California laws (specifically a voter initiative in 1978) limits the increase of property taxes to 2% per year. So unless their neighbors have bought recently (that resets the taxes for current values), it will probably be a few decades before you could say it had an effect on them.
There are good bits, and a lot of bad bits to this law (starving local schools for funds being the largest of the latter).
Just commenting on the 'every weapon that has ever been developed has been used' part: that is not true. Fleets of ICBMs have been primed and ready to go my entire life, yet not a single one of them has ever been used as a weapon (thankfully). So unless you consider the threat of using them a use, those have never been used.
So, we as a species at least have some small amount of self control when it comes to armageddon.
I am not sure how you come to the conclusion that he Antifa are 'statist', since they are pretty obviously antagonizing the police (the arm of the State). And they certainly are not facist, except in the obvious non-tolerance of other opinions. Facism requires more than that: a desire for a strong central authority (typically a government), and typically a focus on a homogenous group set apart from others.
Antifa have more in common with anarchists than facists.
Note that all three of these groups often feel that violence, sometimes even terrorism/mass killings, can be justified in advancing their political goals.
Actually, political affiliation is considered one of the protected attributes. So there is a narrow argument could be made that this is discrimination on the basis of a political affiliation (that being with a white suprematist moment). I don't think you are going to find many judges who are going to take that case very far though. But it is worth the thought exercise.
Personally I am not in favor of the site being taken down, that just fuels the argument of censorship from those in these groups. I would much rather their arguments be calmly refuted. If that can't be done (and I really think it can be), then you have to ask yourself whether your thoughts are truly right/superior. In this case I think they are, but it is an attitude always worth keeping in mind.
And there will always be things that humans miss. The key to this is what proportion will machine-learning trained systems miss vs. human radiologists? Given that the machine systems can handle feedback from a near-infinite number of case (including that from human experts), thus meaning it can, theoretically, improve faster than any human can.
That is not actually a good argument, either way the result is the same: by investing his margin in his workers Ford was able to improve the quality of his product, and the dependability of his workforce, while still making a (smaller) profit.
I should point out that Henry Ford was not a Capitalist by modern standards in any ways. Many of his business decisions run exactly counter to what is advocated in business schools nowadays: paying high wages, producing only a single version of the product ("any color you want, as long as it is black"), paying worker extra if they chose to live in "temperance" (no alcohol) dorms, and he justified many of his decisions on moral not economic) grounds.
Rather your argument should have been: that works for one business, but what if all of his competitors (both for business, and for labor) did the same thing? Would that have produced the same results, or just runaway inflation?
You are completely correct in this, but many people are blinded by the most visible governments that tried "whole system optimization": namely the Soviets and other Communist governments. They failed miserably in trying those optimizations, resulting in frequent stations and some truly crazy results (see the backyard "steel" production fiasco from China's "Great Leap Forward"). There were many reasons for these failures, but the primary underlying one is that they could not get good enough information in order to make good enough centralized decisions. Add to that a hearty dose of ideology and you have a recipe for disasters on large scales (which happened over and over).
In theory the distributed decision making inherent in Capitalism is supposed to be the fix for the ills of centralized planning. But in practice we have found that it requires a lot of external correction, as it tends to centralize power in the hands of a few (see the Robber Barons of U.S. history, or contemporary Russia), and do awful things when companies can externalize their problems (see: pollution, slavery, or the horror of the early 19th century Chicago meat packing industry as described in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"... seriously, worth a read).
The problem with trying to patch these problems in Capitalism is the people quickly forget why those controls were put into place, and instead get focused on the localized problem that the company is facing, forgetting that the global optimum (whatever that is) is what they should be looking at.
I don't have a solution, but I do see us slowly approaching the crisis in Capitalism that Karl Marx predicted (not that I think he had a solution figured out... only that he saw the coming problem, if dimly).
My guess is that the 21" iMacs, and the bottom-end 27" iMac are using Mobile versions, since they are limited to 32GiB RAM. The upper 2 models of iMac 27" are definitely using a Desktop part since they support 64GiB of RAM. That logic goes even more for the iMac Pro since it can address 128GiB of RAM.
On the GPU front it is always a little hard to say, since Apple usually negotiates custom versions of the chips used that typically sit somewhere between the retail Desktop and Mobile chips (so more powerful than typical Mobile, without being as hot as the full Desktop cards). I expect that to be true for the new cards on the released iMacs, but would believe that the iMac Pro GPU will be closer to a stock Desktop part.
The other 27 iMac's that were announced today explicitly have user-serviceable RAM (not drives though), while the 21" versions are explicitly soldered on. The specs for iMac Pro do not specify one way or the other. There are only a few images of the back of the units on the website, and if you watch the keynote there was a video that showed the RAM banks while describing the air flow. The only image we have of that area does not have an obvious panel, but that is less than conclusive.
