000. My annual premium is about $6,000. So this one incident wiped out every penny they made on me and then some. I'm an otherwise healthy 32 year old marathon runner that ought to be subsidizing those who are less fortunate. Now imagine a family of four that were all exposed to the same scenario I was.....
MUCH more importantly, though, ads are draining your BANDWIDTH. It's important, because it's also a simple demonstrable harm. If you pay $30 per month for your internet bandwidth, and the ads use up half of it (conservative estimate)
In which universe do you live where ads on a webpage total up to half of the bandwidth to deliver said webpage?
Because Google purposely don't allow you to block the ads in android (*)
They don't make it easy but they don't make it all that difficult either. Buy a Nexus, Developer Edition, or one of the multitude of carrier branded phones that are rootable. Install one of the multitude of ad blocking apps that are available, AdFree being my personal favorite. Problem solved.
I don't know about Acetaminophen, but I've heard compelling cases made that if Aspirin were discovered today it would be a prescription drug. Think of the side effects, the modern day "think of the children!" attitude, and pathetic need of the body politic to feel "safe" from any and everything.
I had that same thought. This is SOP for any professional relationship. The language in the e-mail is very informal but polite, also SOP. Where's the smoking gun here?
The only difference between today and the past is that you can easily see an encrypted file, you can know it's encrypted
Huh? Modern ciphertext is indistinguishable from random noise. Some implementations leave behind clues (i.e., Truecrypt containers are always divisible by 512 bytes), and of course the user can give it away ("KIDDIE PORN COLLECTION.TC" <--- Probably not the best naming scheme) but I'm not aware of any foolproof method to concretely identify an encrypted file as such with modern implementations.
There are obviously thousands of people using encryption because they have a legitimate reason to hide something
My hard drives are encrypted simply because my entire life is on them and I'd rather not have everything you need to steal my identity fall into the hands of whomever broke into my house and stole my PC. I take similar precautions with physical documents that could be used to the same end. My SSA card and Passport are kept in the Safe Deposit Box except when needed, other forms of ID are always kept on or near my person, so they're not apt to be stolen in a burglary.
I don't know or care if LUKS and Truecrypt are secure enough to resist access by a well resourced and competent government agency. They provide ample security for the threat vectors that I care about.
Most people under investigation have software planted on computers or hardware keyloggers.
This, along with other side channel attacks (social engineering, or even simply guessing the password, remembering that most people use easily guessable passwords) is the most likely explanation. If the United States Federal Government has ways of breaking modern ciphers they're not going to throw it away to secure mundane criminal convictions.
Uhh, he was a natural born American citizen, so how exactly do you propose we keep him out of the United States? I was referring to foreign terrorists, in fact I believe I even made a comment about would-be domestic terrorists having an easier go of it.
Comcast is turning users' cable modems into public hotspots. So anyone could connect to a user's modem and use it for any purpose that one might connect to the Internet for. If said use is illegal, would the person who owned (or leased it from Comcast as the case may be) be liable as an accomplice?
My understanding is that it's not a public hotspot, the access is only made available for other Comcast customers, and that in any event the traffic is handled separately from the owner of the connection. It goes out with a different globally valid IP and does not count against the owner's bandwidth cap or otherwise inconvenience him.
Uhh, did you even read the Wikipedia article you linked, never mind actually researching the case in question on your own?
"Ryan Joseph Holle (born November 17, 1982) was convicted in 2004 of first-degree murder under the felony murder rule for lending his car to a friend after the friend and others at the party discussed their plans to steal drugs, money and beat up the 18 year old daughter of a marijuana dealer."
"Holle, who had given the police statements in which he seemed to admit knowing about the burglary, was convicted on August 3, 2004"
I don't see a problem here. "Hey, we're going to go rob this person. Can we borrow your car?" "Sure, here are the keys." What would possibly go wrong?
That's FUD. Yes the Southern Border is porous. Find me one example of a terrorist that has entered the country via that route. Just one. I'm not aware of it having happened. The United States shares intelligence with Mexico and Canada, so you're still dealing with the same fundamental problem of getting into the Western Hemisphere without being detected. Effectively you've given the security forces two bites at your apple, because you're going to have to sneak past Canadian/Mexican customs and American customs (legal route) or the Border Patrol (illegal route). If it was as easy as you make it sound it would have happened already. Heck, they've actually tried it from the Northern Border, and been caught while doing so.
