You don't seem to quite understand how the world works.
I don't think you do. A civil settlement is compromise, often in many parts. Neither side gets everything they want. A confidentiality agreement is one of those potential parts. If you remove that option, the parties will simply compromise in other ways. Most likely, it means a company would offer a smaller settlement, and be more willing to go to trial.
Also, you seem to assume that anyone suing a company is in the right, and every company in the wrong. Not so.
When I got my iMac it converted my photos from my camera to some iPhoto library from which it was quite difficult to take it out in simple jpg files.
File -> Export works for me. If you want to access a bunch at a time, they're in [your user directory]/Pictures/iPhoto Library.
And for those who haven't followed link about the "obscure workaround":
To do this, simply tap and hold on the undelivered message and a “Send as Text Message” option should appear in the context menu. This works even when “Send as SMS” is disabled in your settings, allowing you to decide when you’d rather send a text message for expediency or simply leave it to wait until the recipient’s device is back online.
I'm not saying that Apple never does lock-in, but both those seem like pretty weak examples.
On the one hand, nobody wants the poor to suffer, especially poor children. And nobody wants the government to decide who has the right to have kids. On the other hand, you get more of what you subsidize, and our society pays poor people to have children. How much crime, poverty, and general misery is caused by people who should never have children, and yet have children? (Often, lots of children?) People worry about "income inequality," but here's a not-insignificant source of at least part of it.
It's tempting to condition welfare on "no more kids" (sterilization), but that's never going to fly, and feels far too totalitarian. And yet, here we are trapped in a system of positive (the bad kind) feedback: Bad parents are paid to have kids, those kids (epigenetically or otherwise) transmit the same dysfunctional traits to their kids, and so society pays for more crime and poverty and misery. I don't have an answer, but I don't think enough people see the problem. They'll just blame their political opponents or capitalism or whatever.
The joke here is that Win8 is not discoverable, the gestures are rather hidden.
No kidding! I am a Mac person who has had to use a new Windows laptop for a project. When I am in Outlook, there seems to be a way that touching the trackpad kicks me into Bing News. (No, there are no news links in the emails.) And once there, there is no obvious way of getting back into Outlook. I have to hit the key to take me back to the desktop (or whatever they call the one with the tiles), and go back into Outlook from there. No wonder Windows 7 users are annoyed.
If it really were Obama's billion dollars, who could object? But of course it's actually money borrowed by the government, to be paid back by future taxpayers. Well, supposedly paid back by future taxpayers, after they pay off the first $60-$100 trillion dollars in debt and unfunded public pension liabilities that they are already on the hook for. But I'm sure they'll be cool with it all.
Fine, then make "fairly significant structural changes." I think the payoff would be worth it. As for the back content, if the classic view is kept, I don't see how it would be hard to keep the back content for that. For the new views, is that important? Most people going to news sites don't care about old content.
If the backend code needs to be completely rewritten
But why would the backend need to be rewritten at all? I've only glanced at the page code, but I don't see any reason why they couldn't just write different style sheets that control what gets displayed and how. Don't like big pictures? Choose a style that doesn't display them. Etc. If they did that, they could pitch the new design(s) to the new audience, without alienating us old fogies.
We have work to do on four big areas: feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning; plain old bugs; and, lastly, the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process
Those are exactly the problems I care about. Mainly information density; I want to see the same amount of information on the screen as I did before. Or at least 75%. It's more like 25% right now. Anyway, I'm glad someone is paying attention.
I agree. I am especially concerned with feature parity for viewing comments: I love the dual-doohickey slider that allows me to set comment visibility by rating, with the other comments shown as single lines. Great for modding.
But I am puzzled why, in this age of CSS, Slashdot needs to replace the classic look with a new design. Why not different style sheets? Show classic, new, and even other layouts, with the click of a link, whatever people prefer. Produce a half-dozen user-selectable layouts and make everyone happy.
Thank you for an informed comment, which leads to my question. I constantly hear how we need net neutrality, otherwise all sorts of terrible things will happen. Well, why haven't they happened? If only net neutrality can prevent Comcast from extorting Netflix, and we don't have net neutrality now, then why isn't Comcast extorting Netflix right now, while there's no law against it? It seems like net neutrality is a solution to a non-existent problem.