Long story short: we don't know anything about that yet. Could be user-serviceable, could be fixed. It could be that they will go back to how it used to be, and you could take the whole back off pretty easily and then the RAM and drives are accessible. We just don't know.
A better analogy would be being put in jail for not providing the location of a safety deposit box that contains proof of your guilt. Assuming that the prosecutor has proof that such a thing exists, but not the location, do you think it alright under the 5th amendment for the government to punish you for not providing the location?
First point: cost shifting exists in almost every industry. Insurance of all types is basically defined by cost shifting. Airlines play all sorts of games with it. ISP's depend on lots of people who use almost none of their bandwidth to pay for those who download constantly.
Second point: No-one is saying "Everything states the same, except it's free" about anything in healthcare. The point of single payer is that you absorb all of the insurance companies into one (governmentally run) organization, including all of the payments and costs. Since the government does not have a profit to make, that is some savings right there. Then since you are concerned primarily with the good-of-the-many you could virtually end the practices that nearly require people to ignore serious conditions until they have to go to the emergency room. Every study out there shows that that situation is costing all of us enormous sums of money, and that the solution is to get everyone into primary care.
Third point: In some ways Medicare/Medicaid does have the 800-lb-gorrilla negotiating power. But in others, such as in drug pricing where it is forbidden to negotiate, it does not. It also does not have the ability to decide who its patients are, which prior to the ACA (and maybe after, if it is dismantled) was the standard practice for insurance companies.
Fourth point: if the Medicare/Medicare prices are so damaging to hospitals, then why do they accept those patients. They are free to do otherwise... it is because accepting those patients brings in the money to keep the lights on and the mortgage paid. Both in terms of the direct fees, and all the other subsidies that medical facilities get, and are usually tied to accepting those patients. So you have to be very careful about how you actually figure the pricing involved. This is one of those areas where it is easy for all sides to make very misleading use of the numbers, but including or excluding lots of payments, and then averaging them over different population subsets. Single payer would pave over all of that confusion very quickly.
Fifth point: you are correct that the current Federal Budget would not be enough to make single payer work, that is not in contention. However, nearly every other developed country in the world demonstrates that single payer healthcare would work, providing better outcomes than the U.S. sees now, for a sum of money less than the current Medicare/Medicaid budget plus the money spent on health insurance. With so many good examples out there, it is hard to argue that that is not the case.
And finally, you seem concerned with the plight of the working poor, which is commendable. But it is not clear to me what you see as a solution to their plight. Removing government altogether (so abolishing Medicare/Medicaid) would only dump a bunch of people in the worst condition into the bottom of the pool. Without massive changes (not seen in the Republican bills so-far), that pool of people would either go uncovered completely (leading directly to lots of deaths), or break the insurance system as we know it (i.e.: massive rate hikes for everyone, especially the working poor). And the CBO has already come out to say that exactly that group is the one that would be most harmed under the current Republican bill that made it though the House, mostly because of the Medicare cuts.
If you are looking for a MacBook Pro with a discrete video card, then I would not wait because of this [1]. Apple has done a lot of work with Intel on integration of the Thunderbolt chips to allow for the mux'ing of the discrete and integrated video streams. My guess is that Apple will continue to use the parts that use the external chips to preserve that work, at least on those computers that have discrete and integrated video parts[2].
[1] At this point you would have to be nuts to buy any Apple product in the next three weeks. Wait until after Tuesday of WWDC (major stuff is announced Monday, then minor bumps come out on Tuesday), then evaluate what you are going to buy.
[2] Technically some iMacs have both, but I would exclude them from this list as it is missing this mux'ing system since the screen is only ever driven by the discrete part. There are some decode functions that are used in the integrated part, but that never goes anywhere but back across to main memory.
Do you have any evidence that Google has been pulling in people to fill lower positions? Disney absolutely abused the system, but everything I have seen either personally or in statistics says that companies like Apple and Google have been using the system to pull in high-talent people, and they paying the accordingly. I know that Apple has off-shored a lot of low-level IT (to India), but that is not directly associated with the H1-B conversation, as those people are still living in India.
The real abusers are places like Tata Consulting, Infosys, and Wipro where they secure the H1-B slots for consulting, then go and find actual work for the people they bring in (so the opposite of what is supposed to be happening). The chart in this article nicely lays out the problem, where outsourcing firms dominate the top 20 users of H1-B (data is from 2014, but is unlikely to have materially changed):
At a guess I would lump half of the IBM positions (remember they are mainly a consulting company), and all the Deloitte & Touche positions in with the mis-use category. And then treat the Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple (plus half of IBM) positions as valid uses of H1-B (I am sure there are some exceptions even there, but... on the whole...). A quick addition of what I just said has 4,329 legitimate H1-B and 27,806 dodgy positions in the top 20 users of the system (those 20 account for a bit less than half of the use: ~32K out of 85K positions).
