Better then to slaughter tens of thousands to steal the oil. Seems like either way, we steal the oil.
We're taking over the holy land on behalf of Jews.
Hey, if Jews want to go and live in an Islam Caliphate, more power to them.
We're forcing our western culture on hapless Syrians.
Yep, nothing more forced than granting voluntary relocation outside of a warzone which might, you know, result in them being exposed to other cultures.
Hell, as some point they'll call it slavery.
They'll call it slavery and the people will live and work freely. Or we continue the air strikes and leave ISIS to behead and every day they live in fear.
Thousands and thousands of hours of MSM hand wringing over the conditions inside immense tent cities...
Because God knows we couldn't build houses. Let's do the math. 6.5 million refugees times $30,000/home* (in many rural areas of the US) == $195 billion. Hey, that's only ~2 years worth of Iraq wars. And we give a lot of people homes. Meanwhile, MSM will hand wring over everything. They'll do 129 separate stories, one on each victim, just to get more ad revenue. So it goes.
... and indignant libtards demanding we bankrupt ourselves to "fix" it.
Compared to what? Air strikes? Bombings? We've already spent much more in war to "fix" it and done nothing of the sort. How about we do something constructive instead of destructive. And for once in history, it might be actually be cheaper.
*PS - Feel free to play around with the numbers (obviously, a lot of families make the numbers more plausible, as you're not really giving each refugee a home). Consider the solution involves many countries taking in refugees, not merely one nation. But even if it were only one, say France, it's doable. Sure it could turn into a clusterfuck with tent cities. But that speaks of a government unwilling to commit to a plan or even having a plan at all. That's why Katrina was such a clusterfuck. It wasn't the Hurricane. Yet government can in competence build out massively. See the Marshall Plan . See China and their city building.
IS is one of the largest threats to our way of life in the west, but we are thinking too small when we think of ways to combat it.
You're right. We think too small. The answer is clear. While we talk and talk about the evil of ISIS and the refugees and the "need" to vet these people. we leave 6.5 million+ Syrians at the mercy of Assad or ISIS or Russian bombings or US bombings or French bombings. We're all being monsters to these people. The death of 129 Parisians is nothing compared to the horror that we sit and watch and act helpless to stop. We debate and discuss and debate some more. We think too small. The answer is clear.
We don't vet the refugees. We don't let in a mere 10,000 "vetted" Syrians. We let in 6.5 million+ Syrians. We begin the largest known evacuation possible. We put the Army and the Navy to the best use we can, to protect and transport civilians. We deprive ISIS and Assad of the very thing they want, fodder for their abuse and subjects of their subjugation. And when there's invariable terrorists in the mix and they come here? We rejoice. Because here the abuse will not be tolerated. Here the death numbers in the hundreds, not in the tens of thousands. Here we do more to end the terrorism of the many and give ISIS and Assad an empty hellhole to squat in over the few who would actual want such a thing. It's a Pyrrhic victory for them. It is freedom and justice for the people.
Its sad to see these scientists cry fowl, controversy, and blasphemy at dissenters . Isn't science supposed to have opposing views, with fact-based research on multiple view points using the "scientific method" for cross-checking each-others work?
'How dare you! I have a right to my opposing view, no matter how ill-informed or incomplete or intentionally agenda-driven wrong it is! How dare you point out the flaws! How dare you engage in the "scientific method"! Why, I'll just claim your engaging in the "scientific method" is not engaging in the "scientific method"!'
And this is why I can't take you seriously. You're the one with your head in dogma.
And you don't find this relevant to this discussion? Exactly where costs are coming from and why? Seems a hell of alot more important than just giving everyone insurance that pays for everything and just raising taxes to account for our out of control healthcare costs.
It's relevant to the discussion. Too bad that, AFAIK, there aren't any studies to spell out where costs are coming from and why. The quote I give only gives a "from" but in mostly esoteric terms that give virtually nothing on the real where and why. Now, if you could provide a study that actually broke down who was using the health care system and how, I'd love to see it. The closest I've seen is little snippets that are often an abuse of statistics.
A very good question. Perhaps it calls for a study (rather than hands over eyes + dump cash into anybody's pocket that asks for medical care). It doesn't even have to be perfect accountability. At this point, I'd settle for any.
You seem to be missing my point. There's already been fuck tons of studies done that show "this significantly increases your risk of cancer type X" where "significantly" just means that there is an actual effect and it's not merely a placebo effect and where "cancer type X" doesn't necessarily apply to any other type of cancer or condition. There are very few examples of any one thing causing one major condition that's preventable and therefore in scope of accountability.
My HSA grows every year (and accrues interest). I fully well intend to have a buffer (+ insurance) for when misfortune strikes me.
That's a ludicrous statement, but thanks for saying it anyways. It's entirely why I asked. You "intend" to have the money "when" misfortune strikes. Yet by its very nature, you have no idea when misfortune will strike, whether multiple misfortunes will strike, or the scale of the cost. Or do you seriously contend that everyone should strive to have millions in savings just in case? Because anything less is unreasonable. Insurance is more of a risk pool precisely because of that and not merely for even "catastrophic" emergency because such a term because untenable very quickly on the cost of many medical procedures.
So then they should end up paying for their mistake, or their children should be taken and given to someone more responsible to take care of.
For the former, you can't get blood from a stone. For the latter, we already have a huge backlog of foster kids.
Well you've finally come around. So aren't you then incensed that next to zero effort was put into healthcare cost control in Obama's healthcare bill?
I would be if I actually thought any health care law passed in the US would do such a thing. Really, we're so well beyond the incensed point on how the system already works, you'd be hard pressed for me to become any more incensed Any real effort to fix the problem would involve either (a) public conversion of the health care system--leading to "death panels"--or (b) massive government regulation into the health care system--as if the current mess is really helping and further regulation is unlikely to be any better than Obamacare.
I never painted all of it as such. In fact, I specifically called out cases that are not self-caused. However, some of it is damn well self-caused. Such as type 2 diabetes for instance. Which statistics show to be ~95% of diabetes cases. So that's at least $245 billion (http://www.diabetes.org/advocacy/news-events/cost-of-diabetes.html) that's highly likely to be self-caused. I could bring up numbers for lung/throat cancer and smoking as well.
Yep, those are the major two ones I'll grant you.
Heart disease is likely strongly linked to obesity as well.
That wasn't my statement. It forces ALL healthcare (including non-emergency care) through insurance. Secondly, your "emergency room" case argument is liberal talking point bullshit. 5% of less of our total healthcare bill is racked up in the emergency room. The VAST amount of healthcare expenses are known ahead of time. If 5% of our healthcare was handled through insurance, and 95% of it wasn't, that would be a functional system.
My former point was that those who were not financially capable of covering medical costs had to buy insurance and that those unplanned expenses are why most people are required to buy insurance. Having said that, further research and you appear to be right. Emergency room care seems to be in the 2%-10% range. I should have stated emergency and urgent care--including things like heart surgery after a heart attack or expensive medication/surgery to treat cancer or other ailments after a diagnosis. Having said that, it does leave me to wonder about the other 90-98% of care. So, we have this:
"Of each dollar spent on health care in the United States, 31% goes to hospital care, 21% goes to physician/clinical services, 10% to pharmaceuticals, 4% to dental, 6% to nursing homes and 3% to home health care, 3% for other retail products, 3% for government public health activities, 7% to administrative costs, 7% to investment, and 6% to other professional services (physical therapists, optometrists, etc.)" -- from Wikipedia Cite Note 45, although the information wasn't readily visible in the first link
Given that ~50% of US spending on health care is Medicare/Medicaid and the other ~50% is private (insurance), it's rather hard to separate out that figure to get an idea of how much of that is "Cadillac" coverage of unnecessary treatment of the elderly/poor or what. In any case...
On the demand supply of things, everyone is a "BMW luxury car" unless you really think rich people, poor people, young people, old people, etc have fundamentally different bodies.
They in fact do. Some cram drugs into them. Some cram nicotine and cigaratte smoke into them. Some pollute their bodies with alcohol. Some spend multiple days a week in tanning beds. Some conduct themselves in dangerous activity like base jumping. Believe it or not, healthcare is not a one-size-fits-all level playing field. The only case where I wouldn't want people paying for their individual fuckups is something like autoimmune or genetics, when they literally have no choice in the matter. Most other times, it most likely had something to do with the way they lived their lives.
How much of it is genetics and how much of it is environmental? Should we go 50/50 until we get genetic tests done on those cancer drugs? And what about the fact that generally being old == getting cancer/having heart failure/having a stroke because eventually you "cram" enough bad stuff in your body even if you live a very healthy lifestyle. So, well, you seem to be for ending Medicare near entirely. That right there doesn't paint you very well. Beyond all that, I'm curious exactly how much money you've saved up personally for your inevitable heart attack and cancer. When are you going to have it and are you saving enough? Because if it's oh so predictable, it'll be nothing more difficult than saving up for one's child's college--which plenty of people don't do either.
Though I guess in your mind the ACA really does eliminate those "market options" of "should I get really sick from the flu to the point I need to see a doctor" or "should I stay healthy, not get really sick, and avoid needing medical care". Or was it the idea that hospitals and doctors used to run specials of "have a heart attack take, 50% off your first quadruple bypass"?
