Yes, it should be the case that any modification to health coverage in the U.S. should not alter any one person's coverage.
Get a grip, of course changing health coverage over a large swath of the U.S. economy is going to generate winners and losers. So you lost, how about the ones who couldn't get coverage before due to cherry picking by the insurance companies that can now get insurance?
Personally, I'd have broken the insurance companies knees. By the way, most of the provisions in the ACA where Republican notions before they became Democrat notions. And the the insurance companies were free to direct that legislation, all in good Republican free market theory. If you didn't get what you expected, blame both parties.
Hmmm, now that I think of it, I think regulating the producing of Justin Bieber CDs would be in the national interest.
I agree with the regulation comment, the FAA was and is instrumental in making airliners safe. Risk is something companies tend to put a price on, human lives doesn't really enter into that calculation and is probably considered an external cost. The free market might be able to price it in...and the price would fluctuate...depending upon lives lost...which is not a terribly good way to think about safety.
Nah, it is really like corkscrew pasta. Particles slide around the corkscrew until they get dizzy and then fall off. What we see are the ones who couldn't stay on.
" Science is a distillation of our observations of the universe and things within it."
Not really. Much of physics starts with a mathematical theory. Biology starts with theories about how something works. Theories may be informed by observations, but they are human imagination at its best. When a theory is confirmed up to some epsilon, we tend to believe it correct up to that epsilon...unless further results prove otherwise, or a better theory comes along which explains more. Science is not mere reading observations.
You don't understand science. Science is a human endeavor, things can remain up in the air for a long while until the facts are sorted out. While they are up in the air, it is all still science. Once one theory is vanquished, that theory does not automatically become not science. Typically, there are features that it got right even if not the entire thing. And the things it got wrong are science as well. That's how scientists work. They make mistakes, they spend a lot of time in a haze, the universe is a complicated place.
The heretic is typically not a professional scientist or at least a respected scientist. The number of places where the heretic was right and the established science is wrong is insignificant compared to the reverse. If you'd spent any time in science at all, you'd see the legions of whackjobs are out there pushing nonsense.
More to the point, we have no idea what feedback loops will open up or open wider due to changing the global climate's local stability point; the latter is what we think of as the current climate. Methane release due to higher global temperatures is a positive feedback loop.
Also, melting the polar ice caps is probably not a good idea since Greenland and Antarctica melting would raise sea levels by several feet. 11 million people in Bangladesh will move to India rather than wade around in salt water. Miami will be underwater along with a good amount of Florida. In general, there will be a lot less dry land. Since most of the biggest cities are actually ocean ports, they probably be underwater as well.
One commonly overlooked fact is that most of Antarctica is below sea level. The ice sits atop the continent. Currently, the increased wind speed around the Antarctic is causing warm water to upwell near the continent which is unfreezing the bond between the land and ice. If that truly melts, finding arable land will be the least of our worries.
However, have no fear. Climate change is a myth perpetrated by 95% of climate scientists because they don't like humanity or at least not as much as we have. And even if climate change is not a myth, humans have nothing to do with it. Dumping tons of a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere won't harm anything; it has been proven that human dumped CO2 doesn't observe physical laws. This isn't the rising sea level you are looking for.
More to the point, all you've been taught in freshman year is a few languages and technologies, you've not done any actual computer science yet. You have one chance (now) to learn enough computer science to last the rest of your career; that computer science will prepare you to work just about anywhere, except for......you have precious little domain knowledge. Most computer scientists are not going to be hired for web development or anything else that can be done in China or India. There are a lot of niches in chemistry, biology, etc. where you marry domain knowledge with computer science. Fill one of those niches, and you'll be set for awhile.
Uh...don't know if you've noticed but Muslim terrorists have no problems attacking other Muslims. If we forget about the intrasect animosities....
In this corner of the WWF, we have the Shi'ite, rabid anti-Jew, chief country planning nuclear weapons in the hopes it will make their dicks look bigger, claim women have no souls, supporting Assad against his country.
In this other corner of the WWF, we have Sunni, rabid anti-Jew, chief country proud of stoning women for looking at men and holder of an annual Stone Satan Jamboree, able to take billions of oil wealth and still make it nothing more than sand.
In the other corner, we have the Al Qaeda wack-a-jews, willing to use any weapons to attack just about everyone else, dreams of a Grand Unified Sultanate stretching from one corner of Heaven to the other corner of Hell, creators of Hell on Earth.
