Errr... maybe, but the general effect on your basic MBA Potted Plant will be to avoid risks. Risks come with responsibility, responsibility comes with risk of admitting you were wrong and willing to take the consequences. An MBA with a failure associated with them is like a leper with a black mark on his/her soul.
Yes, HealthCare costs are a true problem. However, there is another true problem, insurance companies cherry picking customers so if you have a pre-existing condition, you are SOL. And many of the policies they were offering were nearly worthless, but they brought in a lot of money and paid out little.
That's not a valid argument for this. The main problem is the complexity of getting all the insurance companies coordinated. Kneecap those bozos and the problem becomes much easier.
Yes, yes, I know the argument. Government Death Panels. In the insurance industry, they are called Actuaries. See what a change in name can do even if they do the same job?
Did it ever occur to you that the Govt is composed of many agencies? Your criticism is along the lines of "they can send a man to the moon but they cannot cure cancer". I find it helps to keep the apples and the oranges in separate piles.
The SEC under Bush. They decimated it, and helped bring on the Great Recession. Then they turned around and claimed the U.S. shouldn't bail out the banks because it was their own fault...and if that took down the rest of the American economy, they, the Republicans, were willing to endure that. To be clear, it was their own fault, but the SEC should have been riding shotgun over those pillars of capitalism and they didn't.
Well, we could have two lines, one for normal people and one for people with suicide vests. We don't need to be too particular that people get in the correct line because it's all security theater right? Hell, let the ones with the suicide vests sit right behind the cabin in first class to make sure they get the biggest bang for their buck.
How's that for security theater. We'll just sit out in our lawn chairs while the nutjobs randomly blow up planes overhead:
Joe Sixpack: Wow, that was a big one!!
Jane Sixpack: Wait, I'll get some more beers, this is going to be a great night.
If they used agile to build it, they are already screwed beyond repair. Agile only results in a dirty snowball of a system for large systems. And this sounds like agile too. They clearly did not architect for volume...oops.
HHS was supposed to provide the supervisory role. Problem was they didn't have the experience to do such a thing. In a way, they were stuck. If they'd've hired a single contractor, they'd still be in litigation because the others would have sued. Hiring many meant they couldn't use a single company to ride shotgun because companies don't play well together in shotgun marriages.
They should have had the NSA do it. I hear they are quite good a building large systems.
That's plausible. I can also see Apple thinking there's no way Sony, Samsung, or anything MS would be a good iWatch. So they spread the rumor, sees who bites, and then figures out what's wrong with the early entries to see if they can do much better. If they cannot, they'll just bag it.
I think you are cutting the Republicans too much slack. The current crop of faux Republicans want to destroy trust in government. That way the voters will decide on less government. The Tea Baggers (and I include that Svengali, Grover Norquist) are even worse than that. They want to destroy the rest of the world's trust in the U.S. so that there will be no "foreign entanglements". Their belief is just the same as it was in the 1930's, that if the U.S. leaves the rest of the world alone, it will leave the U.S. alone. And that ended very badly.
The cryptic stuff comes because they used techno-geeks to build the sites. The techno-geeks talked to the insurance geeks and the new Geek-O-Rama was stillborn.
It is really hard work creating good user interfaces. Skimp on that or turn it over to people who don't converse well with the regular society and we get crap interfaces we have to suffer from. And it doesn't necessarily restricted to gui elements. I especially love the Verizon phone jungle where you can go around loops which are 9 interactions long:
Phone Systerm: Please allow us to direct your call to the responsible party.
Me: You have included a charge on my bill for feature A I did not ask for?
PS: Please press the correct button to choose features of feature A:
1. Would you like feature A to walk the dog?
2. Would you like to link feature A to feature B (but only if you choose feature C)?
3. Would you like to pay even more for feature A?
Me: Errr...none of those.
PS: We work to ensure your enjoyment with this new feature for you.
Me: I don't want it.
PS: Please press the # key for instructions on how to use your new feature.
Me: I DON'T WANT IT.
PS: Please allow us to direct your call to the responsible party.
Yes, there's no money in replication. More importantly, there is no money for replication. Who's going to fund replication studies? And it wouldn't be small amount of money.