(As a general rule, I prefer that laws and regulations deal with real problems, not ones that someone says might happen. Yes, an ounce of prevention and all that, but many of the worst laws and regulations have been aimed at non-existent problems.)
I really wish I had the ability to make a more subdued honk sometimes, for alerting a pedestrian, or whatever. It seems like an obvious enhancement, and yet AFAIK such a thing has never been standard or even available, except maybe as an aftermarket item.
There's "narrow" AI, where Kurzweil has major achievements: e.g. speech recognition. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a whole 'nother ball game. The field is largely speculative, because it doesn't really exist yet. So it's not unfair to say Kurzweil is big in AI, even though we don't yet have AGI.
Incidentally, Ray Kurzweil is an incompetent hack. Google did itself no favor by hiring him. This person has grand visions but zero understanding of actual reality.
Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer Kurzweil K250 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, America's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He was the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001, the world's largest for innovation. And in 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.
I wish everyone was 1/10 that much of an "incompetent hack." If he thought Deep Mind was worth buying, that's the way I'd bet.
That is a gross and inaccurate simplification. Read a bit of history yourself, maybe? The Nazis were definitely not socialists in the traditional sense.
They were a variation of socialism, as the similarities make clear:
– A modern, revolutionary movement, hostile to liberal democracy, with a desire to remake society in a more "efficient" and "fair" way? Check.
– Opponents of the "wasteful competition" of capitalism, who believed in economic planning for the greater good? Check.
– A belief in government welfare for the poor? Check.
– A belief in massive public works projects? Check.
– A disdain for traditional, non-governmental organizations such as churches, clubs, and other aspects of civil society, and a belief that government should intrude in all of them? Check.
– A belief in the rights of the collective over the rights of "selfish" individuals? Check.
One can quibble that no single one of these is unique to socialism or fascism, but taken together, it's clearly not some sort of misdirection that the Nazis had the word "socialist" in their name, and that their early ranks were filled with ex-socialists and ex-communists.
Indeed. I think this might work as an emergency ration, or perhaps a diet regimen, but I'm not seeing the attraction otherwise.
It also makes me think about something I read decades ago. Supposedly a scientist extracted every known vitamin and nutrient from rat chow, and fed it to rats, leaving out the leftover "non-nutrients." Eventually the rats sickened and died. The lesson of this, as told by the nutrition types I heard it from, was that we have not identified all necessary vitamins and nutrients in foods, so it's risky to think you can make fully nutritious artificial food.
But I just finished a 12-hour work day, so I'll leave it to someone else to track down a reference.
Warning: This is another of those annoying website articles that describe a visually fascinating thing, but don't actually include any pictures or videos of said fascinating thing. Not even the the spectrograph, though that seems to be in the paper behind the paywall. The only picture is of some earlier lab-made ball lightning.
Of all the great inventions of modern times the one that has given me most comfort and joy is one that is seldom heard of, to wit, the thermostat. I was amazed, some time ago, to hear that it was invented at least a generation ago. I first heard of it during the War of 1914-18, when some kind friend suggested that I throw out the coal furnace that was making steam in my house and put in a gas furnace. Naturally enough, I hesitated, for the human mind is so constituted. But the day I finally succumbed must remain ever memorable in my annals, for it saw me move at one leap from an inferno into a sort of paradise. Everyone will recall how bad the coal was in those heroic days. The patriotic anthracite men loaded their culm-piles on cars, and sold them to householders all over the East. Not a furnaceman was in practise in my neighborhood: all of them were working in the shipyards at $15 a day. So I had to shovel coal myself, and not only shovel coal, but sift ashes. It was a truly dreadful experience. Worse, my house was always either too hot or too cold. When a few pieces of actual coal appeared in the mass of slate the temperature leaped up to 85 degrees, but most of the time it was between 45 and 50.
The thermostat changed all that, and in an instant. I simply set it at 68 degrees, and then went about my business. Whenever the temperature in the house went up to 70 it automatically turned off the gas under the furnace in the cellar, and there was an immediate return to 68. And if the mercury, keeping on, dropped to 66, then the gas went on again, and the temperature was soon 68 once more. I began to feel like a man liberated from the death-house. I was never too hot or too cold. I had no coal to heave, no ashes to sift. My house became so clean that I could wear a shirt five days. I began to feel like work, and rapidly turned out a series of imperishable contributions to the national letters. My temper improved so vastly that my family began to suspect senile changes. Moreover, my cellar became as clean as the rest of the house, and as roomy as a barn. I enlarged my wine-room by 1000 cubic metres. I put in a cedar closet big enough to hold my whole wardrobe. I added a vault for papers, a carpenter shop, and a praying chamber.