ACA forces people to engage with the healthcare system through very specific channels (insurance) when they cannot pay for emergency care out of pocket. Crazy shit! Anti-market! Because we can readily have a "market" when buyers don't (because they can't) pay for things they never-the-less receive. Unless you're arguing that we do away with emergency room care for everyone, nothing about the ACA adds to the supply side of things except so far as there's likely to be a shift of people from the emergency room to the doctor's office; but, then, that's most likely to cause a reduction in price.
On the demand supply of things, everyone is a "BMW luxury car" unless you really think rich people, poor people, young people, old people, etc have fundamentally different bodies. That was true before ACA and it stays the same. Cadillac plans, btw, are the ones where people don't have to pay many out-of-pocket expenses and I can personally attest to the point that nothing about the ACA magically erases those except in a few trite ways. Though I guess in your mind the ACA really does eliminate those "market options" of "should I get really sick from the flu to the point I need to see a doctor" or "should I stay healthy, not get really sick, and avoid needing medical care". Or was it the idea that hospitals and doctors used to run specials of "have a heart attack take, 50% off your first quadruple bypass"?
The best part to your little rant is that while you have a small point that any government involvement of the sort involves *some* market elimination, that obviously there's a much bigger insurance market if many more people are buying insurance. Add to it the government subsidizes and it's a real sweet deal for insurance companies on that end. That they have to actually *pay* for care and not wipe it under the table by denying claims, yes it must suck for them. Or that insurance companies can no longer charge 5x the rate for an individual must really cut on those "market options" for individuals who clearly like the idea of getting no better coverage for much higher rates.
But, yes, let's also hear your little diatribe about the evils of car insurance while you're at it, which you basically ran on. Because fuck knows there's no competition in that space. I must be imagining all those commercials. Meanwhile, that there are government standards should mean that Bob's Unfinanced Car Insurance Shack can't enter the market is such a major loss that we should ignore that by setting minimal standards a lot more people actually drive because they don't have to worry upfront about the risk of catastrophic medical costs if they hit someone--not to mention the risk of being hit by someone who didn't or won't keep that sort of cashing in savings.
The only real capper to your statement would be if you were to suggest we expunge all the fraud and murder laws which are obviously very "anti-market". Because fuck knows that a government providing some sort of minimal standards for a society would not in any way provide the basis for a stable market even if it incurs its own costs. It's all zero sum and hence all government can do is shrink a market.
One of the key requirements of any free market is free information.
Not quite. One of the key requirements of any free market is *perfect* information. There's no requirement that information be free in any way. Admittedly, it's generally improbable for information to be perfect and unfree--hence the discord of closed source software and security, among other things.
If you're familiar with "Medicaid oversampling" I'm guessing you're already affiliated with a health care provider. Are you currently pushing your provider to publish its prices? If not, why not?
No, I'm not familiary with "Medicaid oversampling" and Google doesn't really help there. As for pushing my provider to publish its prices, you make it sound like if I somehow got more information out of my health care provider I'd suddenly be able to get prices more in line with their own price estimates per insurer. Well, no, as another major point of the free market is a recognition that oligarchies and monopolies may be a natural consequence in a market place and as such they'll set their own prices which may fall out of an optimal* supply/demand point. As insurance is basically a large financial instrument where the more in the pool the lower per-user rates, it's rather obvious that insurance falls into the scope of natural monopoly/oligarchy. So beyond all the lack of free transition available to buyers, there's simply no means for natural healthy competition--even if cross-state insurance was allowed.
*Okay, that's a rub of the free market. If you're in a desert and there's one well with one owner and a million people about to die, yet no one has the asking price for a drop of water, then the "optimal" solution in a free market would be for everyone but the owner to die of dehydration. Hence, optimal in a free market and actually optimal for society or people in general may be very different things. And since we're having this discussion, I presume you are no more happy with the "optimal" solution that the free market tends towards in health insurance. No doubt, government interference may make the situation worse in many ways, but no government interference would have similar but different problems. Hence, either the whole system reasonable needs abolished or much better regulation needs established. Neither of which I see actually happening, especially as it's unclear how you can well regulate private health insurance when the wealth gap pushes people into free medicaid (admittedly, more often just the emergency room kind).
I was on my own with a full-time consultancy, but I scaled it back to off-hours and went back to a forty-hour-a-week corporate job for the health insurance. The cost of individual health care plans was insane, and the crappy ACA plans provide worse coverage with fewer providers - and they're even more expensive!
So, I take it from this that before ACA you had health insurance while a full-time consultant? Out of curiosity further on that point, are the figures that you discovered along the same path of rate increases that have been going on for years now? Was all of this the result of having to dump an older, set policy rate for a current plan--ie, anything that would require switching policies would have had the same net effect on the price/options? I'm asking all this because I"m curious just how much this is ACA and how much of this is SOP when it comes to health insurance.
I really think what the feds are up to here is trying to kill off as many individual and small business operators as possible. After all, it's a lot easier to monitor and tax large corporate entities than it is to chase after a bunch of little ones.
No, I'm pretty sure the point is to fill the medicaid loophole. That is, one of the major unpaid/underpaid costs hospitals face is their requirement to treat emergency cases if they accept medicaid dollars. It's gotten to the point that some hospitals refuse medicaid just for that reason as even with the overtesting--really, a sort of fraud--, there just isn't remotely enough compensation to foot the bill for all the uninsured. The only directly* reasonable course is to effectively require everyone to have their own insurance. But, as you note, the health insurance rates/coverage are horrible in a lot of locales (and really have been getting worse a lot faster than the inflation rate).
So, it seems a necessity to (1) open up exchanges to push a lot of the available plans together to allow people to choose, (2) require consistent plans so that people can reasonably shop for insurance instead of focusing heavily on every little detail, and (3) to subsidize the very poorest so that they'll pay for at least some of their own coverage. Consequentially, of course, even the best case scenario is that health insurance rates will stay overly high for years as the rate of competition will be rather slow given how people tend to buy policies on a longer scale. It's the same reason why competition in cell phones takes so long. It'd be radically different if people could or did switch policies weekly.
In any case, I do feel bad for you and agree that ACA is a mess. But too many people in Congress are so dead-set against Universal Healthcare that ACA was basically the best that could be reached at this time. Now, whether that translates into Congress and the President being against individuals and small businesses... I think it has more to do with them being seriously incompetent about the ramifications of the current system and how much we really need Universal Healthcare as a solution. I mean, both Democrats and Republicans are seriously delusional about how much the free market can magically solve a lot of the problems with our current health care system. I mean, the main part of trying to make the ACA function is precisely to force the existence of a market place precisely because health insurance is such a disaster on its own.
*There was also talk of a plan to a Single Payer system where money currently to health insurance would funnel to the government and Medicare/Medicaid effectively would pay for everything for everyone. That's obviously unworkable solutions because then people would just drop the insurance. Then you'd be back to taxing people a la Medicare/Medicaid...and that's basically how it'd have to go anyways. So, that's why I said "direct" since everything else turns back into government taxes and pays for health care. That's almost certainly the better approach, but then as I say it would have never passed.
If one could say that any information, no matter how it was obtained, is protected from seizure due to freedom of speech (or whatever the local variety of that right is) then that's an awful big shield to hide behind, it basically legalizes all sorts of [crime] so long as the perpetrator is not caught red-handed.
Yea, uh, that's how it's supposed to work. The major point of the 4th Amendment was precisely to prevent fishing expeditions either in scope of area searched, duration of search, or material to be seized. It all amounts to basically hard evidence gathering of otherwise known facts. To that end, I would actually support requirements of handing over encryption passwords to things if the 4th Amendment was actually being followed as intended. Instead, it takes but the world of a border guard or law enforcement officer to fish into all you personal documents or as in this case the personal documents of your supposedly close associates.
Of course, all of the above is a moot point since this is the UK and obvious US laws don't apply. But, then, as I already stated it's not as if US laws really apply in the US properly either. As a sort of tangent, I think this scenario disproves Upaya--I don't think journalists intent to reclaim their inherent rights was anything more than a expedient step towards their real needs to oversee government intrusions but it's come at the cost of enshrining the false belief that journalists deserve these inherent rights and everyone else will use them to shield their crimes. It's funny that we don't see that logic used to have harsh, dismantling laws over governments and companies which consistently function as much worse shields to crimes not only of wanting desire to harm but simple, consistent apathy to negative consequence.
To keep up with that, websites either need to constantly change in small increments, or to do it in big chunks. We'd been doing the former for a while, but the decision was made to start fresh. I totally understand how jarring it is to see such a huge amount of change all at once, but we also have to look at what the website will look like a few years down the road.
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
So, what you're saying is that in 2018 you predict that/. will have to involved into an unusable, crap-looking site, and you want to beat the future to the punch and deliver that in 2014? That's precisely what people are pointing out to you and until you, the/. development team, actually deliver an improvement to the current design *for the users*, all the above is stating is how you envision/. circling the drain in the future. As another posted of mine stated, perhaps you are envisioning a wholly new wave of users--an Eternal September. If so, then the only thing I can imagine is you and others are listening to know exactly how *not* to design the site to as quickly as possible get the base to leave and let the new fresh meat^W users in.
The whole point is that generally alienating your base will eventually alienate your new users as well--and there will always be new users--as they see how disposable you view them and unilaterally you act. Until you get your shit together and the commenting system, whiting spacing, etc are to a usable state, any sort of announcement that even hints at a switch over or auto-redirects to test out the beta are bound to alienate and generally make the situation worse. It doesn't take 25% of users being auto redirected to get the feedback to know of problems you're already aware of and state to us you know need fixed.