Maybe what is needed is a tax on research to fund replication studies. That opens up another can of worms, is one replication study enough? Who decides? Whether the Tea Baggers like it or not, this seems like an area that will require government intervention. Taxing research is unlikely to bring in enough money. Taxes will have to be raised somewhere to pay for it. (Several Tea Bagger angels were sacrificed in the writing of the previous sentence.)
More to the point, Republicans and to a lessor extent, Democrats, have become post-Science believers in the sense that they treat Science as just another form of politics. Neither side is interested in Scientific results, they are only interested in outcomes that bolster whatever opinion they have this week.
Both sides have decided that since Science produces few truths in the mathematical sense, it can all be made suspect. Scientific theories are only verifiable up to a certain epsilon. That gap has been deemed wide enough for both political parties to drive trucks of manure through. It is disingenuous at the least and downright stupid at the worst. It's somewhat like denying Einstein's relativity. Sure you can argue a lacuna here or there (not yet unified with quantum theory), yet there's no escaping gravity. To put it bluntly, they've invented their own G-d of the Gaps.
I concur that taxpayer funding has not produced politicized science, politicians did that to that thin veneer of science for which they have minimal intellectual capacity to understand.
Please try to keep up. The current crop of "conservative" (read libertarian) Republicans have no allegiance to Wall Street. Hell, during the banking crisis, they were the ones telling Wall Street to go to hell. They didn't want to bail out the banks, or AIG, or the GM or Chrysler. When they shut down the government, it was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street telling the Republicans to knock it off. Now, the corporate interests are interested in running candidates against the Tea Party.
"I'm struggling to comprehend why people are making such a big deal out of Apple's free upgrade." They aren't. But it is difficult to tell that on Slashdot.
Not really. I use Macs because I cannot stand Window's interfaces (any of them) nor Linux's. That said, I do a fair amount of development for Linux. I'm not impressed. I generally switch back to Mac when I need decent guis for apps. Once I'm done creating the new widgets (C++, etc), I use the Breakstone gui for svn and then do an svn update on Linux and off we go into linking, compiling, and debugging hell.
I don't believe it is helpful to look at particular years and their figures. We need to look into what caused those years to be good or bad and those are the previous years.
Just as an example, Clinton did very well by the time he left office, right? Well, he was helped by the internet bubble. And the stock market tanked in April-May of the election year when it looked like Gore would beat Bush. Also, he and his Republican congress couldn't agree on spending, so spending was held in check.
Bush started out okay, then 9/11 happened and knocked the U.S. into a recession. They decided on doing Afghanistan. That wasn't costly, but Iraq was. In the meantime, he pushed through tax cuts and didn't fund the Iraq war with tax increases. The tax cuts put the budget firmly in the red. He also extended Medicare with Part D, that was more money. Meanwhile the housing bubble was happening, and neither Greenspan, nor Bush, nor the Republicans, nor the Democrats wanted to puncture that balloon. Had they done that in 2005, Obama wouldn't have been dealt the bad deck he got. That decade also helped shake out moderates in both parties, the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting cemented it.
Obama isn't blameless, he turned healthcare over to the Dems in Congress who proceeded to decorate it like a Christmas tree and who decided they didn't need any Republican buy-in since they controlled both Houses figuring that Americans were going to love them for it and make their majorities unassailable for years. Obama shot himself in the foot on that one. It only took 3 years for them chickens to come home to roost. The Dems also sold the soul of the ACA to the insurance companies guaranteeing it would be FrankenCare. There were supposed to be healthcare cooperatives like Germany has. The insurance companies have all but spiked those. Most will go out of business shortly.
Before I forget, the individual mandate for buying healthcare, that was a Republican idea from the Heritage Institute (I believe in the 2000's if not before in the 1990's) before it was taken over by Jim Demint.
Yes, the government spends too much, but it is a large government and can walk and chew gum at the same time. 2/3's of the budget is entitlements. Even SS is now in the red every year. It still has its trust fund, but those are government I.O.U.s. The government has to borrow when those get cashed.