H.L. Mencken
The Boons of Civilization
From the American Mercury, Jan., 1931, pp. 33-35
This should be required reading for everyone of junior high/high school age. It's basically a brief introduction to statistics, focusing on all the ways they are often misused. It's short, funny, and permanently changed the way I view news and politics. Once you know this stuff, you'll see examples everywhere, especially when partisans have an ax to grind. E.g., years ago I saw a group's study that purported to "prove" that California's taxes and regulations had no negative effects on businesses. Further investigation revealed that they studied only existing California businesses, not businesses that had closed down, or moved out of state, or never got off the ground. Um, sample bias?
Am I "the above poster" you are referring to? I can't tell. Sure, there are lots of lessons there for IT and project management types that are purely non-political, but as I said elsewhere, the Healthcare.gov mess in inextricably entwined with politics. Whether you care about politics or not, it's not off-topic to talk about how it make this disaster.
Whoever accepts the bid has only the track record of the bidder and their word to go by. Unless the bidder has a terrible, or complete lack of reputation, you can't really blame the person accepting the bid.
What the ever loving fuck does someone saying there will be doctor shortages, or a 2% tax, have to do with the website sucking? Nothing.
No, it's all connected. The entire "health care reform" project was a top-down, centrally-planned attempt to remake a huge portion of the economy. It was assembled into a massive bill that no one read, and forced through Congress on partisan lines. The website had to manifest this confused, partisan mess of idealistic hopes, economic fallacies, and outright lies, and it couldn't. It still can't. As originally conceived, it had to query existing databases at the IRS, HHS, Homeland Security, and Treasury. It had to check 50 state Medicaid systems. It had to communicate with all the insurers. But they haven't been able to make it work. When you hear about the "back-end" not being done, that's what they mean. Applicants are on the honor system, because the planned automated verification checks aren't working yet. And all of that verification is needed because of the political requirements for subsidies.
On top of that, there were delays in giving website requirements to the contractors because the administration wanted to hide things before the 2012 elections, for fear of giving ammunition to Republicans.
The politics of the whole thing is central to the failure of the website.
I don't think the contractor deserves all the blame. They screwed up big-time, true, but they had a very difficult task, perhaps an impossible one. Communicating in real time with dozens of pre-existing government and insurance company databases is hard. They also had to dance to the tune of their political masters, so they got requirements late because the administration didn't want Republicans to know the gory details before the 2012 elections, and because the website flowchart was complicated by the fact that the administration didn't want visitors to see plan costs before subsidies, to reduce sticker shock.
Well, I'm assuming the goal is to use that money to provide health plans to those who can't afford them, obviously if more people get coverage than before and the costs per person don't go down the total will go up.
But the 2% tax applies to all health plans (except Medicaid, I believe). Obamacare was sold as reducing the the cost of insurance for the average person. You don't lower the cost of anything by taxing it. And note that it was also sold as reducing the deficit, or at least not adding to it. That's another claim since exposed as untrue.
No contest. It's got everything: hubris, cronyism, bureaucratic bungling, political idiocy, numerous huge IT errors, hundreds of millions of dollars. Once all the details come out, this massive fail will be studied in universities. Books will be written. The political consequences will last for years. Coming soon: the doctor shortages. And does everyone know that in 2014, the health plan tax kicks in? I don't mean the "Cadillac plan" tax, or the tax if you don't have insurance. I mean the 2% tax on every health plan. Yes, in order to make health insurance more "affordable," they are taxing health insurance! Words fail.
'Why is the government mandating that you support a for-profit company?"
Works for Obamacare.
OK, point taken, but it's a lot more common than that, making the question seem naive. The government also requires you to have non-bald tires on your car, car insurance, wear clothing when you're out in public, and a hundred other things that you get from for-profit companies. And, trust me, you wouldn't enjoy a society in which everything mandated by the government was actually produced by the government.