In this other corner, we have the cowering masses of Muslims, also rabid anti-Jew, unable to raise a whimper to any atrocity as long as it was done in the name of Allah, worried to death their kids are going to wipe their toy governments off the map.
Who will win, who will raise the belt showing them the winner of solving Hitler's Jewish Problem?
The reason aliens would come to earth is our women. It turns out alien women screech a lot about alien men always zipping off their planets and never taking them anywhere. Plus, have you ever seen alien women? No wonder the alien men want to come here.
Yah, I heard about that reaction. It was a breath of fresh air that I hope blows down out of Canada like the cold fronts. To what do you attribute this rare form of sanity?
The guy was saying "research" when he meant "development". I doubt much development gets done at MSR beyond proof of concept. MS appears to lack an internal structure to do development starting at the output of MSR. And that might be due to marketing being too big for MS.
If you think about it, marketing is naturally antagonistic to new ideas. They spend years developing markets for products. Being asked to downplay those markets and their sunk costs for something new which has no track record of producing bonuses for the serfs manning the marketing barricades is asking them to cut their own pay. Why would they do that? There is no incentive. It won't do for management to say, but this is going to be big and allow us to compete against Apple in this market.
Take fondleslabs. MS wants this new market. However, their marketing has just spent the last few decades selling customers on desk and laptops and their souls to Satan. Why should they get behind something that will eat their bonuses? So MS forces through something. The marketers probably figured that if fondleslabs were going to be promoted, then their interface had to look something like desk and laptops. No one would put desktop UI on a fondle, so they went the other way...and result was Windows 8.
I ride both side of that fence. The problem for researchers is that in order to solve a research problem, you need to knock it down to something quite small that you can get some mathematical modeling behind it and prove its properties. To solve an engineering problem, you need to corral several different technologies and get them all to work together. There are very few small engineering problems in the sense of generating new products.
You might think to model the engineering problems in mathematics. The problem: scale. These are large problems with many very different parts. To model something that big in mathematics is asking more than humans can deliver because it requires you make several different areas of math work together when you have little theory for their interconnections. And any one engineering problem has several different models depending upon which aspect you are concentrating upon.
Research problems might start as some aspect of an engineering problem, but you won't get much insight from the engineers who are not trained in abstract general methods. It frequently happens in mathematics that to solve a difficult problem, you need to enlarge its scope or generality even though it will still only cover a small slice of behavior. Engineers cannot even talk to you in your language because mathematics to them was done by long dead gods who brought the mathematics down from the mountain and none may change them.
Engineering problems also have many intricacies, enough that makes their mathematics expressions awkward at best. To learn what those are, you need to do engineering. Engineering cannot be taught in that sense, you cannot sit down with your books and crank out a design. It takes a lot of prior experience. And engineers must also produce a product that can be produced efficiently. It won't do to have just any solution because it has some internal beauty like mathematics. It needs to be capable of reproduction and efficient reproduction at that. This notion isn't something readily expressible in mathematics.
They got started by Leland Stanford who was a railroad baron and not a particularly nice guy. However, one does not spend an endowment, one invests the endowment to use some of the returns for Stanford research, education, etc. and they use some for plowing back into the endowment so that inflation doesn't make it go bye-bye.
Lemme guess, if you win the lottery, you are going to piss it all on wine, women, and song.
Well, as fracking and the gas industry is starting to eat coal's bread and butter, i.e., the power plants (no one is planning new coal power plants in the U.S., they are all gas), it was probably a good financial move spun to feed the Stanford rank and file as a eco-conscious decision to save the planet blah blah blah.
It is good for the environment to have coal take it in the neck, but I'd rather the U.S. go back to nuclear. It is also bad for the coal states and the coal workers.
" in-office happy hour"..what's wrong with this picture?
1. the company is clueless and doesn't care about their insurance premiums should anything go wrong? 2. the kiddies are immature and think drinking at work is a good idea? 3. the management is immature and thinks drinking at work is a good idea? 4. tech and alcohol goes well together, "Hey Boomer, I've got an idea, let's see if we can connect the gizmo with the whatsit".
"Sure there is. Granted, there's about a zillion forms of Libertarianism, just like everything else. " Nice dodge, and you expect us to swallow this? It is akin to talking to a communist who claims communism has never really been tried...maybe because whenever it has it led to totalitarianism.
In pre-war and during war Japan, the emperor was the living G-d on earth. Yes, the country did have a religion that they fanatically believed in. The analogy stands.