From The Congressional Research Service: Federal Research and Development Funding, FY2012 research funding was $138.869 Billion (actually a lot higher than I figured). Obama requested for FY2013 $140.820 Billion. That was broken down into: seven federal agencies would receive 95.8% of total federal R&D funding, with the Department of Defense (50.6%) and the Department of Health and Human Services (22.3%, primarily for the National Institutes of Health) accounting for nearly three-fourths of all R&D funding. Also, Defense tends to do a lot of research in the health sciences to mitigate the cost of was on individual bodies, and there is the spinoffs into the civilian economy of military research.
Obama didn't get all that, I'm unsure what Congress approved but since sequester and 2013's CR, we can assume the research for 2013 was somewhat south of $138.869 Billion. The 2013 deficit from the Congressional Budget Office isn't out yet because of the shutdown, but they were forecasting a deficit of $642 billion.
Total foreign aid for 2012 was about $48 Billion (from the State Dept.'s Executive Budget Summary FUNCTION 150 & OTHER INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS). The Obama's request for the Defense Dept. for 2012 was $553 billion, which doesn't include the sequester or the CR which ran 2012's budget, so that total was south of that.
The consequence is that if we completely whack the Defense Dept. and Science funding, we could just about cover the yearly deficit....except that it won't in the future. Economists expect the budget deficit to drift downward for the next 4 years and then spiral up as the Blue Haired really start demanding their several pounds of flesh from the rest. And whacking Defense and Science will have effects throughout the economy, not least of which losing control of the shipping lanes to some rather unsavory international characters. Also, whacking Defense tends to knock pts off the GDP so that will cause the deficit to reappear. Whacking science similarly except the effect gets greater the farther into the future one looks.
For this G.O.P. and Tea Party, the cut back in research is considered a victory, not the least that climate research has been cut back. They and their fellow travelers, the Libertarians, have no use for government funded research.
As for finding other sources of funding, nothing comparable to the fed. dollars is on the horizon anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Errr... maybe, but the general effect on your basic MBA Potted Plant will be to avoid risks. Risks come with responsibility, responsibility comes with risk of admitting you were wrong and willing to take the consequences. An MBA with a failure associated with them is like a leper with a black mark on his/her soul.
Yes, HealthCare costs are a true problem. However, there is another true problem, insurance companies cherry picking customers so if you have a pre-existing condition, you are SOL. And many of the policies they were offering were nearly worthless, but they brought in a lot of money and paid out little.
That's not a valid argument for this. The main problem is the complexity of getting all the insurance companies coordinated. Kneecap those bozos and the problem becomes much easier.
Yes, yes, I know the argument. Government Death Panels. In the insurance industry, they are called Actuaries. See what a change in name can do even if they do the same job?
Did it ever occur to you that the Govt is composed of many agencies? Your criticism is along the lines of "they can send a man to the moon but they cannot cure cancer". I find it helps to keep the apples and the oranges in separate piles.
The SEC under Bush. They decimated it, and helped bring on the Great Recession. Then they turned around and claimed the U.S. shouldn't bail out the banks because it was their own fault...and if that took down the rest of the American economy, they, the Republicans, were willing to endure that. To be clear, it was their own fault, but the SEC should have been riding shotgun over those pillars of capitalism and they didn't.
Well, we could have two lines, one for normal people and one for people with suicide vests. We don't need to be too particular that people get in the correct line because it's all security theater right? Hell, let the ones with the suicide vests sit right behind the cabin in first class to make sure they get the biggest bang for their buck.
How's that for security theater. We'll just sit out in our lawn chairs while the nutjobs randomly blow up planes overhead:
Joe Sixpack: Wow, that was a big one!!
Jane Sixpack: Wait, I'll get some more beers, this is going to be a great night.
If they used agile to build it, they are already screwed beyond repair. Agile only results in a dirty snowball of a system for large systems. And this sounds like agile too. They clearly did not architect for volume...oops.
HHS was supposed to provide the supervisory role. Problem was they didn't have the experience to do such a thing. In a way, they were stuck. If they'd've hired a single contractor, they'd still be in litigation because the others would have sued. Hiring many meant they couldn't use a single company to ride shotgun because companies don't play well together in shotgun marriages.