Of course, the core issue is whether CMMI does what it's supposed to. I have no idea, but will note that governments tend to love all sorts of mandatory "certification," despite their often spotty track record and the negative economic consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't seem to quite understand how the world works.
I don't think you do. A civil settlement is compromise, often in many parts. Neither side gets everything they want. A confidentiality agreement is one of those potential parts. If you remove that option, the parties will simply compromise in other ways. Most likely, it means a company would offer a smaller settlement, and be more willing to go to trial.
Also, you seem to assume that anyone suing a company is in the right, and every company in the wrong. Not so.
When I got my iMac it converted my photos from my camera to some iPhoto library from which it was quite difficult to take it out in simple jpg files.
File -> Export works for me. If you want to access a bunch at a time, they're in [your user directory]/Pictures/iPhoto Library.
And for those who haven't followed link about the "obscure workaround":
To do this, simply tap and hold on the undelivered message and a “Send as Text Message” option should appear in the context menu. This works even when “Send as SMS” is disabled in your settings, allowing you to decide when you’d rather send a text message for expediency or simply leave it to wait until the recipient’s device is back online.
I'm not saying that Apple never does lock-in, but both those seem like pretty weak examples.
On the one hand, nobody wants the poor to suffer, especially poor children. And nobody wants the government to decide who has the right to have kids. On the other hand, you get more of what you subsidize, and our society pays poor people to have children. How much crime, poverty, and general misery is caused by people who should never have children, and yet have children? (Often, lots of children?) People worry about "income inequality," but here's a not-insignificant source of at least part of it.
It's tempting to condition welfare on "no more kids" (sterilization), but that's never going to fly, and feels far too totalitarian. And yet, here we are trapped in a system of positive (the bad kind) feedback: Bad parents are paid to have kids, those kids (epigenetically or otherwise) transmit the same dysfunctional traits to their kids, and so society pays for more crime and poverty and misery. I don't have an answer, but I don't think enough people see the problem. They'll just blame their political opponents or capitalism or whatever.
The joke here is that Win8 is not discoverable, the gestures are rather hidden.
No kidding! I am a Mac person who has had to use a new Windows laptop for a project. When I am in Outlook, there seems to be a way that touching the trackpad kicks me into Bing News. (No, there are no news links in the emails.) And once there, there is no obvious way of getting back into Outlook. I have to hit the key to take me back to the desktop (or whatever they call the one with the tiles), and go back into Outlook from there. No wonder Windows 7 users are annoyed.
Obama's $1B will fund [...]
If it really were Obama's billion dollars, who could object? But of course it's actually money borrowed by the government, to be paid back by future taxpayers. Well, supposedly paid back by future taxpayers, after they pay off the first $60-$100 trillion dollars in debt and unfunded public pension liabilities that they are already on the hook for. But I'm sure they'll be cool with it all.
Fine, then make "fairly significant structural changes." I think the payoff would be worth it. As for the back content, if the classic view is kept, I don't see how it would be hard to keep the back content for that. For the new views, is that important? Most people going to news sites don't care about old content.
If the backend code needs to be completely rewritten
But why would the backend need to be rewritten at all? I've only glanced at the page code, but I don't see any reason why they couldn't just write different style sheets that control what gets displayed and how. Don't like big pictures? Choose a style that doesn't display them. Etc. If they did that, they could pitch the new design(s) to the new audience, without alienating us old fogies.
We have work to do on four big areas: feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning; plain old bugs; and, lastly, the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process
Those are exactly the problems I care about. Mainly information density; I want to see the same amount of information on the screen as I did before. Or at least 75%. It's more like 25% right now. Anyway, I'm glad someone is paying attention.
I agree. I am especially concerned with feature parity for viewing comments: I love the dual-doohickey slider that allows me to set comment visibility by rating, with the other comments shown as single lines. Great for modding.
But I am puzzled why, in this age of CSS, Slashdot needs to replace the classic look with a new design. Why not different style sheets? Show classic, new, and even other layouts, with the click of a link, whatever people prefer. Produce a half-dozen user-selectable layouts and make everyone happy.
Thank you for an informed comment, which leads to my question. I constantly hear how we need net neutrality, otherwise all sorts of terrible things will happen. Well, why haven't they happened? If only net neutrality can prevent Comcast from extorting Netflix, and we don't have net neutrality now, then why isn't Comcast extorting Netflix right now, while there's no law against it? It seems like net neutrality is a solution to a non-existent problem.