You are aware that Japan only surrendered after the A-bombs, right? And the U.S. was encouraging Stalin to open up another front for the Japanese in the hopes the U.S. wouldn't have to invade. MacArthur was all for invasion. The most in the Japanese military were all for dying until the last man, woman, and child. They had armed the populace with pitchforks and was teaching them how to gut an American GI. The Emperor signed off on the surrender and parts of the Japanese military attempted a coup but were put down due to some loyal (to the Emperor). Okinawa was only the last of a string of very bloody islands where most Japanese fought until they died or attempted to surrender to get close enough to American GIs to kill them with a grenade. Iwo Jima, Tinian, Saipan, Guam, all were nasty, brutish fights and the Japanese were flinging Kamikazis against American ships.
Fortunately, Admiral Nimitz knew better than to attempt an invasion of Japan and was against it. Germany was already gone, but it took many American lives and the wounded were arriving back in the U.S. with horrific injuries. Truman had to tell the American people the war wasn't over yet because an uncowed Japan would surely attempt to reconstruct its empire. Japanese atrocities in the Pacific and certainly China were legendary. The Pacific campaign had also claimed many American lives and wounded.
Now you sin in Truman's office. Some on his military staff tell you invasion is the only way...estimated U.S. casualties: 250,000 up to 1 million (they couldn't be sure other than the figure was appalling). Some on his military staff tell you the invasion is not necessary. You dither for about 3 months, bombing Japan is certainly reducing the country but they won't surrender. Now one of your secret projects offers a chance to blow some sense into the stiff-necked Japanese. Do you (a) take it, (b) invade at horrible cost, (c) do nothing and attempt to keep a war going that is fast losing support, (d) declare victory believing you will have to come back and fight the war again in 10 years? You have to decide Mr. President.
Slashdot Mirror
Err...who owns access to the internet?
Yes, it should be the case that any modification to health coverage in the U.S. should not alter any one person's coverage.
Get a grip, of course changing health coverage over a large swath of the U.S. economy is going to generate winners and losers. So you lost, how about the ones who couldn't get coverage before due to cherry picking by the insurance companies that can now get insurance?
Personally, I'd have broken the insurance companies knees. By the way, most of the provisions in the ACA where Republican notions before they became Democrat notions. And the the insurance companies were free to direct that legislation, all in good Republican free market theory. If you didn't get what you expected, blame both parties.
Hmmm, now that I think of it, I think regulating the producing of Justin Bieber CDs would be in the national interest.
I agree with the regulation comment, the FAA was and is instrumental in making airliners safe. Risk is something companies tend to put a price on, human lives doesn't really enter into that calculation and is probably considered an external cost. The free market might be able to price it in...and the price would fluctuate...depending upon lives lost...which is not a terribly good way to think about safety.
Nah, it is really like corkscrew pasta. Particles slide around the corkscrew until they get dizzy and then fall off. What we see are the ones who couldn't stay on.
" Science is a distillation of our observations of the universe and things within it."
Not really. Much of physics starts with a mathematical theory. Biology starts with theories about how something works. Theories may be informed by observations, but they are human imagination at its best. When a theory is confirmed up to some epsilon, we tend to believe it correct up to that epsilon...unless further results prove otherwise, or a better theory comes along which explains more. Science is not mere reading observations.
You don't understand science. Science is a human endeavor, things can remain up in the air for a long while until the facts are sorted out. While they are up in the air, it is all still science. Once one theory is vanquished, that theory does not automatically become not science. Typically, there are features that it got right even if not the entire thing. And the things it got wrong are science as well. That's how scientists work. They make mistakes, they spend a lot of time in a haze, the universe is a complicated place.
The heretic is typically not a professional scientist or at least a respected scientist. The number of places where the heretic was right and the established science is wrong is insignificant compared to the reverse. If you'd spent any time in science at all, you'd see the legions of whackjobs are out there pushing nonsense.
More to the point, we have no idea what feedback loops will open up or open wider due to changing the global climate's local stability point; the latter is what we think of as the current climate. Methane release due to higher global temperatures is a positive feedback loop.
Also, melting the polar ice caps is probably not a good idea since Greenland and Antarctica melting would raise sea levels by several feet. 11 million people in Bangladesh will move to India rather than wade around in salt water. Miami will be underwater along with a good amount of Florida. In general, there will be a lot less dry land. Since most of the biggest cities are actually ocean ports, they probably be underwater as well.