I think you've got this all backwards. It seems that rational slashdotters have no interest in learning a new way to do the old thing....Unless there is some compelling reason or need, learning a new way to do an old thing is a waste of time better spent on learning something totally new. Yes, I do get that sometimes there are improvements that make it advantageous to learn a new way to do something old, but the beta is not such an example.
Which is more or less precisely it. When Slashdot did its redesign 8 years ago, there was a bit of fuss too. But the level of it was a lot less precisely because it included a lot of improvements without the useless layout butchery. And eventually virtually everyone switched over from the earlier Slashdot classic to the current design (hence my comment you quoted, as not everyone values the current design). I agree that the beta is not an example of such, but that's precisely why leaving it as a choice is the way to go. People won't choose crap* and if their claim of "listening" holds they'll devote most their resources to either (a) creating yet another beta but more aligned to the current design or (b) simply evolving the current design as far as they can.
*Yes, there's always the risk that a new wave of people will come in wholly unlike the current community will come in and see the new design as better than the old one and utterly replace the current base. And there's the distinct possibility that a lot of people will tolerate a lot of crap (hence why defaults for design, web browser, opt-in donor cards are so important) to be almost equivalent. Still, I wouldn't count on a new save coming in, and I can only imagine even a vocal minority on/. to make the new Beta near unusable for a placidly accepting majority. After all, it's a vocal minority that's responsible for the submitted stories, the higher rated comments, etc. That's just an inherent part of the system of filtering out a lot of noise.
we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready.
Nobody gives a flying fuck about if it is 5%, 50%, 95% or 100% ready when they kill off the classic interface.
WE WANT THE CLASSIC SLASHDOT TO REMAIN AS AN OPTION!!!
To reiterate the point, the obvious truth is that the beta will be "ready" when people chose it over classic slashdot. For some people, it'll never be ready because they don't care to learn something new (ironic enough given the audience). But, the first big step to getting people to adopt the new beta is to make sure it's actually a choice. Otherwise, as others have stated, they'll pull a Vista and learn just how uncaptive of an audience/crowd/mob they really have.
Oh, and to that end, I'd suggest a big first step would be to make it trivial to switch from/to the beta layout and not bury it as an option at the bottom of the page or to randomly change to/from the beta layout for people who normally lurk without being logged in. Seriously, that's also a complaint I generally have about Slashdot "classic"--too many pretty preferences require you to be logged in to take effect. But, really, it'd just be enough to make it a choice for the user.
But, yea, it's not like the/. community is at all about choice or anything.:)
What do you mean, "regardless"? There's no "regardless" about it. It's like comparing a guy who won a gajillion dollars on a scratchcard to Warren Buffett (except for the fact that you could never get richer than Warren Buffett with any scratchcard). There is no comparison.
And thank you for proving the point of the "regardless". Even in your own mindset, you feel compelled to mention money as some sort of comparison as if money == aptitude, no matter how much you discount the comparison.
Or are we really now meant to re-appraise Bill Gates's intelligence and business acumen in light of this spectacular failure to hold out against a chess grandmaster?
Yes, we are. Because Bill Gates being good at making Microsoft or being a billionaire means nothing in light of chess, general strategy, curing malaria, etc. Sure, he might be good at some of those latter things, but the whole point is that way too many people do associate money with ability in a lot of areas it has nothing to do with it and its that large sum of money which is used as a basis to pay any attention to Bill Gates or ilk beyond how, you know, they're spending that money or doing whatever actually business they do and how that business will effect people.
Ie, it's appropriate to issue some humble pie not on Bill Gates--well, not necessarily, since he does come across as a general egomaniac although he's mellowed a lot--, but on everyone to really appreciate the situation.
I think allowing the sale of cadaveric organs is reasonable; right now, hospitals and doctors effectively enrich themselves and frequently engage in fraud and nepotism. Getting that money to the family of the deceased is a good thing.
"Will you help this boy see? Will you give this little girl your dead son's heart?"
"No. Fuck 'em!"
"What if we give you $1,000?"
"Well, then, sign me up!"
You might call the above ridiculous. But that's, more or less, the argument that said economist is making.in the context of cadaver organs.
Btw, you're making the same fallacy Mark Twain did about copyright and publishers. He argued that copyright should more or less be perpetual because publishers have no incentive to drop prices just because they no longer have to pay the authors their royalty. But like tax cuts or increases, that's rather a moot point to the issue. There's something inherently ridiculous and wrong about selling organs just as there's something wrong (obviously, to a different scale) to extending copyright or fiddling around with the tax code to maximize some numbers.
The best chances for an organ transparent recipient are people (especially how it's structure today, parents and relatives of the deceased) to want to give those organs away (and I'd argue for a more opt-out system (one where the dead prechoose and an affirmative to donate cannot be overridden and need not be reconfirmed from living relatives)). By the same token, a copyright system works best which an author keeps making new works that people want to buy, not simply having a single smash hit that they worry about publishers milking more than they can. Same with taxes being an attempt to micromanage behavior instead of to micromanage acknowledge the necessary and least unjust way to form the burden of paying for the services the people want and need. That is, each system only really works best when people buy into wanting the system to work and to participate in its functioning to its fullest; best is not a matter of numbers precisely because numbers are a horrible metric*.
Money clouds the issue. If it does it with the doctors, who have made much more of an oath to the preservation of life, then I trust the common person even less on that point. Obviously, there's no way to take money out of the equation completely, but that doesn't justify encouraging its use.
*You go on a segue about organs from the living, and this is precisely it. If you can kill one person and harvest their organs to save 8, it's a bargain in numbers, right? Yet that's obviously wrong and quoting numbers doesn't change that. The only real question is, then, if we even want to have a system that respects the wishes of the dead or not when it comes to organ harvesting. And I'm tempted to say to ignore their wishes. But, that does seem wrong as well. So, well, we should just leave it as a choice unless or until society accepts such an idea.
Geez, our present system is an utter failure in most of the US. I would posit that pretty much anything is worth trying, in an effort to start trying to reign in cost, and get more results from our efforts.
Worth trying, yes. But to actually "reign in cost" you have to, you know, budget appropriately (and most charter schools inherently add to costs as extant public schools don't magically become cheaper and it's a slow, grinding process to consolidate them (if at all possible)). As for "get more results", well, you have to first ask questions about whether we are actually getting results and then you have to examine their methodology, including making sure they're producing accurate results and not simply skewing them--for example, taking all the top scorers and placing them in charter schools and leaving all the low performers in public schools and you might have simple shuffled people around without even changing the median score let alone the average one.
There is one thing, however, which I don't know how we can fix, at least not from a legislative or policy standpoint, and that is the lack of parental participation.
How about student participation? The biggest hope for success of students are the students themselves. Yet we've consistently stripped students of any sort of power, consideration, or respect--student council, journalism, etc are all jokes in school. People may look to the past and point about how much administrations so actively fought students in the past as a sign that today things are better, but that's actually more evidence that the administrations won and now students are so actively discouraged that there's basically nothing left to fight over.
So we've doubled the amount of money we spend on food stamps and we have record numbers of Americans that rely on the government for their food. I wonder which way the vote.
Both political parties, since neither wants to get rid of SNAP?
When you don't work and get your income from the government (who gets its money from taxpayers) then there is no incentive to look for work.
You've got it. That's why you don't work, right? Oh, right, you work because you're wholly a motivated person. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that said "income from the government" is at best a meager amount barely capable of supporting a person and that most jobs pay better than that--because even though the average "income from the government" is over minimum wage, that's a factor that is heavily skewed by urban recipients having a higher cost of living and hence higher "income" (read, project housing) figured into the "income", but then urban areas inherently have to pay more than minimum wage precisely for that higher cost of living reason.
Have some kids, collect some checks, and don't ever look for work. And with all the unemployment and record food stamp usage both parties are now talking about letting millions of illegal immigrants into this country and legalizing the ones that are already here.
Of course. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the US has a changing demographic because (a) there's now a lot of legal hispanic immigrants, (b) a lot of illegal hispanic immigrants, and (c) hispanic immigrants tend to have more kids on average which all basically begs for politicians to, in some fashion, address the question of immigration policy. But, sure, it's all about the short-term spike in unemployment and food stamps...
And of course cue the screaming. "Corporate welfare is worse than individual welfare". They are both a major drain on society. And individual welfare is now a record drain. There's no incentive to succeed anymore. There's no incentive for personal responsibility.
So true. That's why no one works. Oh, right, that's obviously false at so many levels.
You can have six kids out of wedlock and be rewarded by the state with free food and housing. This happens on such a massive scale that we lose billions annually creating a system that encourages broken homes, unwanted children, and bastard children with no future as productive citizens.
Two obvious things. One, no one wants to have six kids in today's American society because six kids, even trying to be really, really negligent, still is a pretty full-time job. But, yea, nothing about raising kids is important for society so fuck that. Two, "bastard children with no future as productive citizens"? Did you just drop out of a time warp from the 1700s? "Bastard children" were and are such a fucking common thing throughout history and the very nothing that they, as a rule, have "no future as productive citizens" is such utter bullshit that I honestly can't imagine how you can think such a thing. Why? Because due to automation a "productive citizen" is now days most often a person who does an incredibly menial task of little sophistication that a trained chimp could do.