Do you really think that most of President Obama's trips were vacation? Do you think that the President of the United States ever gets anything but a "working vacation"?
A pretty Apples-to-Apples comparison puts President Trump way ahead of President Obama in costs to defend him, and that is before you start to talk about defending his wife and children (which are a more complicated story). But even more damming is all of the quotes from the campaign when then-candidate Trump talked about how he would never leave the White House because he would be too busy to golf. That promise was truly and thoroughly shredded in the first couple of weeks of his Presidency.
That would be pretty silly for Apple, since now anyone who cares to download and figure out the exploits can test them for themselves. Someone checking them on this would be easy, and a huge black eye for Apple. You really are off into conspiracy theory territory.
The "three stooges" were lawyers, and they were responding to not a subpoena, but a Freedom of Information Act request (so a much lower bar). That does not stink of coverup, especially since there was apparently plenty of
If you want better examples of coverup, look up the Bush email scandal, or the current Trump administration's (meaning the White House) use of "secure messaging" apps. Or the fact that many of them have gone back to using RNC email servers the the majority of their communications. Any bet we see another failure to backup of those emails when they get subpoenaed?
But more importantly: while then-Goveneor Pence was on the campaign trail criticizing Hilary Clinton about her use of a private email address, he was actively using his own for government business. The hypocrisy runs think there.
Lets be clear about this: in neither case was using non-governmental email addresses illegal, so-long as they (eventually in both cases) complied with federal record keeping acts. In the time after Clinton was Secretary of State they have institutes internal rules that would forbid this sort of thing, but that was afterwards, and one could argue about whether the head of the State Department could grant themselves an exemption...
Neither of them using an outside email server was a good idea on many of the same fronts, including the risk of classified documents. Certainly the Secretary of State gets more classified documents, but by all accounts Clinton and her team were pretty good about keeping those on a separate device designated for classified communications (not perfect, but pretty good). Most of the (informed) debate about that during the campaign either revolved around documents that were in the grey area about what was classified when (and what should be classified). I am not going to say all, but it is unfair and untrue to say that most of Clintons classified communications when through that channel.
But the more pertinent issue at the moment: at the same time then-Goveoner Pence was criticizing Hillary Clinton for her use of an external server, he himself was doing so. That is pure hypocrisy. How can you expect honest government if you do not hold the individuals to even a minimal standard of honesty?
The main advantages are that a) they can take a lot more load that the majority of sites can by both doing pretty good caching and having a lot of geographic redundancy (and the DNS services to handle that), and b) have an operations team that can better respond to DOS attacks than most of their customers are large enough to have (plus network-geographicly distributed resources to hopefully mitigate the attack).
They are probably not going to be faster for small-traffic websites, and they are adding a layer of complexity (so can easily be complicit in bugs, if not outright responsible for them), but if you are going to be hit with a lot of traffic (legitimate or not), then they offer a service that few smaller companies are in the position to match.
"tweak" is a bit of an understatement. They are on their 5th shipping version of modified ISAs (Swift, Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, and now Hurricane), and the included PowerVR GPU has been increasingly modified from the base technology from Imagination Technology. Where most "tweaking" is in how many cores or what fixed-function units are included, Apple has been playing with the core instruction set to make them more performant (both from power and speed perspectives). This has been how Apple has been at least a year ahead in meaningful performance for at least 4 years now (multi-thread performance is not usually meaningful on a phone), despite having a lower base clock speed than their competitors (thus getting very nice battery savings out of it).
What this article is talking about is that Apple is spending increasing amounts of money directly in R&D, rather than farming it out to their suppliers (which does not count in R&D).
The memory limitations that you cite, as well as the driving problem behind slow updates, can be squarely put at the feet of Intel. They have pushed back meaningful updates for a couple of years now. I am not implying that they are doing so deliberately, but rather have been unable to make meaningful upgrades.
To take the memory size limitation, that is because Kaby Lake processors are the only ones to support 64GiB, and the models that Apple would have used were not available (let alone in Apple quantities) until long after the current MacBook Pros shipped. And I think you are a bit mislead about "battery issues". For most workloads Apple's newest MacBook Pro's have 10+ hour battery life. The only place where it is not better than the previous generation is on the 15 inch models on workloads that cause the GPU to kick in. There the battery simply is not enough to really feed that power-hungry GPU. This was an engineering decision (tradeoffs between a better GPU, thinness, and battery life for certain workloads), and real deserves a more thorough understanding than your summary indicates.
A similar conversation applies on the MacPro front. Again, the Xeon processors that Apple used have not been upgraded in a way that justified updates. I wish that Apple had released speed-bumps along the way (and adjusted the bottom-end price along the way), but there was really not enough change since their release to justify a re-work since then. A GPU update might have been nice, but (full disclosure: I worked at Apple, and helped test one aspect of the GPUs) Apple spent a lot of engineer time making those custom GPUs sing on the workloads they were for: FinalCut Pro (not gaming). Likely someone crunched the numbers on sales and determined that it was not worth the expenditure to do that again for a mid-term product. Whenever it is updated again we will see if Apple goes the custom route again.