One commonly overlooked fact is that most of Antarctica is below sea level. The ice sits atop the continent. Currently, the increased wind speed around the Antarctic is causing warm water to upwell near the continent which is unfreezing the bond between the land and ice. If that truly melts, finding arable land will be the least of our worries.
However, have no fear. Climate change is a myth perpetrated by 95% of climate scientists because they don't like humanity or at least not as much as we have. And even if climate change is not a myth, humans have nothing to do with it. Dumping tons of a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere won't harm anything; it has been proven that human dumped CO2 doesn't observe physical laws. This isn't the rising sea level you are looking for.
More to the point, all you've been taught in freshman year is a few languages and technologies, you've not done any actual computer science yet. You have one chance (now) to learn enough computer science to last the rest of your career; that computer science will prepare you to work just about anywhere, except for... ...you have precious little domain knowledge. Most computer scientists are not going to be hired for web development or anything else that can be done in China or India. There are a lot of niches in chemistry, biology, etc. where you marry domain knowledge with computer science. Fill one of those niches, and you'll be set for awhile.
And this deep analysis holds up until the terrorists get nukes, or chem weapons. Nice fairytale.
Uh...don't know if you've noticed but Muslim terrorists have no problems attacking other Muslims. If we forget about the intrasect animosities....
In this corner of the WWF, we have the Shi'ite, rabid anti-Jew, chief country planning nuclear weapons in the hopes it will make their dicks look bigger, claim women have no souls, supporting Assad against his country.
In this other corner of the WWF, we have Sunni, rabid anti-Jew, chief country proud of stoning women for looking at men and holder of an annual Stone Satan Jamboree, able to take billions of oil wealth and still make it nothing more than sand.
In the other corner, we have the Al Qaeda wack-a-jews, willing to use any weapons to attack just about everyone else, dreams of a Grand Unified Sultanate stretching from one corner of Heaven to the other corner of Hell, creators of Hell on Earth.
In this other corner, we have the cowering masses of Muslims, also rabid anti-Jew, unable to raise a whimper to any atrocity as long as it was done in the name of Allah, worried to death their kids are going to wipe their toy governments off the map.
Who will win, who will raise the belt showing them the winner of solving Hitler's Jewish Problem?
The reason aliens would come to earth is our women. It turns out alien women screech a lot about alien men always zipping off their planets and never taking them anywhere. Plus, have you ever seen alien women? No wonder the alien men want to come here.
Yah, I heard about that reaction. It was a breath of fresh air that I hope blows down out of Canada like the cold fronts. To what do you attribute this rare form of sanity?
The guy was saying "research" when he meant "development". I doubt much development gets done at MSR beyond proof of concept. MS appears to lack an internal structure to do development starting at the output of MSR. And that might be due to marketing being too big for MS.
If you think about it, marketing is naturally antagonistic to new ideas. They spend years developing markets for products. Being asked to downplay those markets and their sunk costs for something new which has no track record of producing bonuses for the serfs manning the marketing barricades is asking them to cut their own pay. Why would they do that? There is no incentive. It won't do for management to say, but this is going to be big and allow us to compete against Apple in this market.
Take fondleslabs. MS wants this new market. However, their marketing has just spent the last few decades selling customers on desk and laptops and their souls to Satan. Why should they get behind something that will eat their bonuses? So MS forces through something. The marketers probably figured that if fondleslabs were going to be promoted, then their interface had to look something like desk and laptops. No one would put desktop UI on a fondle, so they went the other way...and result was Windows 8.
Research had nothing to do with it.
I ride both side of that fence. The problem for researchers is that in order to solve a research problem, you need to knock it down to something quite small that you can get some mathematical modeling behind it and prove its properties. To solve an engineering problem, you need to corral several different technologies and get them all to work together. There are very few small engineering problems in the sense of generating new products.
You might think to model the engineering problems in mathematics. The problem: scale. These are large problems with many very different parts. To model something that big in mathematics is asking more than humans can deliver because it requires you make several different areas of math work together when you have little theory for their interconnections. And any one engineering problem has several different models depending upon which aspect you are concentrating upon.
Research problems might start as some aspect of an engineering problem, but you won't get much insight from the engineers who are not trained in abstract general methods. It frequently happens in mathematics that to solve a difficult problem, you need to enlarge its scope or generality even though it will still only cover a small slice of behavior. Engineers cannot even talk to you in your language because mathematics to them was done by long dead gods who brought the mathematics down from the mountain and none may change them.