That is, instead of having a view of this as some sort of utopia where so few people are needed to actually work and the people who do work have such easy jobs, you want to begrudge upon people such horrible filth out of some backwards view of heredity and the importance of being a "productive" "citizen", both of which are increasingly becoming subjective terms. And I wonder, do you begrudge that "productive" workers want to be paid above said "drain"s on society? Do you begrudge all the illegals who can't become "citizens" become some bastardly quota system?
Really, before you go around dismissing people, why don't you prove that *you* are a "productive [citizen]" who is worth the sort of consideration you obviously are unwilling to show when it's so much easier to just play up stereotypes and hyperbole.
Did you actually even bother checking this? No, most modern X11 servers run as root so they can* have hardware access to GLX and DRM. But, please tell me, which distro or OS do you run that runs your X11 server as non-root? Because I'd love to use a system like that.
*Technically, privilege separation is quite possible on these points, which has been done in OpenBSD AFAIK, but very few people use OpenBSD and I think the whole point of your post was about what the vast majority of people use. Otherwise, you're just quibbling over the point without stating it that most people don't run a "modern" X11 server.
So why not follow suit, and keep updating the Constitution with new things that we deem particularly worthy of protection because we have fresh memory of them being infringed?
While that sounds good in theory, in practice you have to keep in mind that as you note...
The Constitution, and particularly the Bill of Rights, were originally written very much with this intent in mind - by a generation that witnessed several flagrant violations of their rights, intent on codifying the law against those particular violations.
And that only happened because people who weren't the original leaders held a revolution because those in the status quo were not at all willing to take part in codifying laws to address those violations. I think that's precisely why TJ spoke about "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants". But beyond that problem, even if we saw a near bloodless coop, there's nothing to stop the equivalent of "The Muslim Brotherhood" taken power. After all, there was enough agreement about the fact that rights were being violated in the colonies. Today in America, if anything the majority seems to want to codify even more abuse.
And again, I speak of the hypocrisy of the founding fathers. They were quick to support Freedom of Speech when it meant being allowed to speak unfavorably about the king, but they wanted to declare it sedition when it came to the newly elected President. TJ himself helped write and pass a Bill of Attainder, then later had them banned in the new United States; yet, he later wrote to continue to defend his previous act, citing the urgent and immediate need. Doesn't that line ring a bell?
Perhaps if there was less hero worship of the founding fathers and a political shift, which might itself take a generation, we could get to the point where we could compromise our way into new Amendments to address what will be hopefully past issues that they wish to avoid resurfacing. I'm just not hopeful of anything being done today since if anything there's been a strong shift the opposite direction, in large part because of a willingness under expediency to bypass amending the Constitution to codify the necessary changes and just hoping that progress would keep going in the desired direction.
Beware of people whose only marketable skills are their supposed loyalty and their ability to equivocate the following of rules to the letter. The ones who actually followed rules to the letter would have died long ago in the shower from lack of common sense.
There's no suspension of constitutional rights here. Fourth Amendment protects you against unreasonable search. Historically, border searches (then primarily to detect contraband) have been practiced since the founding of the Republic, and are deemed reasonable by long historical precedent and public good. As this has always been the case, there's no actual erosion.
You should read about Writs of assistance, which rather tie into this.given how many reports there have been of searches conducted well beyond the borders and over similar logic--smuggling, although of people today. You also seem to be glossing over the point that the courts are directly acknowledging that the searches aren't reasonable in what seems heavily a sign of equivocation on their part to justify the searches--that is, they acknowledge they're not "reasonable" but then counter that the search is okay because "hunches" can be fruitful. This rather falls much further into the category of what's an acceptable level of search for people detained. To that end, it quite clearly seems unreasonable by any definition to allow unilateral mass copying of all data on laptops or any other device.
I do agree that it may well be overly broad and should be narrowed down, but it would require a constitutional amendment to codify that arbitrary searches at the border are not "reasonable". It is not something that SCOTUS can strike down, because the precedent is overwhelmingly in favor of it.
I don't know. We've already got a Fourth Amendment that doesn't qualify "at the border" as some sort of exception. And we've consistently read the Fourth Amendment in all sorts of broad ways well outside the scope of the original intention--mostly because a lot of the people who wrote the Constitution were hypocrites by any reasonable standard. Honestly, if we tomorrow had an Amendment that clarified the point that "at the border the Fourth Amendment applies", I don't doubt that in fifty years we'd just redefine what "at the border" means in such a fashion to be again having this debate. No, the simple truth is that this whole scenario is such a flagrant violation of a person being secure in their effects that we should on principle alone interpret the Fourth Amendment to not allow such things, regardless of how narrow in scope its original intent was. Because honestly, the founders didn't have one concrete idea of what they wanted on most things and even the ones who did were more than willing to make an exception for themselves.
So, short of a whole rewrite of the Constitution to "reset" the interpretation, we're always going to be arguing interpretation. And it's really absurd to argue "deemed reasonable by long historical precedent and public good" or "English Common Law" when the whole Constitution was enacted precisely to rely more upon Statute and not "historical precedent" which the colonists felt were so bad to have to revolt and start a whole separate country over. And if worst comes to worst and the Statute become too absurd, then one can fall upon the meaning behind the Declaration of Independence and excise yourself from absurd Statutes. None of that, though, justifies stomaching this bullshit.
It's not surprising the Catholics can create a big controversy that government actually listens to, while the Quakers cannot.
It also has a lot to do with most Quakers not *wanting* to make a big controversy because they believe it a private, personal matter. Honestly, the whole idea of it is absurd because of the thousand things that health insurance covers, it's not like "The Pill" is the one big morally questionable aspect. No, it's just the "icky" sex-related one that the Catholics are fighting to stop because anything that promotes the ability to have sex or any other kind of worldly pleasure without consequence greatly diminishes their control. The fact that the Church doesn't have nearly the control they think they do...and it's not like "The Pill" is only available through health insurance.
In short, it's more attention whoring than anything wrapped into some self-absorbed desire to dictate to others how society should work. Well, if the Catholics or Quakers or whoever are that opposed to it, they can seclude themselves from society or move to another country. And I say this is as a former Quaker, who recognizes most Quakers really only make a fuss when they're asked to directly harm others or the like. This discussion would be wholly different if the nuns or whoever were being forced to shove "The Pill" literally down people's throats.
'The report said that a reasonable suspicion standard is inadvisable because it could lead to litigation...
Unlike now, where there's litigation precisely because there isn't a reasonable suspicion standard. Okay, yea, I know, it'll head off future litigation. But, then, is that a good thing in itself? Because if it is, we should just shut down the Judiciary Branch and be done with it.
... and the forced divulgence of national security information,...
That's some great logic there. If we have some sort of standard of reasonable suspicion for anything related to national security, then indirectly national security information will be divulge. Isn't this the same logic that requires those on the inside to "neither confirm nor deny" everything? And if it's not talking about the indirect form, well, the last decade has shown just how little any part of the federal government has been "forced" to do anything national security wise, even if a court order demanded it. Honestly, no matter how you interpret it it sounds like the court is giving extra-legal blessing to all the "national security" activities the federal government has done/is doing/will do because there's already standards for national security information containment during court proceedings, which apparently they aren't willing to accept as actually good enough.
... and would prevent border officers from acting on inchoate "hunches," a method that it says has sometimes proved fruitful.'
And firing at people on inchoate "hunches" has sometimes proved fruitful in killing drug lords and murderers. Should we legally allow border officers to do that too? Yep, the borders really are a Constitution free zone. There also apparently a human decency free zone. Really, this sort of ruling would make me want to not be a border officer at all. At least the executioner, as bloody as his hands might be, can have some faith that a lengthy process was taken to determine the guilt of the person they kill. With this? It's a free-for-all, with out apparently any reasonable restrictions. Because being reasonable might allow the bad guys to win.
Granted, the last time I checked linux makes the memory space of every process for any uid available to any other process running under the same uid (unless you're using SELinux). It is just that big unixy trust-everything-local attitude.
Actually, what makes it worse than that is that (1) there are suid X clients which makes for an obvious privilege escalation attack vector though the X server and (2) the X server itself is root which makes the X server a big target. The fact that the presentation spoke repeatedly about how nasty GLX was is only funny to me in a dark way because of just how insecure GPUs seem anyways as they suffer even worse from the "unixy" trust-everything-local attitude. So, while I'd love to hear that he succeeds in his GLX clean ups, I only think that clears one bug hurdle while still leaving (a) OpenGL drivers and (b) potentially hardware GPU memory protection limitations. Screen scrapping at the kernel level seems worse if nothing else because it doesn't require nearly the level of sophistication in actually discovering which window holds what object and then try to grab or trap for passwords or whatever that way.
However, until we close the gap of by web browser being able to read my mail directory or modify my.bashrc, I think that X11 vulnerabilities are just the tip of the iceburg.
Strictly speaking, we already have that capability in SELinux or in AppArmor. The reason it's not really heavily implemented is because you might want your web browser to be able to save a file in your mail directory or overwrite your local.bashrc from a server stored copy somewhere. Meanwhile, sticking all the UI stuff to allow/disallow isn't some magic bullet--Windows NT has a very robust system of protection that does very little because people don't micromanage things. And honestly, the issue isn't that the web browser has access to your mail directory. It's that a nefarious web site may manipulate your web browser to read the mail directory when you don't want it to. If that's really a big enough concern, you can just run the web browser as a different user....so long as the X11 bugs are fixed.:)
People who produce content do have some right to keep other people from stealing it.