I also don't think you are evaluating Apple chip work nearly well enough. I you look at the CPU/GPU work they have done on the iOS devices; for the last 4 or so years competitors have been at least a year behind on most real-work testing metrics. Only in multi-threaded tests does anyone else remain competitive within a year timeframe. That is despite Apple being lower-power and lower clock-speed in almost all cases. And the delta has been widening as Apple ramps up on this. They started with nearly off-the-shelf processors, but are now on their fifth version of increasingly modified ARM ISA (Swift, Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, and now Hurricane), each of which had increasingly custom versions of the paired PowerVR GPUs.
None of that work is about lowering costs, all of it is about improving performance. If Apple only wanted to lower costs they would be using Samsung or Qualcomm licensed CPU designs.
And yet you don't seem to be able to point to a single lie. All of this innuendo, and no facts. If she really did "lie continuously for months", then there would be a clear record of it. At this point it is clear that your position is not about the truth; you have an enemy and you are going to do everything to damage that enemy, even if you have nothing to go on. That is simply prejudice.
As a former RethinkDB employee I am more than a little biased, but I don't think that you understand the competitive space around MongoDB. Everything you have sited as an advantage for MongoDB is done better by just about every one of their competitors (RethinkDB included). MongoDB's main advantage is that they were the first big on in the field, and no-one has been able to make something better enough to de-seat them. It is not enough to be better, you have to be noticeably better in order to de-seat a reigning competitor. Think of the phrase "no one gets fired for buying IBM".
And I also don't think you understand the cost of polling, especially for non-trivial (e.g.: not key-lookup) queries. While RethinkDB's `join` queries are not included in `changefeeds`, just about everything else is. So for example if you wanted to keep a leaderboard, say the top 10 scores in a game, you would have to re-compute that every time in most databases (at a minimum scan the index). With RethinkDB it automatically gets modified based on writes in the database, and sent to you. The efficiency improvement is truly huge. And since those queries can be fairly complicated (say: top 10 scores within the week), that gets very expensive with polling.
An example that is in usage right now from a major stock trader: their iOS app uses RethinkDB to get streaming stock-price updates. The app (indirectly through a server) just opens a changefeed on the list of stocks that you follow, and RethinkDB coordinates who needs to get what updates when they feed in the stream of changes of market prices. They don't have a ton of clients constantly polling in order to show them constantly changing feeds of numbers (some change every second, others not in hours), and they can push out changes as fast as they get them.
What about the response makes you think that? The only relevant piece of information I actually can see in the response is the inference that Apple is asking them to re-run the tests (presumably with Apple engineers in attendance). The implication is that Apple is trying to reproduce what Consumer Reports saw, and is unable to, so is asking them to do it again. This sounds exactly like what everyone involved should want to happen: make sure that the tests are reproducible, and thus representative of what users would see. So to me the Consumer Reports response seems unjustified, and very defensive.
Actually, in the case of Germany the U.S. is older as a country by something like a hundred years. The unification of something like what we now call Germany did not begin until the German Empire began in 1871. The Confederation of States was formed in 1781, and the Constitution (so U.S.) was seven years later in 1788. So depending on when you were talking about, either 100 years, or 93 years. Prior to that you don't really have anything that could be called Germany, rather you have separate German-speking states. It does not look like you understand history enough to be using it to make broad sweeping statements like you are doing.
Another major problem in your argument is that the U.S. is much bigger, population wise, that most countries it is going to be compared to. So when you say things like "richest", that is true for aggregate wealth. But it is not true for per-capita income (U.S. is #11).
And the statement "Capitalism and free markets have lifted more people out of poverty and lifted the standards of living of more people than any other system yet tried, combined" ignores that China has lifted billions of people out of poverty. You can make lots of truthful bad statements about China, and I certainly would not want to live there. But it does prove that statement wrong.
But even more to the point: Germany has a much more social-based system than ours. Clearly in areas of heath-care, education, workers rights, and welfare systems. But they are doing better than the U.S. in terms of growth, average wage, and unemployment. How does your argument survive that?
I advise you to read more about Ben Carson before you defend him as a good person to be a Cabinet Secretary. He does not seem to be very able to reason out issues. Having seen a number of his interviews and lines of logic I really do wonder how he made it though medical school, let alone planned out complicated procedures (which he does seem to have done). Maybe I should believe him that he passed because God gave him the answers in a dream:
Skip the obvious bias in the source, just watch the video of him saying this himself. Or go look up his (still maintained) views on the Pyramids. This is not a rational thinker.