The gun stuff is FUD too. It's "very easy" to get your hands on a cache of firearms large enough to conduct a Mumbai style attack? Where exactly is it "easy" to do that? You can't go the legal route as a non-citizen. That leaves you with the choice of obtaining them from private sellers and/or the black market. Option #1 doesn't scale and Option #2 runs the risk of detection by law enforcement. The only way I can see pulling it off would be to have a sleeper agent in the United States months before your planned attack, who slowly assembled the required weapons cache, but the longer you're here the more likely it is that you get caught. Murphy's Law applies even to terrorists.....
Tom Clancy was actually interviewed by CNN on 9/11. I remember listening to it on the local radio station, which decided to cut their normal feed and broadcast CNN Radio for the duration of the day. We got all of our news from the radio that day, along with the extra edition of the local paper, because we were at work with no television and the internet was too bogged down to be useful. None of us actually saw what had happened until we got home from work, which made it really surreal.
For some reason the Clancy interview is one of the things that sticks out in my mind when I think of that day. Maybe because I had already read Debt of Honor.
I'm still waiting for the Teeth of the Tiger shopping-mall attacks. We saw what happened in Kenya recently. Just imagine that in several malls across the US.
After 9/11 we actually got pretty good at keeping terrorists from getting to the United States, so I don't think attacks like these are a particularly likely occurrence. First you've got to get enough committed people here to carry out the attacks, which means you have to find people that aren't already on the radar of American intelligence, then get them through the Visa process. Once they're here you've got to obtain all the weaponry you'll need, because you're sure as hell not bringing it here in your checked baggage, so now you've got to deal with the American criminal element (not exactly the most trustworthy lot) to get your hands on a cache of firearms and explosives, all while remaining off the radar of law enforcement. It's really not as easy as it sounds when you open those technothrillers....
Even if you pulled it off, I doubt you could duplicate what we saw in Kenya or Mumbai. American law enforcement isn't likely to shrink from the confrontation like some of the Mumbai police did. They're well armed and well trained for these sorts of things. You've also got a non-zero chance of running into armed civilians and private security, depending on your choice of targets. I doubt the average civilian concealed carrier or rent-a-cop could stop a committed assault, but they've got a decent chance at taking one or more bad guys out with them, so that's yet another thing that could go wrong from the perspective of the would be attackers.
I suppose you could worry about domestic terrorists doing the same, because they're already here and would have an easier time arming themselves. Of course, shooting up a shopping mall doesn't seem like their style, and the Government is fairly adept at infiltrating these types of organizations before they can pull off anything serious.
What's wrong with that? Lots of amusing things come up when you Google that. Hell, Google auto completed the search for me, suggesting "recipes" after I had typed in "human meat".
Incidentally, I'm not much of a whiz in the kitchen, but I suspect human flesh would work pretty well in a red sauce or curry. The bigger problem of course would be the cost of obtaining it, followed by the difficulty of obtaining lean cuts, particularly if you reside in the first world....
I bet you if he wrote about child pornography or terrorism it would be a different story.
Tom Clancy penned a novel in 1994 that ended with a 767 being flown into the United States Capitol. Seven years before 9/11. Nobody put him in jail, before or after.
it was the OPPOSITE of isolationism which brought war to the US.
The United States was already effectively at war with Germany before the oil embargo against Japan. The US Navy had orders to sink German U-Boats on sight, we were giving weapons away to the British and Soviets (itself a violation of the obligations of a neutral country under international law), and were making plans for the manner in which we would wage open war against Germany once it broke out. Fire was traded between the US Navy and Kriegsmarine months before Pearl Harbor, in fact two American destroyers were torpedoed (one sunk) by U-Boats in October 1941.
The policy of the American Government at the time was to focus on Europe. Nobody in Washington wanted war with Japan, but they also weren't willing to accept a Japanese defeat and conquest of China. The oil embargo was a last ditch effort to bring them to the negotiation table. They opted for war, with a country that had seventeen times their GDP and twice the population. Had the United States not followed the Europe First policy it's quite probable that Japan would have been crushed by late 1943/early 1944. Japan going to war with the United States has to rank as one of the most boneheaded military decisions ever made in the history of the human race. Probably only equaled by Hitler's move to follow them into war against the sleeping giant.
Something seems really, really off kilter if so many of us see the federal government's law enforcement agencies as the enemy.
The War on Drugs made law enforcement into the enemy for a lot more people than the War on Copyright Infringement. That's really where the Government started to overreach, in modern times, and if you think what they're doing with cyber criminals (real and imagined) is horrible you should Google "civil asset forfeiture" and start reading.