Define "stealing" in this context. Because "stealing" patents by utilizing the underlying ideas in more or less spelled out ways in a patent application are the basis of most industries in their foundations. It's only much later is there any real recognition of patents, generally, as companies (and people) feel a need to create artificial barriers of entry to preempt competition.
Now, the case in point is copyright, and certainly there's a much greater view of respect for that field precisely because it is, in theory, supposed to be of a much more narrow scope. But, we're so far down that rabbit hole--the very definition of a derivative work has become so warped and the time span for a copyright to last has grown so large--that the respect for copyright at all has really had a falling out.
It is very difficult to track down individual pirates, so most get away and reasonable fines are not a deterrent. This leads to a sort of reverse-lottery where lots of people take a chance at disastrous penalties.
Which is the problem, full stop. If reasonable fines are not a deterrent, well, they're simple not a deterrent. Sometimes justice and punishment aren't a deterrent. That's life. Strive to correct this in some way only makes the situation worse. I mean, by the logic stated, jay walking should carry perhaps 20 years or even a death sentence. That's absurd.
Part of the problem is that the public is very split on what is reasonable.
A more major part is that those writing the laws are being effectively bribed with money from copyright holders into writing laws beneficial to copyright holders. So, that there is a "split on what is reasonable" is true. But, we live in a democracy, and I'm quite certain that way more than 90% of people are not in the "fine a person into oblivion". Hell, ever time you see a story showing the vast majority of a nation are committing piracy, it's a good sign you should rethink your laws to decriminalize it more, not try to crack down harder on it. That doesn't inherently mean that content creators won't be paid at all--although they may have to come to terms with the idea that even fewer will make a living wage from it. But, it may mean devising another system than copyright to facilitate it.
Some people are happy with any arrangement that industry wants because the purchase is voluntary
Piracy is voluntary too, between two consenting people to copy some bit of data. The rub is of course that it's piracy that's the issue, not whether people are somehow obtaining content from the industry directly without paying.
It would be interesting to see a survey of opinions on this and see how well public opinion matches the law.
See above. I'd say Napster was a good effective opinion poll of a sort. I am wary, though, of how any survey may be stacked one way or another to distort the message people wish to express. After all, most people may feel guilty about piracy, but that doesn't mean they feel they should be punished for it. Self-guilt happens in lots of circumstances which are clearly entirely victim-less, so it's important to not extrapolate unwarrantedly even if surveys did suggest that some sort of fine or whatever would be appropriate.
Yes, XP needs to die, because it is made to deal with threats from 2000-2001, with added security patches strapped on as the need arose. Windows 7 and newer help address this issue.
Help address this issue..except not really.:/ Windows 7 was made to deal with threats from 2009-2010, with added security patches strapped on as the need arose. Windows 8 was made to deal with threats from 2012-2013, with added security patches strapped on as the need arose. You see a trend? The biggest things that consistently have to be done, no matter what version of Windows you use, is to (a) use Internet Explorer/Adobe Flash as little as possible (directly or indirectly through its rendering engine) and (b) keep as much of your software as possible up to date.
That MS has chosen to not push more updates for Windows XP is the only real major thing hindering (b), but that speaks relatively little of XP. The only other major, possibly, beef is the hassle of installing so many incremental security patches. That's a major reason, of course, for Service Packs and slipstreaming.
Nah, really, the only place XP needs to "die" is in that hardware has continued to evolve and XP has been left out of a lot of developments, in large part because fundamentally some things didn't exist when XP was released. That Windows 7/8 already exists and supports said hardware as part of a new system...then XP can "die" when you switch to a new system inherently. But, that still leaves plenty of years for fully functional hardware to keep using XP for a long while.
It reminds me of a funny statement from Woz in "Accidental Empires" about how he couldn't wait for Moore's Law to reach its limit, so hardware would stop changing and schools could afford to spend the money on hardware that'd be around for 10-20 years like most other equipment. Ignoring that the actual time scale has shifted so much because of how cheap computers, not the PCs envisioned, have gotten, the mindset that old software shouldn't reasonably be supported for 10-20 years does sort of kill a lot of good ideas when it comes to reasonably using computer hardware. I guess there's always a long-term support contract with IBM and Linux...
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Better then to slaughter tens of thousands to steal the oil. Seems like either way, we steal the oil.
Hey, if Jews want to go and live in an Islam Caliphate, more power to them.
Yep, nothing more forced than granting voluntary relocation outside of a warzone which might, you know, result in them being exposed to other cultures.
They'll call it slavery and the people will live and work freely. Or we continue the air strikes and leave ISIS to behead and every day they live in fear.
Because God knows we couldn't build houses. Let's do the math. 6.5 million refugees times $30,000/home* (in many rural areas of the US) == $195 billion. Hey, that's only ~2 years worth of Iraq wars. And we give a lot of people homes. Meanwhile, MSM will hand wring over everything. They'll do 129 separate stories, one on each victim, just to get more ad revenue. So it goes.
Compared to what? Air strikes? Bombings? We've already spent much more in war to "fix" it and done nothing of the sort. How about we do something constructive instead of destructive. And for once in history, it might be actually be cheaper.
*PS - Feel free to play around with the numbers (obviously, a lot of families make the numbers more plausible, as you're not really giving each refugee a home). Consider the solution involves many countries taking in refugees, not merely one nation. But even if it were only one, say France, it's doable. Sure it could turn into a clusterfuck with tent cities. But that speaks of a government unwilling to commit to a plan or even having a plan at all. That's why Katrina was such a clusterfuck. It wasn't the Hurricane. Yet government can in competence build out massively. See the Marshall Plan . See China and their city building.
You're right. We think too small. The answer is clear. While we talk and talk about the evil of ISIS and the refugees and the "need" to vet these people. we leave 6.5 million+ Syrians at the mercy of Assad or ISIS or Russian bombings or US bombings or French bombings. We're all being monsters to these people. The death of 129 Parisians is nothing compared to the horror that we sit and watch and act helpless to stop. We debate and discuss and debate some more. We think too small. The answer is clear.
We don't vet the refugees. We don't let in a mere 10,000 "vetted" Syrians. We let in 6.5 million+ Syrians. We begin the largest known evacuation possible. We put the Army and the Navy to the best use we can, to protect and transport civilians. We deprive ISIS and Assad of the very thing they want, fodder for their abuse and subjects of their subjugation. And when there's invariable terrorists in the mix and they come here? We rejoice. Because here the abuse will not be tolerated. Here the death numbers in the hundreds, not in the tens of thousands. Here we do more to end the terrorism of the many and give ISIS and Assad an empty hellhole to squat in over the few who would actual want such a thing. It's a Pyrrhic victory for them. It is freedom and justice for the people.
'How dare you! I have a right to my opposing view, no matter how ill-informed or incomplete or intentionally agenda-driven wrong it is! How dare you point out the flaws! How dare you engage in the "scientific method"! Why, I'll just claim your engaging in the "scientific method" is not engaging in the "scientific method"!'
And this is why I can't take you seriously. You're the one with your head in dogma.
It's relevant to the discussion. Too bad that, AFAIK, there aren't any studies to spell out where costs are coming from and why. The quote I give only gives a "from" but in mostly esoteric terms that give virtually nothing on the real where and why. Now, if you could provide a study that actually broke down who was using the health care system and how, I'd love to see it. The closest I've seen is little snippets that are often an abuse of statistics.
You seem to be missing my point. There's already been fuck tons of studies done that show "this significantly increases your risk of cancer type X" where "significantly" just means that there is an actual effect and it's not merely a placebo effect and where "cancer type X" doesn't necessarily apply to any other type of cancer or condition. There are very few examples of any one thing causing one major condition that's preventable and therefore in scope of accountability.
That's a ludicrous statement, but thanks for saying it anyways. It's entirely why I asked. You "intend" to have the money "when" misfortune strikes. Yet by its very nature, you have no idea when misfortune will strike, whether multiple misfortunes will strike, or the scale of the cost. Or do you seriously contend that everyone should strive to have millions in savings just in case? Because anything less is unreasonable. Insurance is more of a risk pool precisely because of that and not merely for even "catastrophic" emergency because such a term because untenable very quickly on the cost of many medical procedures.
For the former, you can't get blood from a stone. For the latter, we already have a huge backlog of foster kids.
I would be if I actually thought any health care law passed in the US would do such a thing. Really, we're so well beyond the incensed point on how the system already works, you'd be hard pressed for me to become any more incensed Any real effort to fix the problem would involve either (a) public conversion of the health care system--leading to "death panels"--or (b) massive government regulation into the health care system--as if the current mess is really helping and further regulation is unlikely to be any better than Obamacare.
Yep, those are the major two ones I'll grant you.
Actually, it's most strongly linked to ag
My former point was that those who were not financially capable of covering medical costs had to buy insurance and that those unplanned expenses are why most people are required to buy insurance. Having said that, further research and you appear to be right. Emergency room care seems to be in the 2%-10% range. I should have stated emergency and urgent care--including things like heart surgery after a heart attack or expensive medication/surgery to treat cancer or other ailments after a diagnosis. Having said that, it does leave me to wonder about the other 90-98% of care. So, we have this:
"Of each dollar spent on health care in the United States, 31% goes to hospital care, 21% goes to physician/clinical services, 10% to pharmaceuticals, 4% to dental, 6% to nursing homes and 3% to home health care, 3% for other retail products, 3% for government public health activities, 7% to administrative costs, 7% to investment, and 6% to other professional services (physical therapists, optometrists, etc.)" -- from Wikipedia Cite Note 45, although the information wasn't readily visible in the first link
Given that ~50% of US spending on health care is Medicare/Medicaid and the other ~50% is private (insurance), it's rather hard to separate out that figure to get an idea of how much of that is "Cadillac" coverage of unnecessary treatment of the elderly/poor or what. In any case...