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California laws (specifically a voter initiative in 1978) limits the increase of property taxes to 2% per year. So unless their neighbors have bought recently (that resets the taxes for current values), it will probably be a few decades before you could say it had an effect on them.
There are good bits, and a lot of bad bits to this law (starving local schools for funds being the largest of the latter).
Just commenting on the 'every weapon that has ever been developed has been used' part: that is not true. Fleets of ICBMs have been primed and ready to go my entire life, yet not a single one of them has ever been used as a weapon (thankfully). So unless you consider the threat of using them a use, those have never been used.
So, we as a species at least have some small amount of self control when it comes to armageddon.
I am not sure how you come to the conclusion that he Antifa are 'statist', since they are pretty obviously antagonizing the police (the arm of the State). And they certainly are not facist, except in the obvious non-tolerance of other opinions. Facism requires more than that: a desire for a strong central authority (typically a government), and typically a focus on a homogenous group set apart from others.
Antifa have more in common with anarchists than facists.
Note that all three of these groups often feel that violence, sometimes even terrorism/mass killings, can be justified in advancing their political goals.
Actually, political affiliation is considered one of the protected attributes. So there is a narrow argument could be made that this is discrimination on the basis of a political affiliation (that being with a white suprematist moment). I don't think you are going to find many judges who are going to take that case very far though. But it is worth the thought exercise.
Personally I am not in favor of the site being taken down, that just fuels the argument of censorship from those in these groups. I would much rather their arguments be calmly refuted. If that can't be done (and I really think it can be), then you have to ask yourself whether your thoughts are truly right/superior. In this case I think they are, but it is an attitude always worth keeping in mind.
And there will always be things that humans miss. The key to this is what proportion will machine-learning trained systems miss vs. human radiologists? Given that the machine systems can handle feedback from a near-infinite number of case (including that from human experts), thus meaning it can, theoretically, improve faster than any human can.
That is not actually a good argument, either way the result is the same: by investing his margin in his workers Ford was able to improve the quality of his product, and the dependability of his workforce, while still making a (smaller) profit.
I should point out that Henry Ford was not a Capitalist by modern standards in any ways. Many of his business decisions run exactly counter to what is advocated in business schools nowadays: paying high wages, producing only a single version of the product ("any color you want, as long as it is black"), paying worker extra if they chose to live in "temperance" (no alcohol) dorms, and he justified many of his decisions on moral not economic) grounds.
Rather your argument should have been: that works for one business, but what if all of his competitors (both for business, and for labor) did the same thing? Would that have produced the same results, or just runaway inflation?
You are completely correct in this, but many people are blinded by the most visible governments that tried "whole system optimization": namely the Soviets and other Communist governments. They failed miserably in trying those optimizations, resulting in frequent stations and some truly crazy results (see the backyard "steel" production fiasco from China's "Great Leap Forward"). There were many reasons for these failures, but the primary underlying one is that they could not get good enough information in order to make good enough centralized decisions. Add to that a hearty dose of ideology and you have a recipe for disasters on large scales (which happened over and over).
In theory the distributed decision making inherent in Capitalism is supposed to be the fix for the ills of centralized planning. But in practice we have found that it requires a lot of external correction, as it tends to centralize power in the hands of a few (see the Robber Barons of U.S. history, or contemporary Russia), and do awful things when companies can externalize their problems (see: pollution, slavery, or the horror of the early 19th century Chicago meat packing industry as described in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"... seriously, worth a read).
The problem with trying to patch these problems in Capitalism is the people quickly forget why those controls were put into place, and instead get focused on the localized problem that the company is facing, forgetting that the global optimum (whatever that is) is what they should be looking at.
I don't have a solution, but I do see us slowly approaching the crisis in Capitalism that Karl Marx predicted (not that I think he had a solution figured out... only that he saw the coming problem, if dimly).
My guess is that the 21" iMacs, and the bottom-end 27" iMac are using Mobile versions, since they are limited to 32GiB RAM. The upper 2 models of iMac 27" are definitely using a Desktop part since they support 64GiB of RAM. That logic goes even more for the iMac Pro since it can address 128GiB of RAM.
On the GPU front it is always a little hard to say, since Apple usually negotiates custom versions of the chips used that typically sit somewhere between the retail Desktop and Mobile chips (so more powerful than typical Mobile, without being as hot as the full Desktop cards). I expect that to be true for the new cards on the released iMacs, but would believe that the iMac Pro GPU will be closer to a stock Desktop part.
The other 27 iMac's that were announced today explicitly have user-serviceable RAM (not drives though), while the 21" versions are explicitly soldered on. The specs for iMac Pro do not specify one way or the other. There are only a few images of the back of the units on the website, and if you watch the keynote there was a video that showed the RAM banks while describing the air flow. The only image we have of that area does not have an obvious panel, but that is less than conclusive.
Long story short: we don't know anything about that yet. Could be user-serviceable, could be fixed. It could be that they will go back to how it used to be, and you could take the whole back off pretty easily and then the RAM and drives are accessible. We just don't know.