They should have had the NSA do it. I hear they are quite good a building large systems.
I see, so you want to replicate Federal regulatory enforcement in 50 states. Yep, that's going to be cost effective.
Good luck getting its nuclear reactors going.
That's plausible. I can also see Apple thinking there's no way Sony, Samsung, or anything MS would be a good iWatch. So they spread the rumor, sees who bites, and then figures out what's wrong with the early entries to see if they can do much better. If they cannot, they'll just bag it.
I think you are cutting the Republicans too much slack. The current crop of faux Republicans want to destroy trust in government. That way the voters will decide on less government. The Tea Baggers (and I include that Svengali, Grover Norquist) are even worse than that. They want to destroy the rest of the world's trust in the U.S. so that there will be no "foreign entanglements". Their belief is just the same as it was in the 1930's, that if the U.S. leaves the rest of the world alone, it will leave the U.S. alone. And that ended very badly.
The cryptic stuff comes because they used techno-geeks to build the sites. The techno-geeks talked to the insurance geeks and the new Geek-O-Rama was stillborn.
It is really hard work creating good user interfaces. Skimp on that or turn it over to people who don't converse well with the regular society and we get crap interfaces we have to suffer from. And it doesn't necessarily restricted to gui elements. I especially love the Verizon phone jungle where you can go around loops which are 9 interactions long:
Phone Systerm: Please allow us to direct your call to the responsible party.
Me: You have included a charge on my bill for feature A I did not ask for?
PS: Please press the correct button to choose features of feature A:
1. Would you like feature A to walk the dog?
2. Would you like to link feature A to feature B (but only if you choose feature C)?
3. Would you like to pay even more for feature A?
Me: Errr...none of those.
PS: We work to ensure your enjoyment with this new feature for you.
Me: I don't want it.
PS: Please press the # key for instructions on how to use your new feature.
Me: I DON'T WANT IT.
PS: Please allow us to direct your call to the responsible party.
Eh, they just wanted the bar set so Rand Paul could understand the site. Mitch McConnell is SOL though.
Yes, there's no money in replication. More importantly, there is no money for replication. Who's going to fund replication studies? And it wouldn't be small amount of money.
Maybe what is needed is a tax on research to fund replication studies. That opens up another can of worms, is one replication study enough? Who decides? Whether the Tea Baggers like it or not, this seems like an area that will require government intervention. Taxing research is unlikely to bring in enough money. Taxes will have to be raised somewhere to pay for it. (Several Tea Bagger angels were sacrificed in the writing of the previous sentence.)
More to the point, Republicans and to a lessor extent, Democrats, have become post-Science believers in the sense that they treat Science as just another form of politics. Neither side is interested in Scientific results, they are only interested in outcomes that bolster whatever opinion they have this week.
Both sides have decided that since Science produces few truths in the mathematical sense, it can all be made suspect. Scientific theories are only verifiable up to a certain epsilon. That gap has been deemed wide enough for both political parties to drive trucks of manure through. It is disingenuous at the least and downright stupid at the worst. It's somewhat like denying Einstein's relativity. Sure you can argue a lacuna here or there (not yet unified with quantum theory), yet there's no escaping gravity. To put it bluntly, they've invented their own G-d of the Gaps.
I concur that taxpayer funding has not produced politicized science, politicians did that to that thin veneer of science for which they have minimal intellectual capacity to understand.
So, you are saying that we should be awash in industry funded research on climate change. Okay, where is it?
Please try to keep up. The current crop of "conservative" (read libertarian) Republicans have no allegiance to Wall Street. Hell, during the banking crisis, they were the ones telling Wall Street to go to hell. They didn't want to bail out the banks, or AIG, or the GM or Chrysler. When they shut down the government, it was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street telling the Republicans to knock it off. Now, the corporate interests are interested in running candidates against the Tea Party.
Microsoft.
"I'm struggling to comprehend why people are making such a big deal out of Apple's free upgrade." They aren't. But it is difficult to tell that on Slashdot.
Not really. I use Macs because I cannot stand Window's interfaces (any of them) nor Linux's. That said, I do a fair amount of development for Linux. I'm not impressed. I generally switch back to Mac when I need decent guis for apps. Once I'm done creating the new widgets (C++, etc), I use the Breakstone gui for svn and then do an svn update on Linux and off we go into linking, compiling, and debugging hell.