How much of it is genetics and how much of it is environmental? Should we go 50/50 until we get genetic tests done on those cancer drugs? And what about the fact that generally being old == getting cancer/having heart failure/having a stroke because eventually you "cram" enough bad stuff in your body even if you live a very healthy lifestyle. So, well, you seem to be for ending Medicare near entirely. That right there doesn't paint you very well. Beyond all that, I'm curious exactly how much money you've saved up personally for your inevitable heart attack and cancer. When are you going to have it and are you saving enough? Because if it's oh so predictable, it'll be nothing more difficult than saving up for one's child's college--which plenty of people don't do either.
ACA forces people to engage with the healthcare system through very specific channels (insurance) when they cannot pay for emergency care out of pocket. Crazy shit! Anti-market! Because we can readily have a "market" when buyers don't (because they can't) pay for things they never-the-less receive. Unless you're arguing that we do away with emergency room care for everyone, nothing about the ACA adds to the supply side of things except so far as there's likely to be a shift of people from the emergency room to the doctor's office; but, then, that's most likely to cause a reduction in price.
On the demand supply of things, everyone is a "BMW luxury car" unless you really think rich people, poor people, young people, old people, etc have fundamentally different bodies. That was true before ACA and it stays the same. Cadillac plans, btw, are the ones where people don't have to pay many out-of-pocket expenses and I can personally attest to the point that nothing about the ACA magically erases those except in a few trite ways. Though I guess in your mind the ACA really does eliminate those "market options" of "should I get really sick from the flu to the point I need to see a doctor" or "should I stay healthy, not get really sick, and avoid needing medical care". Or was it the idea that hospitals and doctors used to run specials of "have a heart attack take, 50% off your first quadruple bypass"?
The best part to your little rant is that while you have a small point that any government involvement of the sort involves *some* market elimination, that obviously there's a much bigger insurance market if many more people are buying insurance. Add to it the government subsidizes and it's a real sweet deal for insurance companies on that end. That they have to actually *pay* for care and not wipe it under the table by denying claims, yes it must suck for them. Or that insurance companies can no longer charge 5x the rate for an individual must really cut on those "market options" for individuals who clearly like the idea of getting no better coverage for much higher rates.
But, yes, let's also hear your little diatribe about the evils of car insurance while you're at it, which you basically ran on. Because fuck knows there's no competition in that space. I must be imagining all those commercials. Meanwhile, that there are government standards should mean that Bob's Unfinanced Car Insurance Shack can't enter the market is such a major loss that we should ignore that by setting minimal standards a lot more people actually drive because they don't have to worry upfront about the risk of catastrophic medical costs if they hit someone--not to mention the risk of being hit by someone who didn't or won't keep that sort of cashing in savings.
The only real capper to your statement would be if you were to suggest we expunge all the fraud and murder laws which are obviously very "anti-market". Because fuck knows that a government providing some sort of minimal standards for a society would not in any way provide the basis for a stable market even if it incurs its own costs. It's all zero sum and hence all government can do is shrink a market.
Thanks for the lesson!
Not quite. One of the key requirements of any free market is *perfect* information. There's no requirement that information be free in any way. Admittedly, it's generally improbable for information to be perfect and unfree--hence the discord of closed source software and security, among other things.
No, I'm not familiary with "Medicaid oversampling" and Google doesn't really help there. As for pushing my provider to publish its prices, you make it sound like if I somehow got more information out of my health care provider I'd suddenly be able to get prices more in line with their own price estimates per insurer. Well, no, as another major point of the free market is a recognition that oligarchies and monopolies may be a natural consequence in a market place and as such they'll set their own prices which may fall out of an optimal* supply/demand point. As insurance is basically a large financial instrument where the more in the pool the lower per-user rates, it's rather obvious that insurance falls into the scope of natural monopoly/oligarchy. So beyond all the lack of free transition available to buyers, there's simply no means for natural healthy competition--even if cross-state insurance was allowed.
*Okay, that's a rub of the free market. If you're in a desert and there's one well with one owner and a million people about to die, yet no one has the asking price for a drop of water, then the "optimal" solution in a free market would be for everyone but the owner to die of dehydration. Hence, optimal in a free market and actually optimal for society or people in general may be very different things. And since we're having this discussion, I presume you are no more happy with the "optimal" solution that the free market tends towards in health insurance. No doubt, government interference may make the situation worse in many ways, but no government interference would have similar but different problems. Hence, either the whole system reasonable needs abolished or much better regulation needs established. Neither of which I see actually happening, especially as it's unclear how you can well regulate private health insurance when the wealth gap pushes people into free medicaid (admittedly, more often just the emergency room kind).
So, I take it from this that before ACA you had health insurance while a full-time consultant? Out of curiosity further on that point, are the figures that you discovered along the same path of rate increases that have been going on for years now? Was all of this the result of having to dump an older, set policy rate for a current plan--ie, anything that would require switching policies would have had the same net effect on the price/options? I'm asking all this because I"m curious just how much this is ACA and how much of this is SOP when it comes to health insurance.
No, I'm pretty sure the point is to fill the medicaid loophole. That is, one of the major unpaid/underpaid costs hospitals face is their requirement to treat emergency cases if they accept medicaid dollars. It's gotten to the point that some hospitals refuse medicaid just for that reason as even with the overtesting--really, a sort of fraud--, there just isn't remotely enough compensation to foot the bill for all the uninsured. The only directly* reasonable course is to effectively require everyone to have their own insurance. But, as you note, the health insurance rates/coverage are horrible in a lot of locales (and really have been getting worse a lot faster than the inflation rate).
So, it seems a necessity to (1) open up exchanges to push a lot of the available plans together to allow people to choose, (2) require consistent plans so that people can reasonably shop for insurance instead of focusing heavily on every little detail, and (3) to subsidize the very poorest so that they'll pay for at least some of their own coverage. Consequentially, of course, even the best case scenario is that health insurance rates will stay overly high for years as the rate of competition will be rather slow given how people tend to buy policies on a longer scale. It's the same reason why competition in cell phones takes so long. It'd be radically different if people could or did switch policies weekly.
In any case, I do feel bad for you and agree that ACA is a mess. But too many people in Congress are so dead-set against Universal Healthcare that ACA was basically the best that could be reached at this time. Now, whether that translates into Congress and the President being against individuals and small businesses... I think it has more to do with them being seriously incompetent about the ramifications of the current system and how much we really need Universal Healthcare as a solution. I mean, both Democrats and Republicans are seriously delusional about how much the free market can magically solve a lot of the problems with our current health care system. I mean, the main part of trying to make the ACA function is precisely to force the existence of a market place precisely because health insurance is such a disaster on its own.
*There was also talk of a plan to a Single Payer system where money currently to health insurance would funnel to the government and Medicare/Medicaid effectively would pay for everything for everyone. That's obviously unworkable solutions because then people would just drop the insurance. Then you'd be back to taxing people a la Medicare/Medicaid...and that's basically how it'd have to go anyways. So, that's why I said "direct" since everything else turns back into government taxes and pays for health care. That's almost certainly the better approach, but then as I say it would have never passed.
Yea, uh, that's how it's supposed to work. The major point of the 4th Amendment was precisely to prevent fishing expeditions either in scope of area searched, duration of search, or material to be seized. It all amounts to basically hard evidence gathering of otherwise known facts. To that end, I would actually support requirements of handing over encryption passwords to things if the 4th Amendment was actually being followed as intended. Instead, it takes but the world of a border guard or law enforcement officer to fish into all you personal documents or as in this case the personal documents of your supposedly close associates.
Of course, all of the above is a moot point since this is the UK and obvious US laws don't apply. But, then, as I already stated it's not as if US laws really apply in the US properly either. As a sort of tangent, I think this scenario disproves Upaya--I don't think journalists intent to reclaim their inherent rights was anything more than a expedient step towards their real needs to oversee government intrusions but it's come at the cost of enshrining the false belief that journalists deserve these inherent rights and everyone else will use them to shield their crimes. It's funny that we don't see that logic used to have harsh, dismantling laws over governments and companies which consistently function as much worse shields to crimes not only of wanting desire to harm but simple, consistent apathy to negative consequence.
So, what you're saying is that in 2018 you predict that /. will have to involved into an unusable, crap-looking site, and you want to beat the future to the punch and deliver that in 2014? That's precisely what people are pointing out to you and until you, the /. development team, actually deliver an improvement to the current design *for the users*, all the above is stating is how you envision /. circling the drain in the future. As another posted of mine stated, perhaps you are envisioning a wholly new wave of users--an Eternal September. If so, then the only thing I can imagine is you and others are listening to know exactly how *not* to design the site to as quickly as possible get the base to leave and let the new fresh meat^W users in.
The whole point is that generally alienating your base will eventually alienate your new users as well--and there will always be new users--as they see how disposable you view them and unilaterally you act. Until you get your shit together and the commenting system, whiting spacing, etc are to a usable state, any sort of announcement that even hints at a switch over or auto-redirects to test out the beta are bound to alienate and generally make the situation worse. It doesn't take 25% of users being auto redirected to get the feedback to know of problems you're already aware of and state to us you know need fixed.