A better analogy would be being put in jail for not providing the location of a safety deposit box that contains proof of your guilt. Assuming that the prosecutor has proof that such a thing exists, but not the location, do you think it alright under the 5th amendment for the government to punish you for not providing the location?
First point: cost shifting exists in almost every industry. Insurance of all types is basically defined by cost shifting. Airlines play all sorts of games with it. ISP's depend on lots of people who use almost none of their bandwidth to pay for those who download constantly.
Second point: No-one is saying "Everything states the same, except it's free" about anything in healthcare. The point of single payer is that you absorb all of the insurance companies into one (governmentally run) organization, including all of the payments and costs. Since the government does not have a profit to make, that is some savings right there. Then since you are concerned primarily with the good-of-the-many you could virtually end the practices that nearly require people to ignore serious conditions until they have to go to the emergency room. Every study out there shows that that situation is costing all of us enormous sums of money, and that the solution is to get everyone into primary care.
Third point: In some ways Medicare/Medicaid does have the 800-lb-gorrilla negotiating power. But in others, such as in drug pricing where it is forbidden to negotiate, it does not. It also does not have the ability to decide who its patients are, which prior to the ACA (and maybe after, if it is dismantled) was the standard practice for insurance companies.
Fourth point: if the Medicare/Medicare prices are so damaging to hospitals, then why do they accept those patients. They are free to do otherwise... it is because accepting those patients brings in the money to keep the lights on and the mortgage paid. Both in terms of the direct fees, and all the other subsidies that medical facilities get, and are usually tied to accepting those patients. So you have to be very careful about how you actually figure the pricing involved. This is one of those areas where it is easy for all sides to make very misleading use of the numbers, but including or excluding lots of payments, and then averaging them over different population subsets. Single payer would pave over all of that confusion very quickly.
Fifth point: you are correct that the current Federal Budget would not be enough to make single payer work, that is not in contention. However, nearly every other developed country in the world demonstrates that single payer healthcare would work, providing better outcomes than the U.S. sees now, for a sum of money less than the current Medicare/Medicaid budget plus the money spent on health insurance. With so many good examples out there, it is hard to argue that that is not the case.
And finally, you seem concerned with the plight of the working poor, which is commendable. But it is not clear to me what you see as a solution to their plight. Removing government altogether (so abolishing Medicare/Medicaid) would only dump a bunch of people in the worst condition into the bottom of the pool. Without massive changes (not seen in the Republican bills so-far), that pool of people would either go uncovered completely (leading directly to lots of deaths), or break the insurance system as we know it (i.e.: massive rate hikes for everyone, especially the working poor). And the CBO has already come out to say that exactly that group is the one that would be most harmed under the current Republican bill that made it though the House, mostly because of the Medicare cuts.
If you are looking for a MacBook Pro with a discrete video card, then I would not wait because of this [1]. Apple has done a lot of work with Intel on integration of the Thunderbolt chips to allow for the mux'ing of the discrete and integrated video streams. My guess is that Apple will continue to use the parts that use the external chips to preserve that work, at least on those computers that have discrete and integrated video parts[2].
[1] At this point you would have to be nuts to buy any Apple product in the next three weeks. Wait until after Tuesday of WWDC (major stuff is announced Monday, then minor bumps come out on Tuesday), then evaluate what you are going to buy.
[2] Technically some iMacs have both, but I would exclude them from this list as it is missing this mux'ing system since the screen is only ever driven by the discrete part. There are some decode functions that are used in the integrated part, but that never goes anywhere but back across to main memory.
Do you have any evidence that Google has been pulling in people to fill lower positions? Disney absolutely abused the system, but everything I have seen either personally or in statistics says that companies like Apple and Google have been using the system to pull in high-talent people, and they paying the accordingly. I know that Apple has off-shored a lot of low-level IT (to India), but that is not directly associated with the H1-B conversation, as those people are still living in India.
The real abusers are places like Tata Consulting, Infosys, and Wipro where they secure the H1-B slots for consulting, then go and find actual work for the people they bring in (so the opposite of what is supposed to be happening). The chart in this article nicely lays out the problem, where outsourcing firms dominate the top 20 users of H1-B (data is from 2014, but is unlikely to have materially changed):
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing-companies-dominate-h1b-visas.html?_r=0
At a guess I would lump half of the IBM positions (remember they are mainly a consulting company), and all the Deloitte & Touche positions in with the mis-use category. And then treat the Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple (plus half of IBM) positions as valid uses of H1-B (I am sure there are some exceptions even there, but... on the whole...). A quick addition of what I just said has 4,329 legitimate H1-B and 27,806 dodgy positions in the top 20 users of the system (those 20 account for a bit less than half of the use: ~32K out of 85K positions).