Slashdot Mirror
Pre-existing condition exclusions are required because of adverse selection. Flood insurance works the same way; you've got no coverage at all until the policy has been in effect for 30 days. If your house washes away on Day 29 you're SOL.
In any case, I didn't share my story to indict the insurance companies. It was more of an indictment of the healthcare system in general. There was one unavoidable expense: the $4,500 immunoglobulin shot. Why then did the total bill come to nearly $7,000? It came to that much because treatment was routed through the most expensive delivery system (the ER) available in our healthcare system. Why is that? The rabies series is not time sensitive, waiting a few days causes no ill effects. The taxpayers ostensibly pay for it anyway so why not just have it at the County Health Department Monday through Friday?
I try to route my healthcare through my PCP, because 1) I like him, 2) It's cheaper (both for me and society) than the alternatives. Of course, we're killing the PCP providers, they're barely paid cost as it is (less than cost for medicare patients) and there's no incentives for med students to pursue primary/family medicine as a specialty. The ACA didn't do anything to address this either, a fat lot of good having insurance for the first time is going to do you when you can't find an MD that's taking new patients.
You're right, please support HR-27-1337, placing a 200% tax on politicizing random science discussions.
I'd like to support your tax but I fear that the climate change discussions will see a massively improved signal to noise ratio with corresponding decrease in the eye rolling ratio.
That's a valid point but you kind of missed the bigger picture. With my history and health status they shouldn't be on the hook for more than $300-$500 annually. That's the cost of an annual physical and standard blood/urine lab work. All it took was one incident to largely wipe out their earnings on me and in this case the costs really weren't inflated all that much. Despite what the other poster thinks, the immunoglobulin really is that expensive. It has a very short shelf life, production is a bitch, and there's little economy of scale because it's so rarely needed. Socialized medicine won't fix any of that....
Yes, since the bills would be covered by insurance.
After the deductibles and co-pays. I have a "platinum" plan through my employer; better insurance than anyone else I know and the co-pays still total up to a considerable amount. No deductibles for in-network on my plan, which makes me extremely fortunate. As a single guy I can afford the co-pays even with my modest salary but I can see how quickly they would bankrupt someone with a family, particularly if said family had one or more members with a chronic illness.
Incidentally, I was just exposed to rabies a few months ago:
Strike One: The only place to get the immunoglobulin is the ER, because it's very expensive (>$4,500) and has a short shelf-life. ER co-pay: $150
Strike Two: There's a set schedule for the vaccine, Days 0, 3, 7, and 14. You can get the vaccine from your primary, in theory, but of course my primary has a months long waiting list because we're driving PCPs out of business. Bottom line, I can't get appointments with them for Days 3 or 7, so that's two more trips to the ER. Additional co-pay total: $300
Strike Three: New York State ostensibly has a fund to pay for out of pocket expenses related to rabies exposures, but they only reimburse for the rabies vaccine and immunoglobulin. Since the ER decided to give me a tetanus shot on Day 0 NYS won't reimburse me, even though my out of pocket would have been $150 with or without this extra shot. Hooray for bureaucracy!
Totaling all this up, that stupid bat that found its way into my apartment has personally cost me $465 ($450 of ER co-pays, $15 of PCP co-pay) while my insurance company is on the hook for close to $7,000. My annual premium is about $6,000. So this one incident wiped out every penny they made on me and then some. I'm an otherwise healthy 32 year old marathon runner that ought to be subsidizing those who are less fortunate. Now imagine a family of four that were all exposed to the same scenario I was.....
Any Nexus branded device running Cyanogenmod. Or any non-Nexus device that CM supports (there are literally dozens)
MUCH more importantly, though, ads are draining your BANDWIDTH. It's important, because it's also a simple demonstrable harm. If you pay $30 per month for your internet bandwidth, and the ads use up half of it (conservative estimate)
In which universe do you live where ads on a webpage total up to half of the bandwidth to deliver said webpage?
Because Google purposely don't allow you to block the ads in android (*)
They don't make it easy but they don't make it all that difficult either. Buy a Nexus, Developer Edition, or one of the multitude of carrier branded phones that are rootable. Install one of the multitude of ad blocking apps that are available, AdFree being my personal favorite. Problem solved.
In terms of stumble/dollar vodka has it beat, hands down.