So, do you understand or do you grok?
Which is more or less precisely it. When Slashdot did its redesign 8 years ago, there was a bit of fuss too. But the level of it was a lot less precisely because it included a lot of improvements without the useless layout butchery. And eventually virtually everyone switched over from the earlier Slashdot classic to the current design (hence my comment you quoted, as not everyone values the current design). I agree that the beta is not an example of such, but that's precisely why leaving it as a choice is the way to go. People won't choose crap* and if their claim of "listening" holds they'll devote most their resources to either (a) creating yet another beta but more aligned to the current design or (b) simply evolving the current design as far as they can.
*Yes, there's always the risk that a new wave of people will come in wholly unlike the current community will come in and see the new design as better than the old one and utterly replace the current base. And there's the distinct possibility that a lot of people will tolerate a lot of crap (hence why defaults for design, web browser, opt-in donor cards are so important) to be almost equivalent. Still, I wouldn't count on a new save coming in, and I can only imagine even a vocal minority on /. to make the new Beta near unusable for a placidly accepting majority. After all, it's a vocal minority that's responsible for the submitted stories, the higher rated comments, etc. That's just an inherent part of the system of filtering out a lot of noise.
To reiterate the point, the obvious truth is that the beta will be "ready" when people chose it over classic slashdot. For some people, it'll never be ready because they don't care to learn something new (ironic enough given the audience). But, the first big step to getting people to adopt the new beta is to make sure it's actually a choice. Otherwise, as others have stated, they'll pull a Vista and learn just how uncaptive of an audience/crowd/mob they really have.
Oh, and to that end, I'd suggest a big first step would be to make it trivial to switch from/to the beta layout and not bury it as an option at the bottom of the page or to randomly change to/from the beta layout for people who normally lurk without being logged in. Seriously, that's also a complaint I generally have about Slashdot "classic"--too many pretty preferences require you to be logged in to take effect. But, really, it'd just be enough to make it a choice for the user.
But, yea, it's not like the /. community is at all about choice or anything. :)
And thank you for proving the point of the "regardless". Even in your own mindset, you feel compelled to mention money as some sort of comparison as if money == aptitude, no matter how much you discount the comparison.
Yes, we are. Because Bill Gates being good at making Microsoft or being a billionaire means nothing in light of chess, general strategy, curing malaria, etc. Sure, he might be good at some of those latter things, but the whole point is that way too many people do associate money with ability in a lot of areas it has nothing to do with it and its that large sum of money which is used as a basis to pay any attention to Bill Gates or ilk beyond how, you know, they're spending that money or doing whatever actually business they do and how that business will effect people.
Ie, it's appropriate to issue some humble pie not on Bill Gates--well, not necessarily, since he does come across as a general egomaniac although he's mellowed a lot--, but on everyone to really appreciate the situation.
"Will you help this boy see? Will you give this little girl your dead son's heart?"
"No. Fuck 'em!"
"What if we give you $1,000?"
"Well, then, sign me up!"
You might call the above ridiculous. But that's, more or less, the argument that said economist is making.in the context of cadaver organs.
Btw, you're making the same fallacy Mark Twain did about copyright and publishers. He argued that copyright should more or less be perpetual because publishers have no incentive to drop prices just because they no longer have to pay the authors their royalty. But like tax cuts or increases, that's rather a moot point to the issue. There's something inherently ridiculous and wrong about selling organs just as there's something wrong (obviously, to a different scale) to extending copyright or fiddling around with the tax code to maximize some numbers.
The best chances for an organ transparent recipient are people (especially how it's structure today, parents and relatives of the deceased) to want to give those organs away (and I'd argue for a more opt-out system (one where the dead prechoose and an affirmative to donate cannot be overridden and need not be reconfirmed from living relatives)). By the same token, a copyright system works best which an author keeps making new works that people want to buy, not simply having a single smash hit that they worry about publishers milking more than they can. Same with taxes being an attempt to micromanage behavior instead of to micromanage acknowledge the necessary and least unjust way to form the burden of paying for the services the people want and need. That is, each system only really works best when people buy into wanting the system to work and to participate in its functioning to its fullest; best is not a matter of numbers precisely because numbers are a horrible metric*.
Money clouds the issue. If it does it with the doctors, who have made much more of an oath to the preservation of life, then I trust the common person even less on that point. Obviously, there's no way to take money out of the equation completely, but that doesn't justify encouraging its use.
*You go on a segue about organs from the living, and this is precisely it. If you can kill one person and harvest their organs to save 8, it's a bargain in numbers, right? Yet that's obviously wrong and quoting numbers doesn't change that. The only real question is, then, if we even want to have a system that respects the wishes of the dead or not when it comes to organ harvesting. And I'm tempted to say to ignore their wishes. But, that does seem wrong as well. So, well, we should just leave it as a choice unless or until society accepts such an idea.
Worth trying, yes. But to actually "reign in cost" you have to, you know, budget appropriately (and most charter schools inherently add to costs as extant public schools don't magically become cheaper and it's a slow, grinding process to consolidate them (if at all possible)). As for "get more results", well, you have to first ask questions about whether we are actually getting results and then you have to examine their methodology, including making sure they're producing accurate results and not simply skewing them--for example, taking all the top scorers and placing them in charter schools and leaving all the low performers in public schools and you might have simple shuffled people around without even changing the median score let alone the average one.
How about student participation? The biggest hope for success of students are the students themselves. Yet we've consistently stripped students of any sort of power, consideration, or respect--student council, journalism, etc are all jokes in school. People may look to the past and point about how much administrations so actively fought students in the past as a sign that today things are better, but that's actually more evidence that the administrations won and now students are so actively discouraged that there's basically nothing left to fight over.
Both political parties, since neither wants to get rid of SNAP?
You've got it. That's why you don't work, right? Oh, right, you work because you're wholly a motivated person. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that said "income from the government" is at best a meager amount barely capable of supporting a person and that most jobs pay better than that--because even though the average "income from the government" is over minimum wage, that's a factor that is heavily skewed by urban recipients having a higher cost of living and hence higher "income" (read, project housing) figured into the "income", but then urban areas inherently have to pay more than minimum wage precisely for that higher cost of living reason.
Of course. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the US has a changing demographic because (a) there's now a lot of legal hispanic immigrants, (b) a lot of illegal hispanic immigrants, and (c) hispanic immigrants tend to have more kids on average which all basically begs for politicians to, in some fashion, address the question of immigration policy. But, sure, it's all about the short-term spike in unemployment and food stamps...
So true. That's why no one works. Oh, right, that's obviously false at so many levels.
Two obvious things. One, no one wants to have six kids in today's American society because six kids, even trying to be really, really negligent, still is a pretty full-time job. But, yea, nothing about raising kids is important for society so fuck that. Two, "bastard children with no future as productive citizens"? Did you just drop out of a time warp from the 1700s? "Bastard children" were and are such a fucking common thing throughout history and the very nothing that they, as a rule, have "no future as productive citizens" is such utter bullshit that I honestly can't imagine how you can think such a thing. Why? Because due to automation a "productive citizen" is now days most often a person who does an incredibly menial task of little sophistication that a trained chimp could do.
That is, instead of having a view of this as some sort of utopia where so few people are needed to actually work and the people who do work have such easy jobs, you want to begrudge upon people such horrible filth out of some backwards view of heredity and the importance of being a "productive" "citizen", both of which are increasingly becoming subjective terms. And I wonder, do you begrudge that "productive" workers want to be paid above said "drain"s on society? Do you begrudge all the illegals who can't become "citizens" become some bastardly quota system?
Really, before you go around dismissing people, why don't you prove that *you* are a "productive [citizen]" who is worth the sort of consideration you obviously are unwilling to show when it's so much easier to just play up stereotypes and hyperbole.
Did you actually even bother checking this? No, most modern X11 servers run as root so they can* have hardware access to GLX and DRM. But, please tell me, which distro or OS do you run that runs your X11 server as non-root? Because I'd love to use a system like that.
*Technically, privilege separation is quite possible on these points, which has been done in OpenBSD AFAIK, but very few people use OpenBSD and I think the whole point of your post was about what the vast majority of people use. Otherwise, you're just quibbling over the point without stating it that most people don't run a "modern" X11 server.
While that sounds good in theory, in practice you have to keep in mind that as you note...
And that only happened because people who weren't the original leaders held a revolution because those in the status quo were not at all willing to take part in codifying laws to address those violations. I think that's precisely why TJ spoke about "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants". But beyond that problem, even if we saw a near bloodless coop, there's nothing to stop the equivalent of "The Muslim Brotherhood" taken power. After all, there was enough agreement about the fact that rights were being violated in the colonies. Today in America, if anything the majority seems to want to codify even more abuse.
And again, I speak of the hypocrisy of the founding fathers. They were quick to support Freedom of Speech when it meant being allowed to speak unfavorably about the king, but they wanted to declare it sedition when it came to the newly elected President. TJ himself helped write and pass a Bill of Attainder, then later had them banned in the new United States; yet, he later wrote to continue to defend his previous act, citing the urgent and immediate need. Doesn't that line ring a bell?
Perhaps if there was less hero worship of the founding fathers and a political shift, which might itself take a generation, we could get to the point where we could compromise our way into new Amendments to address what will be hopefully past issues that they wish to avoid resurfacing. I'm just not hopeful of anything being done today since if anything there's been a strong shift the opposite direction, in large part because of a willingness under expediency to bypass amending the Constitution to codify the necessary changes and just hoping that progress would keep going in the desired direction.