Do you really think that most of President Obama's trips were vacation? Do you think that the President of the United States ever gets anything but a "working vacation"?
A pretty Apples-to-Apples comparison puts President Trump way ahead of President Obama in costs to defend him, and that is before you start to talk about defending his wife and children (which are a more complicated story). But even more damming is all of the quotes from the campaign when then-candidate Trump talked about how he would never leave the White House because he would be too busy to golf. That promise was truly and thoroughly shredded in the first couple of weeks of his Presidency.
That would be pretty silly for Apple, since now anyone who cares to download and figure out the exploits can test them for themselves. Someone checking them on this would be easy, and a huge black eye for Apple. You really are off into conspiracy theory territory.
The "three stooges" were lawyers, and they were responding to not a subpoena, but a Freedom of Information Act request (so a much lower bar). That does not stink of coverup, especially since there was apparently plenty of
If you want better examples of coverup, look up the Bush email scandal, or the current Trump administration's (meaning the White House) use of "secure messaging" apps. Or the fact that many of them have gone back to using RNC email servers the the majority of their communications. Any bet we see another failure to backup of those emails when they get subpoenaed?
But more importantly: while then-Goveneor Pence was on the campaign trail criticizing Hilary Clinton about her use of a private email address, he was actively using his own for government business. The hypocrisy runs think there.
Lets be clear about this: in neither case was using non-governmental email addresses illegal, so-long as they (eventually in both cases) complied with federal record keeping acts. In the time after Clinton was Secretary of State they have institutes internal rules that would forbid this sort of thing, but that was afterwards, and one could argue about whether the head of the State Department could grant themselves an exemption...
Neither of them using an outside email server was a good idea on many of the same fronts, including the risk of classified documents. Certainly the Secretary of State gets more classified documents, but by all accounts Clinton and her team were pretty good about keeping those on a separate device designated for classified communications (not perfect, but pretty good). Most of the (informed) debate about that during the campaign either revolved around documents that were in the grey area about what was classified when (and what should be classified). I am not going to say all, but it is unfair and untrue to say that most of Clintons classified communications when through that channel.
But the more pertinent issue at the moment: at the same time then-Goveoner Pence was criticizing Hillary Clinton for her use of an external server, he himself was doing so. That is pure hypocrisy. How can you expect honest government if you do not hold the individuals to even a minimal standard of honesty?
The main advantages are that a) they can take a lot more load that the majority of sites can by both doing pretty good caching and having a lot of geographic redundancy (and the DNS services to handle that), and b) have an operations team that can better respond to DOS attacks than most of their customers are large enough to have (plus network-geographicly distributed resources to hopefully mitigate the attack).
They are probably not going to be faster for small-traffic websites, and they are adding a layer of complexity (so can easily be complicit in bugs, if not outright responsible for them), but if you are going to be hit with a lot of traffic (legitimate or not), then they offer a service that few smaller companies are in the position to match.
"tweak" is a bit of an understatement. They are on their 5th shipping version of modified ISAs (Swift, Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, and now Hurricane), and the included PowerVR GPU has been increasingly modified from the base technology from Imagination Technology. Where most "tweaking" is in how many cores or what fixed-function units are included, Apple has been playing with the core instruction set to make them more performant (both from power and speed perspectives). This has been how Apple has been at least a year ahead in meaningful performance for at least 4 years now (multi-thread performance is not usually meaningful on a phone), despite having a lower base clock speed than their competitors (thus getting very nice battery savings out of it).
What this article is talking about is that Apple is spending increasing amounts of money directly in R&D, rather than farming it out to their suppliers (which does not count in R&D).
The memory limitations that you cite, as well as the driving problem behind slow updates, can be squarely put at the feet of Intel. They have pushed back meaningful updates for a couple of years now. I am not implying that they are doing so deliberately, but rather have been unable to make meaningful upgrades.
To take the memory size limitation, that is because Kaby Lake processors are the only ones to support 64GiB, and the models that Apple would have used were not available (let alone in Apple quantities) until long after the current MacBook Pros shipped. And I think you are a bit mislead about "battery issues". For most workloads Apple's newest MacBook Pro's have 10+ hour battery life. The only place where it is not better than the previous generation is on the 15 inch models on workloads that cause the GPU to kick in. There the battery simply is not enough to really feed that power-hungry GPU. This was an engineering decision (tradeoffs between a better GPU, thinness, and battery life for certain workloads), and real deserves a more thorough understanding than your summary indicates.
A similar conversation applies on the MacPro front. Again, the Xeon processors that Apple used have not been upgraded in a way that justified updates. I wish that Apple had released speed-bumps along the way (and adjusted the bottom-end price along the way), but there was really not enough change since their release to justify a re-work since then. A GPU update might have been nice, but (full disclosure: I worked at Apple, and helped test one aspect of the GPUs) Apple spent a lot of engineer time making those custom GPUs sing on the workloads they were for: FinalCut Pro (not gaming). Likely someone crunched the numbers on sales and determined that it was not worth the expenditure to do that again for a mid-term product. Whenever it is updated again we will see if Apple goes the custom route again.