Stumble/dollar is one of the best descriptions I've ever heard to rate drugs, just FYI. ;)
I don't know about Acetaminophen, but I've heard compelling cases made that if Aspirin were discovered today it would be a prescription drug. Think of the side effects, the modern day "think of the children!" attitude, and pathetic need of the body politic to feel "safe" from any and everything.
I had that same thought. This is SOP for any professional relationship. The language in the e-mail is very informal but polite, also SOP. Where's the smoking gun here?
"Pretty goddamn certain" != "beyond a reasonable doubt"
Can you tell the difference between 1,024 MB of /dev/random and 1,024 MB of Truecrypt container? I didn't think so....
The only difference between today and the past is that you can easily see an encrypted file, you can know it's encrypted
Huh? Modern ciphertext is indistinguishable from random noise. Some implementations leave behind clues (i.e., Truecrypt containers are always divisible by 512 bytes), and of course the user can give it away ("KIDDIE PORN COLLECTION.TC" <--- Probably not the best naming scheme) but I'm not aware of any foolproof method to concretely identify an encrypted file as such with modern implementations.
There are obviously thousands of people using encryption because they have a legitimate reason to hide something
My hard drives are encrypted simply because my entire life is on them and I'd rather not have everything you need to steal my identity fall into the hands of whomever broke into my house and stole my PC. I take similar precautions with physical documents that could be used to the same end. My SSA card and Passport are kept in the Safe Deposit Box except when needed, other forms of ID are always kept on or near my person, so they're not apt to be stolen in a burglary.
I don't know or care if LUKS and Truecrypt are secure enough to resist access by a well resourced and competent government agency. They provide ample security for the threat vectors that I care about.
Most people under investigation have software planted on computers or hardware keyloggers.
This, along with other side channel attacks (social engineering, or even simply guessing the password, remembering that most people use easily guessable passwords) is the most likely explanation. If the United States Federal Government has ways of breaking modern ciphers they're not going to throw it away to secure mundane criminal convictions.
Uhh, he was a natural born American citizen, so how exactly do you propose we keep him out of the United States? I was referring to foreign terrorists, in fact I believe I even made a comment about would-be domestic terrorists having an easier go of it.
Comcast is turning users' cable modems into public hotspots. So anyone could connect to a user's modem and use it for any purpose that one might connect to the Internet for. If said use is illegal, would the person who owned (or leased it from Comcast as the case may be) be liable as an accomplice?
My understanding is that it's not a public hotspot, the access is only made available for other Comcast customers, and that in any event the traffic is handled separately from the owner of the connection. It goes out with a different globally valid IP and does not count against the owner's bandwidth cap or otherwise inconvenience him.
Uhh, did you even read the Wikipedia article you linked, never mind actually researching the case in question on your own?
"Ryan Joseph Holle (born November 17, 1982) was convicted in 2004 of first-degree murder under the felony murder rule for lending his car to a friend after the friend and others at the party discussed their plans to steal drugs, money and beat up the 18 year old daughter of a marijuana dealer."
"Holle, who had given the police statements in which he seemed to admit knowing about the burglary, was convicted on August 3, 2004"
I don't see a problem here. "Hey, we're going to go rob this person. Can we borrow your car?" "Sure, here are the keys." What would possibly go wrong?
so I would probably set up my hunting blind in a Golden Corral parking lot
Hunting blind? Why would you need one of those? Your prey is too busy looking at its cell phone to notice you sneaking up on it.
That's FUD. Yes the Southern Border is porous. Find me one example of a terrorist that has entered the country via that route. Just one. I'm not aware of it having happened. The United States shares intelligence with Mexico and Canada, so you're still dealing with the same fundamental problem of getting into the Western Hemisphere without being detected. Effectively you've given the security forces two bites at your apple, because you're going to have to sneak past Canadian/Mexican customs and American customs (legal route) or the Border Patrol (illegal route). If it was as easy as you make it sound it would have happened already. Heck, they've actually tried it from the Northern Border, and been caught while doing so.
The gun stuff is FUD too. It's "very easy" to get your hands on a cache of firearms large enough to conduct a Mumbai style attack? Where exactly is it "easy" to do that? You can't go the legal route as a non-citizen. That leaves you with the choice of obtaining them from private sellers and/or the black market. Option #1 doesn't scale and Option #2 runs the risk of detection by law enforcement. The only way I can see pulling it off would be to have a sleeper agent in the United States months before your planned attack, who slowly assembled the required weapons cache, but the longer you're here the more likely it is that you get caught. Murphy's Law applies even to terrorists.....