(As a general rule, I prefer that laws and regulations deal with real problems, not ones that someone says might happen. Yes, an ounce of prevention and all that, but many of the worst laws and regulations have been aimed at non-existent problems.)
I really wish I had the ability to make a more subdued honk sometimes, for alerting a pedestrian, or whatever. It seems like an obvious enhancement, and yet AFAIK such a thing has never been standard or even available, except maybe as an aftermarket item.
There's "narrow" AI, where Kurzweil has major achievements: e.g. speech recognition. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a whole 'nother ball game. The field is largely speculative, because it doesn't really exist yet. So it's not unfair to say Kurzweil is big in AI, even though we don't yet have AGI.
Incidentally, Ray Kurzweil is an incompetent hack. Google did itself no favor by hiring him. This person has grand visions but zero understanding of actual reality.
Oh, really? A quick visit to Wikipedia finds:
Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer Kurzweil K250 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, America's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He was the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001, the world's largest for innovation. And in 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.
I wish everyone was 1/10 that much of an "incompetent hack." If he thought Deep Mind was worth buying, that's the way I'd bet.
That is a gross and inaccurate simplification. Read a bit of history yourself, maybe? The Nazis were definitely not socialists in the traditional sense.
They were a variation of socialism, as the similarities make clear:
One can quibble that no single one of these is unique to socialism or fascism, but taken together, it's clearly not some sort of misdirection that the Nazis had the word "socialist" in their name, and that their early ranks were filled with ex-socialists and ex-communists.
Indeed. I think this might work as an emergency ration, or perhaps a diet regimen, but I'm not seeing the attraction otherwise.
It also makes me think about something I read decades ago. Supposedly a scientist extracted every known vitamin and nutrient from rat chow, and fed it to rats, leaving out the leftover "non-nutrients." Eventually the rats sickened and died. The lesson of this, as told by the nutrition types I heard it from, was that we have not identified all necessary vitamins and nutrients in foods, so it's risky to think you can make fully nutritious artificial food.
But I just finished a 12-hour work day, so I'll leave it to someone else to track down a reference.
Warning: This is another of those annoying website articles that describe a visually fascinating thing, but don't actually include any pictures or videos of said fascinating thing. Not even the the spectrograph, though that seems to be in the paper behind the paywall. The only picture is of some earlier lab-made ball lightning.
THE THERMOSTAT
Of all the great inventions of modern times the one that has given me most comfort and joy is one that is seldom heard of, to wit, the thermostat. I was amazed, some time ago, to hear that it was invented at least a generation ago. I first heard of it during the War of 1914-18, when some kind friend suggested that I throw out the coal furnace that was making steam in my house and put in a gas furnace. Naturally enough, I hesitated, for the human mind is so constituted. But the day I finally succumbed must remain ever memorable in my annals, for it saw me move at one leap from an inferno into a sort of paradise. Everyone will recall how bad the coal was in those heroic days. The patriotic anthracite men loaded their culm-piles on cars, and sold them to householders all over the East. Not a furnaceman was in practise in my neighborhood: all of them were working in the shipyards at $15 a day. So I had to shovel coal myself, and not only shovel coal, but sift ashes. It was a truly dreadful experience. Worse, my house was always either too hot or too cold. When a few pieces of actual coal appeared in the mass of slate the temperature leaped up to 85 degrees, but most of the time it was between 45 and 50.
The thermostat changed all that, and in an instant. I simply set it at 68 degrees, and then went about my business. Whenever the temperature in the house went up to 70 it automatically turned off the gas under the furnace in the cellar, and there was an immediate return to 68. And if the mercury, keeping on, dropped to 66, then the gas went on again, and the temperature was soon 68 once more. I began to feel like a man liberated from the death-house. I was never too hot or too cold. I had no coal to heave, no ashes to sift. My house became so clean that I could wear a shirt five days. I began to feel like work, and rapidly turned out a series of imperishable contributions to the national letters. My temper improved so vastly that my family began to suspect senile changes. Moreover, my cellar became as clean as the rest of the house, and as roomy as a barn. I enlarged my wine-room by 1000 cubic metres. I put in a cedar closet big enough to hold my whole wardrobe. I added a vault for papers, a carpenter shop, and a praying chamber.