I also don't think you are evaluating Apple chip work nearly well enough. I you look at the CPU/GPU work they have done on the iOS devices; for the last 4 or so years competitors have been at least a year behind on most real-work testing metrics. Only in multi-threaded tests does anyone else remain competitive within a year timeframe. That is despite Apple being lower-power and lower clock-speed in almost all cases. And the delta has been widening as Apple ramps up on this. They started with nearly off-the-shelf processors, but are now on their fifth version of increasingly modified ARM ISA (Swift, Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, and now Hurricane), each of which had increasingly custom versions of the paired PowerVR GPUs.
None of that work is about lowering costs, all of it is about improving performance. If Apple only wanted to lower costs they would be using Samsung or Qualcomm licensed CPU designs.
And yet you don't seem to be able to point to a single lie. All of this innuendo, and no facts. If she really did "lie continuously for months", then there would be a clear record of it. At this point it is clear that your position is not about the truth; you have an enemy and you are going to do everything to damage that enemy, even if you have nothing to go on. That is simply prejudice.
As a former RethinkDB employee I am more than a little biased, but I don't think that you understand the competitive space around MongoDB. Everything you have sited as an advantage for MongoDB is done better by just about every one of their competitors (RethinkDB included). MongoDB's main advantage is that they were the first big on in the field, and no-one has been able to make something better enough to de-seat them. It is not enough to be better, you have to be noticeably better in order to de-seat a reigning competitor. Think of the phrase "no one gets fired for buying IBM".
And I also don't think you understand the cost of polling, especially for non-trivial (e.g.: not key-lookup) queries. While RethinkDB's `join` queries are not included in `changefeeds`, just about everything else is. So for example if you wanted to keep a leaderboard, say the top 10 scores in a game, you would have to re-compute that every time in most databases (at a minimum scan the index). With RethinkDB it automatically gets modified based on writes in the database, and sent to you. The efficiency improvement is truly huge. And since those queries can be fairly complicated (say: top 10 scores within the week), that gets very expensive with polling.
An example that is in usage right now from a major stock trader: their iOS app uses RethinkDB to get streaming stock-price updates. The app (indirectly through a server) just opens a changefeed on the list of stocks that you follow, and RethinkDB coordinates who needs to get what updates when they feed in the stream of changes of market prices. They don't have a ton of clients constantly polling in order to show them constantly changing feeds of numbers (some change every second, others not in hours), and they can push out changes as fast as they get them.
What about the response makes you think that? The only relevant piece of information I actually can see in the response is the inference that Apple is asking them to re-run the tests (presumably with Apple engineers in attendance). The implication is that Apple is trying to reproduce what Consumer Reports saw, and is unable to, so is asking them to do it again. This sounds exactly like what everyone involved should want to happen: make sure that the tests are reproducible, and thus representative of what users would see. So to me the Consumer Reports response seems unjustified, and very defensive.
Actually, in the case of Germany the U.S. is older as a country by something like a hundred years. The unification of something like what we now call Germany did not begin until the German Empire began in 1871. The Confederation of States was formed in 1781, and the Constitution (so U.S.) was seven years later in 1788. So depending on when you were talking about, either 100 years, or 93 years. Prior to that you don't really have anything that could be called Germany, rather you have separate German-speking states. It does not look like you understand history enough to be using it to make broad sweeping statements like you are doing.
Another major problem in your argument is that the U.S. is much bigger, population wise, that most countries it is going to be compared to. So when you say things like "richest", that is true for aggregate wealth. But it is not true for per-capita income (U.S. is #11).
And the statement "Capitalism and free markets have lifted more people out of poverty and lifted the standards of living of more people than any other system yet tried, combined" ignores that China has lifted billions of people out of poverty. You can make lots of truthful bad statements about China, and I certainly would not want to live there. But it does prove that statement wrong.
But even more to the point: Germany has a much more social-based system than ours. Clearly in areas of heath-care, education, workers rights, and welfare systems. But they are doing better than the U.S. in terms of growth, average wage, and unemployment. How does your argument survive that?
I advise you to read more about Ben Carson before you defend him as a good person to be a Cabinet Secretary. He does not seem to be very able to reason out issues. Having seen a number of his interviews and lines of logic I really do wonder how he made it though medical school, let alone planned out complicated procedures (which he does seem to have done). Maybe I should believe him that he passed because God gave him the answers in a dream:
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/god-helped-ben-carson-ace-his-college-chemistry-final-by-giving-him-all-the-answers-in-a-dream/
Skip the obvious bias in the source, just watch the video of him saying this himself. Or go look up his (still maintained) views on the Pyramids. This is not a rational thinker.