If you are sure, then you surely must have some evidence for why you believe this, yes?
I don't believe it is helpful to look at particular years and their figures. We need to look into what caused those years to be good or bad and those are the previous years.
Just as an example, Clinton did very well by the time he left office, right? Well, he was helped by the internet bubble. And the stock market tanked in April-May of the election year when it looked like Gore would beat Bush. Also, he and his Republican congress couldn't agree on spending, so spending was held in check.
Bush started out okay, then 9/11 happened and knocked the U.S. into a recession. They decided on doing Afghanistan. That wasn't costly, but Iraq was. In the meantime, he pushed through tax cuts and didn't fund the Iraq war with tax increases. The tax cuts put the budget firmly in the red. He also extended Medicare with Part D, that was more money. Meanwhile the housing bubble was happening, and neither Greenspan, nor Bush, nor the Republicans, nor the Democrats wanted to puncture that balloon. Had they done that in 2005, Obama wouldn't have been dealt the bad deck he got. That decade also helped shake out moderates in both parties, the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting cemented it.
Obama isn't blameless, he turned healthcare over to the Dems in Congress who proceeded to decorate it like a Christmas tree and who decided they didn't need any Republican buy-in since they controlled both Houses figuring that Americans were going to love them for it and make their majorities unassailable for years. Obama shot himself in the foot on that one. It only took 3 years for them chickens to come home to roost. The Dems also sold the soul of the ACA to the insurance companies guaranteeing it would be FrankenCare. There were supposed to be healthcare cooperatives like Germany has. The insurance companies have all but spiked those. Most will go out of business shortly.
Before I forget, the individual mandate for buying healthcare, that was a Republican idea from the Heritage Institute (I believe in the 2000's if not before in the 1990's) before it was taken over by Jim Demint.
Yes, the government spends too much, but it is a large government and can walk and chew gum at the same time. 2/3's of the budget is entitlements. Even SS is now in the red every year. It still has its trust fund, but those are government I.O.U.s. The government has to borrow when those get cashed.
From The Congressional Research Service: Federal Research and Development Funding, FY2012 research funding was $138.869 Billion (actually a lot higher than I figured). Obama requested for FY2013 $140.820 Billion. That was broken down into: seven federal agencies would receive 95.8% of total federal R&D funding, with the Department of Defense (50.6%) and the Department of Health and Human Services (22.3%, primarily for the National Institutes of Health) accounting for nearly three-fourths of all R&D funding. Also, Defense tends to do a lot of research in the health sciences to mitigate the cost of was on individual bodies, and there is the spinoffs into the civilian economy of military research.
Obama didn't get all that, I'm unsure what Congress approved but since sequester and 2013's CR, we can assume the research for 2013 was somewhat south of $138.869 Billion. The 2013 deficit from the Congressional Budget Office isn't out yet because of the shutdown, but they were forecasting a deficit of $642 billion.
Total foreign aid for 2012 was about $48 Billion (from the State Dept.'s Executive Budget Summary FUNCTION 150 & OTHER INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS). The Obama's request for the Defense Dept. for 2012 was $553 billion, which doesn't include the sequester or the CR which ran 2012's budget, so that total was south of that.
The consequence is that if we completely whack the Defense Dept. and Science funding, we could just about cover the yearly deficit....except that it won't in the future. Economists expect the budget deficit to drift downward for the next 4 years and then spiral up as the Blue Haired really start demanding their several pounds of flesh from the rest. And whacking Defense and Science will have effects throughout the economy, not least of which losing control of the shipping lanes to some rather unsavory international characters. Also, whacking Defense tends to knock pts off the GDP so that will cause the deficit to reappear. Whacking science similarly except the effect gets greater the farther into the future one looks.
For this G.O.P. and Tea Party, the cut back in research is considered a victory, not the least that climate research has been cut back. They and their fellow travelers, the Libertarians, have no use for government funded research.
As for finding other sources of funding, nothing comparable to the fed. dollars is on the horizon anywhere.