Engineering problems also have many intricacies, enough that makes their mathematics expressions awkward at best. To learn what those are, you need to do engineering. Engineering cannot be taught in that sense, you cannot sit down with your books and crank out a design. It takes a lot of prior experience. And engineers must also produce a product that can be produced efficiently. It won't do to have just any solution because it has some internal beauty like mathematics. It needs to be capable of reproduction and efficient reproduction at that. This notion isn't something readily expressible in mathematics.
Not really, look at employment in the coal industry...it has shrunk quite a bit and certainly a lot recently as gas is eating their lunch.
They got started by Leland Stanford who was a railroad baron and not a particularly nice guy. However, one does not spend an endowment, one invests the endowment to use some of the returns for Stanford research, education, etc. and they use some for plowing back into the endowment so that inflation doesn't make it go bye-bye.
Lemme guess, if you win the lottery, you are going to piss it all on wine, women, and song.
Well, as fracking and the gas industry is starting to eat coal's bread and butter, i.e., the power plants (no one is planning new coal power plants in the U.S., they are all gas), it was probably a good financial move spun to feed the Stanford rank and file as a eco-conscious decision to save the planet blah blah blah.
It is good for the environment to have coal take it in the neck, but I'd rather the U.S. go back to nuclear. It is also bad for the coal states and the coal workers.
Nonsense! Those trumpets were playing "Hey Jude" over, and over, and over, and....
" in-office happy hour"..what's wrong with this picture?
1. the company is clueless and doesn't care about their insurance premiums should anything go wrong?
2. the kiddies are immature and think drinking at work is a good idea?
3. the management is immature and thinks drinking at work is a good idea?
4. tech and alcohol goes well together, "Hey Boomer, I've got an idea, let's see if we can connect the gizmo with the whatsit".
Not all stocks pay dividends.
"Sure there is. Granted, there's about a zillion forms of Libertarianism, just like everything else. " Nice dodge, and you expect us to swallow this? It is akin to talking to a communist who claims communism has never really been tried...maybe because whenever it has it led to totalitarianism.
In pre-war and during war Japan, the emperor was the living G-d on earth. Yes, the country did have a religion that they fanatically believed in. The analogy stands.
You are aware that Japan only surrendered after the A-bombs, right? And the U.S. was encouraging Stalin to open up another front for the Japanese in the hopes the U.S. wouldn't have to invade. MacArthur was all for invasion. The most in the Japanese military were all for dying until the last man, woman, and child. They had armed the populace with pitchforks and was teaching them how to gut an American GI. The Emperor signed off on the surrender and parts of the Japanese military attempted a coup but were put down due to some loyal (to the Emperor). Okinawa was only the last of a string of very bloody islands where most Japanese fought until they died or attempted to surrender to get close enough to American GIs to kill them with a grenade. Iwo Jima, Tinian, Saipan, Guam, all were nasty, brutish fights and the Japanese were flinging Kamikazis against American ships.
Fortunately, Admiral Nimitz knew better than to attempt an invasion of Japan and was against it. Germany was already gone, but it took many American lives and the wounded were arriving back in the U.S. with horrific injuries. Truman had to tell the American people the war wasn't over yet because an uncowed Japan would surely attempt to reconstruct its empire. Japanese atrocities in the Pacific and certainly China were legendary. The Pacific campaign had also claimed many American lives and wounded.
Now you sin in Truman's office. Some on his military staff tell you invasion is the only way...estimated U.S. casualties: 250,000 up to 1 million (they couldn't be sure other than the figure was appalling). Some on his military staff tell you the invasion is not necessary. You dither for about 3 months, bombing Japan is certainly reducing the country but they won't surrender. Now one of your secret projects offers a chance to blow some sense into the stiff-necked Japanese. Do you (a) take it, (b) invade at horrible cost, (c) do nothing and attempt to keep a war going that is fast losing support, (d) declare victory believing you will have to come back and fight the war again in 10 years? You have to decide Mr. President.
Guy: Hi. I'm a long lost relative of yours from the Olde Country. Our parents had a bet and promised their kids would pay up. You owe me $1000.
You: I don't know you from Adam. How do I know you are who you say you are.
Guy: I'm me, can't you see? Are you blind? Now fork over the moolah before I get medieval on your ass.
You: Uh....okay, here's the $1000. Please come back if you need more.