Tom Clancy was actually interviewed by CNN on 9/11. I remember listening to it on the local radio station, which decided to cut their normal feed and broadcast CNN Radio for the duration of the day. We got all of our news from the radio that day, along with the extra edition of the local paper, because we were at work with no television and the internet was too bogged down to be useful. None of us actually saw what had happened until we got home from work, which made it really surreal.
For some reason the Clancy interview is one of the things that sticks out in my mind when I think of that day. Maybe because I had already read Debt of Honor.
I'm still waiting for the Teeth of the Tiger shopping-mall attacks. We saw what happened in Kenya recently. Just imagine that in several malls across the US.
After 9/11 we actually got pretty good at keeping terrorists from getting to the United States, so I don't think attacks like these are a particularly likely occurrence. First you've got to get enough committed people here to carry out the attacks, which means you have to find people that aren't already on the radar of American intelligence, then get them through the Visa process. Once they're here you've got to obtain all the weaponry you'll need, because you're sure as hell not bringing it here in your checked baggage, so now you've got to deal with the American criminal element (not exactly the most trustworthy lot) to get your hands on a cache of firearms and explosives, all while remaining off the radar of law enforcement. It's really not as easy as it sounds when you open those technothrillers....
Even if you pulled it off, I doubt you could duplicate what we saw in Kenya or Mumbai. American law enforcement isn't likely to shrink from the confrontation like some of the Mumbai police did. They're well armed and well trained for these sorts of things. You've also got a non-zero chance of running into armed civilians and private security, depending on your choice of targets. I doubt the average civilian concealed carrier or rent-a-cop could stop a committed assault, but they've got a decent chance at taking one or more bad guys out with them, so that's yet another thing that could go wrong from the perspective of the would be attackers.
I suppose you could worry about domestic terrorists doing the same, because they're already here and would have an easier time arming themselves. Of course, shooting up a shopping mall doesn't seem like their style, and the Government is fairly adept at infiltrating these types of organizations before they can pull off anything serious.
What's wrong with that? Lots of amusing things come up when you Google that. Hell, Google auto completed the search for me, suggesting "recipes" after I had typed in "human meat".
Incidentally, I'm not much of a whiz in the kitchen, but I suspect human flesh would work pretty well in a red sauce or curry. The bigger problem of course would be the cost of obtaining it, followed by the difficulty of obtaining lean cuts, particularly if you reside in the first world....
From TFA: "Gilberto Valle was 25 years old and still living with his father in Queens when, in 2009, he met Kathleen Mangan on OKCupid."
OKC strikes again! Someone met a creeper on OKC who still lived with their parents? Imagine that....
I bet you if he wrote about child pornography or terrorism it would be a different story.
Tom Clancy penned a novel in 1994 that ended with a 767 being flown into the United States Capitol. Seven years before 9/11. Nobody put him in jail, before or after.
it was the OPPOSITE of isolationism which brought war to the US.
The United States was already effectively at war with Germany before the oil embargo against Japan. The US Navy had orders to sink German U-Boats on sight, we were giving weapons away to the British and Soviets (itself a violation of the obligations of a neutral country under international law), and were making plans for the manner in which we would wage open war against Germany once it broke out. Fire was traded between the US Navy and Kriegsmarine months before Pearl Harbor, in fact two American destroyers were torpedoed (one sunk) by U-Boats in October 1941.
The policy of the American Government at the time was to focus on Europe. Nobody in Washington wanted war with Japan, but they also weren't willing to accept a Japanese defeat and conquest of China. The oil embargo was a last ditch effort to bring them to the negotiation table. They opted for war, with a country that had seventeen times their GDP and twice the population . Had the United States not followed the Europe First policy it's quite probable that Japan would have been crushed by late 1943/early 1944. Japan going to war with the United States has to rank as one of the most boneheaded military decisions ever made in the history of the human race. Probably only equaled by Hitler's move to follow them into war against the sleeping giant.
They should be an impartial enforcer of the governments laws.
They usually are. That's kind of the problem. This was the best moment ever of The Wire.
Something seems really, really off kilter if so many of us see the federal government's law enforcement agencies as the enemy.
The War on Drugs made law enforcement into the enemy for a lot more people than the War on Copyright Infringement. That's really where the Government started to overreach, in modern times, and if you think what they're doing with cyber criminals (real and imagined) is horrible you should Google "civil asset forfeiture" and start reading.