Beware of people whose only marketable skills are their supposed loyalty and their ability to equivocate the following of rules to the letter. The ones who actually followed rules to the letter would have died long ago in the shower from lack of common sense.
You should read about Writs of assistance, which rather tie into this.given how many reports there have been of searches conducted well beyond the borders and over similar logic--smuggling, although of people today. You also seem to be glossing over the point that the courts are directly acknowledging that the searches aren't reasonable in what seems heavily a sign of equivocation on their part to justify the searches--that is, they acknowledge they're not "reasonable" but then counter that the search is okay because "hunches" can be fruitful. This rather falls much further into the category of what's an acceptable level of search for people detained. To that end, it quite clearly seems unreasonable by any definition to allow unilateral mass copying of all data on laptops or any other device.
I don't know. We've already got a Fourth Amendment that doesn't qualify "at the border" as some sort of exception. And we've consistently read the Fourth Amendment in all sorts of broad ways well outside the scope of the original intention--mostly because a lot of the people who wrote the Constitution were hypocrites by any reasonable standard. Honestly, if we tomorrow had an Amendment that clarified the point that "at the border the Fourth Amendment applies", I don't doubt that in fifty years we'd just redefine what "at the border" means in such a fashion to be again having this debate. No, the simple truth is that this whole scenario is such a flagrant violation of a person being secure in their effects that we should on principle alone interpret the Fourth Amendment to not allow such things, regardless of how narrow in scope its original intent was. Because honestly, the founders didn't have one concrete idea of what they wanted on most things and even the ones who did were more than willing to make an exception for themselves.
So, short of a whole rewrite of the Constitution to "reset" the interpretation, we're always going to be arguing interpretation. And it's really absurd to argue "deemed reasonable by long historical precedent and public good" or "English Common Law" when the whole Constitution was enacted precisely to rely more upon Statute and not "historical precedent" which the colonists felt were so bad to have to revolt and start a whole separate country over. And if worst comes to worst and the Statute become too absurd, then one can fall upon the meaning behind the Declaration of Independence and excise yourself from absurd Statutes. None of that, though, justifies stomaching this bullshit.
It also has a lot to do with most Quakers not *wanting* to make a big controversy because they believe it a private, personal matter. Honestly, the whole idea of it is absurd because of the thousand things that health insurance covers, it's not like "The Pill" is the one big morally questionable aspect. No, it's just the "icky" sex-related one that the Catholics are fighting to stop because anything that promotes the ability to have sex or any other kind of worldly pleasure without consequence greatly diminishes their control. The fact that the Church doesn't have nearly the control they think they do...and it's not like "The Pill" is only available through health insurance.
In short, it's more attention whoring than anything wrapped into some self-absorbed desire to dictate to others how society should work. Well, if the Catholics or Quakers or whoever are that opposed to it, they can seclude themselves from society or move to another country. And I say this is as a former Quaker, who recognizes most Quakers really only make a fuss when they're asked to directly harm others or the like. This discussion would be wholly different if the nuns or whoever were being forced to shove "The Pill" literally down people's throats.
Unlike now, where there's litigation precisely because there isn't a reasonable suspicion standard. Okay, yea, I know, it'll head off future litigation. But, then, is that a good thing in itself? Because if it is, we should just shut down the Judiciary Branch and be done with it.
That's some great logic there. If we have some sort of standard of reasonable suspicion for anything related to national security, then indirectly national security information will be divulge. Isn't this the same logic that requires those on the inside to "neither confirm nor deny" everything? And if it's not talking about the indirect form, well, the last decade has shown just how little any part of the federal government has been "forced" to do anything national security wise, even if a court order demanded it. Honestly, no matter how you interpret it it sounds like the court is giving extra-legal blessing to all the "national security" activities the federal government has done/is doing/will do because there's already standards for national security information containment during court proceedings, which apparently they aren't willing to accept as actually good enough.
And firing at people on inchoate "hunches" has sometimes proved fruitful in killing drug lords and murderers. Should we legally allow border officers to do that too? Yep, the borders really are a Constitution free zone. There also apparently a human decency free zone. Really, this sort of ruling would make me want to not be a border officer at all. At least the executioner, as bloody as his hands might be, can have some faith that a lengthy process was taken to determine the guilt of the person they kill. With this? It's a free-for-all, with out apparently any reasonable restrictions. Because being reasonable might allow the bad guys to win.
Actually, what makes it worse than that is that (1) there are suid X clients which makes for an obvious privilege escalation attack vector though the X server and (2) the X server itself is root which makes the X server a big target. The fact that the presentation spoke repeatedly about how nasty GLX was is only funny to me in a dark way because of just how insecure GPUs seem anyways as they suffer even worse from the "unixy" trust-everything-local attitude. So, while I'd love to hear that he succeeds in his GLX clean ups, I only think that clears one bug hurdle while still leaving (a) OpenGL drivers and (b) potentially hardware GPU memory protection limitations. Screen scrapping at the kernel level seems worse if nothing else because it doesn't require nearly the level of sophistication in actually discovering which window holds what object and then try to grab or trap for passwords or whatever that way.
Strictly speaking, we already have that capability in SELinux or in AppArmor. The reason it's not really heavily implemented is because you might want your web browser to be able to save a file in your mail directory or overwrite your local .bashrc from a server stored copy somewhere. Meanwhile, sticking all the UI stuff to allow/disallow isn't some magic bullet--Windows NT has a very robust system of protection that does very little because people don't micromanage things. And honestly, the issue isn't that the web browser has access to your mail directory. It's that a nefarious web site may manipulate your web browser to read the mail directory when you don't want it to. If that's really a big enough concern, you can just run the web browser as a different user....so long as the X11 bugs are fixed. :)
Granted.
Define "stealing" in this context. Because "stealing" patents by utilizing the underlying ideas in more or less spelled out ways in a patent application are the basis of most industries in their foundations. It's only much later is there any real recognition of patents, generally, as companies (and people) feel a need to create artificial barriers of entry to preempt competition.
Now, the case in point is copyright, and certainly there's a much greater view of respect for that field precisely because it is, in theory, supposed to be of a much more narrow scope. But, we're so far down that rabbit hole--the very definition of a derivative work has become so warped and the time span for a copyright to last has grown so large--that the respect for copyright at all has really had a falling out.
Which is the problem, full stop. If reasonable fines are not a deterrent, well, they're simple not a deterrent. Sometimes justice and punishment aren't a deterrent. That's life. Strive to correct this in some way only makes the situation worse. I mean, by the logic stated, jay walking should carry perhaps 20 years or even a death sentence. That's absurd.
A more major part is that those writing the laws are being effectively bribed with money from copyright holders into writing laws beneficial to copyright holders. So, that there is a "split on what is reasonable" is true. But, we live in a democracy, and I'm quite certain that way more than 90% of people are not in the "fine a person into oblivion". Hell, ever time you see a story showing the vast majority of a nation are committing piracy, it's a good sign you should rethink your laws to decriminalize it more, not try to crack down harder on it. That doesn't inherently mean that content creators won't be paid at all--although they may have to come to terms with the idea that even fewer will make a living wage from it. But, it may mean devising another system than copyright to facilitate it.
Piracy is voluntary too, between two consenting people to copy some bit of data. The rub is of course that it's piracy that's the issue, not whether people are somehow obtaining content from the industry directly without paying.
See above. I'd say Napster was a good effective opinion poll of a sort. I am wary, though, of how any survey may be stacked one way or another to distort the message people wish to express. After all, most people may feel guilty about piracy, but that doesn't mean they feel they should be punished for it. Self-guilt happens in lots of circumstances which are clearly entirely victim-less, so it's important to not extrapolate unwarrantedly even if surveys did suggest that some sort of fine or whatever would be appropriate.
Help address this issue..except not really. :/ Windows 7 was made to deal with threats from 2009-2010, with added security patches strapped on as the need arose. Windows 8 was made to deal with threats from 2012-2013, with added security patches strapped on as the need arose. You see a trend? The biggest things that consistently have to be done, no matter what version of Windows you use, is to (a) use Internet Explorer/Adobe Flash as little as possible (directly or indirectly through its rendering engine) and (b) keep as much of your software as possible up to date.
That MS has chosen to not push more updates for Windows XP is the only real major thing hindering (b), but that speaks relatively little of XP. The only other major, possibly, beef is the hassle of installing so many incremental security patches. That's a major reason, of course, for Service Packs and slipstreaming.
Nah, really, the only place XP needs to "die" is in that hardware has continued to evolve and XP has been left out of a lot of developments, in large part because fundamentally some things didn't exist when XP was released. That Windows 7/8 already exists and supports said hardware as part of a new system...then XP can "die" when you switch to a new system inherently. But, that still leaves plenty of years for fully functional hardware to keep using XP for a long while.
It reminds me of a funny statement from Woz in "Accidental Empires" about how he couldn't wait for Moore's Law to reach its limit, so hardware would stop changing and schools could afford to spend the money on hardware that'd be around for 10-20 years like most other equipment. Ignoring that the actual time scale has shifted so much because of how cheap computers, not the PCs envisioned, have gotten, the mindset that old software shouldn't reasonably be supported for 10-20 years does sort of kill a lot of good ideas when it comes to reasonably using computer hardware. I guess there's always a long-term support contract with IBM and Linux...