H.L. Mencken
The Boons of Civilization
From the American Mercury, Jan., 1931, pp. 33-35
I'm just thankful they didn't change it to "diversity."
This should be required reading for everyone of junior high/high school age. It's basically a brief introduction to statistics, focusing on all the ways they are often misused. It's short, funny, and permanently changed the way I view news and politics. Once you know this stuff, you'll see examples everywhere, especially when partisans have an ax to grind. E.g., years ago I saw a group's study that purported to "prove" that California's taxes and regulations had no negative effects on businesses. Further investigation revealed that they studied only existing California businesses, not businesses that had closed down, or moved out of state, or never got off the ground. Um, sample bias?
Am I "the above poster" you are referring to? I can't tell. Sure, there are lots of lessons there for IT and project management types that are purely non-political, but as I said elsewhere, the Healthcare.gov mess in inextricably entwined with politics. Whether you care about politics or not, it's not off-topic to talk about how it make this disaster.
Whoever accepts the bid has only the track record of the bidder and their word to go by. Unless the bidder has a terrible, or complete lack of reputation, you can't really blame the person accepting the bid.
In this case, the contractor had a bad track record, but they had crony connections with the White House.
What the ever loving fuck does someone saying there will be doctor shortages, or a 2% tax, have to do with the website sucking? Nothing.
No, it's all connected. The entire "health care reform" project was a top-down, centrally-planned attempt to remake a huge portion of the economy. It was assembled into a massive bill that no one read, and forced through Congress on partisan lines. The website had to manifest this confused, partisan mess of idealistic hopes, economic fallacies, and outright lies, and it couldn't. It still can't. As originally conceived, it had to query existing databases at the IRS, HHS, Homeland Security, and Treasury. It had to check 50 state Medicaid systems. It had to communicate with all the insurers. But they haven't been able to make it work. When you hear about the "back-end" not being done, that's what they mean. Applicants are on the honor system, because the planned automated verification checks aren't working yet. And all of that verification is needed because of the political requirements for subsidies.
On top of that, there were delays in giving website requirements to the contractors because the administration wanted to hide things before the 2012 elections, for fear of giving ammunition to Republicans.
The politics of the whole thing is central to the failure of the website.
Those "millions of enrollments" include:
The number not in those categories is still unknown. Let's see what the real numbers are when the administration decides to release them.
I don't think the contractor deserves all the blame. They screwed up big-time, true, but they had a very difficult task, perhaps an impossible one. Communicating in real time with dozens of pre-existing government and insurance company databases is hard. They also had to dance to the tune of their political masters, so they got requirements late because the administration didn't want Republicans to know the gory details before the 2012 elections, and because the website flowchart was complicated by the fact that the administration didn't want visitors to see plan costs before subsidies, to reduce sticker shock.
Well, I'm assuming the goal is to use that money to provide health plans to those who can't afford them, obviously if more people get coverage than before and the costs per person don't go down the total will go up.
But the 2% tax applies to all health plans (except Medicaid, I believe). Obamacare was sold as reducing the the cost of insurance for the average person. You don't lower the cost of anything by taxing it. And note that it was also sold as reducing the deficit, or at least not adding to it. That's another claim since exposed as untrue.
No contest. It's got everything: hubris, cronyism, bureaucratic bungling, political idiocy, numerous huge IT errors, hundreds of millions of dollars. Once all the details come out, this massive fail will be studied in universities. Books will be written. The political consequences will last for years. Coming soon: the doctor shortages. And does everyone know that in 2014, the health plan tax kicks in? I don't mean the "Cadillac plan" tax, or the tax if you don't have insurance. I mean the 2% tax on every health plan. Yes, in order to make health insurance more "affordable," they are taxing health insurance! Words fail.
'Why is the government mandating that you support a for-profit company?"
Works for Obamacare.
OK, point taken, but it's a lot more common than that, making the question seem naive. The government also requires you to have non-bald tires on your car, car insurance, wear clothing when you're out in public, and a hundred other things that you get from for-profit companies. And, trust me, you wouldn't enjoy a society in which everything mandated by the government was actually produced by the government.
Of course, the core issue is whether CMMI does what it's supposed to. I have no idea, but will note that governments tend to love all sorts of mandatory "certification," despite their often spotty track record and the negative economic consequences.