All this drone stuff will be fine until one manages to crash into an airliner, bringing it down. Then the FAA will be swamped with people demanding to know why the drones were allowed in the first place.
Which is also true of traditional RC aircraft, which have been flown for decades - with plenty of opportunities to get up into the path of full-scale aircraft. The carnage has been incredible, one plane after the next falling out of the sky.
The problem isn't going to be people shooting crop health, checking their gutters, doing an aerial during a TV shoot, or getting real estate photos. The problem is going to be malicious users. Just like wrong-headed people who choose to be malicious with lead pipes, shotguns, or kitchen knives.
A bunch of laws telling law abiding people not to fly their camera robot over 400' will mean exactly nothing to someone who doesn't care about laws.
The question was why this is interesting to the slashdot audience. The answer is that this demographic is interested in how the government looks into and acts upon things that most people think of as not-really-public-stuff.
Regardless of your take on how the editor wrote the headline, the concept here (the government empowering trash collectors to police your behavior after looking through what you throw out) is right there in keeping with the government doing all sorts of other things that involve prying into your behavior with an eye towards controlling it. Technology is the most common or at least a highly visible venue for that sort of intrusion these days, so other blatant examples of government micromanagement (like looking through your trash) serve nicely to remind technologists of the larger underlying issues, and that there ARE such issues.
OK, you got me. For a moment there I thought you were taking yourself seriously, and having a rant, however misguided. It's a shame there's no satire/sarcasm tag to reward you for your sense of humor. That was a good one!
And there is no way to convince me that the state can't defeat them with its little finger
Which state are you talking about? If a state doesn't have a coherent, functional military with the resolve to fight against these guys, then there's nothing else up their sleeves to use. Iraq wasn't ready for this. ISIS just kidnapped another 68 Iraqi soldiers to use as extortion leverage, and has killed a bunch more using suicide bombers. Recent recruits there have no stomach for fighting people like that with only what Iraq has that passes as its own air power for support. Their "little finger" isn't nearly enough to protect and hold the dam in Mosul, for example, let alone stamp this group out of existence.
Well here in our state, we've now got a rain tax. So all they have to do is tweak the law that makes guesses about how much grass you have (and this how much you should be charged each year when it rains X amount), and instead make guesses about how much wind-interfering surface area your house has, and how that might be disturbing, through turbulence, the mating habits of a special sub-species of gnats.
Not that you'd like to make a useful point by actually speaking of substance or anything. No, it's just "you're wrong, and I know secret things that you don't." Which is always a sure sign that you don't, actually. My perspective is shaped by daily reality: higher premiums, wildly higher deductibles, millions of people still not covered, millions of people now covered by charging other people for their consumption, more national debt, and a coming tsunami of yet more rate increases for millions of people. Yay, it's "Affordable!"
Other than the fact that they can use it to pay off more muscle, to make up for not always being able to attract enough true believer goons. Also works for buying supplies, getting people on airplanes, and other things that you can't get with ammo left in the dirt by the fleeing Iraqi army.
If kidnapping, extortion, and good old fashioned robbery were so profitable, the everybody would be doing it.
In places without the rule of law, everybody (with the muscle) IS doing it. That's why it's a major industry in certain parts of Africa, Central America, and the Middle East. Which of course you know, but would rather ignore.
If you think they can do all this damage without continued aid from the US/Europe (Saudi, especially them. You are so barking up the wrong tree), Russia, China, whoever is competing for the territory, then I'll have to assume you own several bridges and the Haney Farm...
This sentence is impossible to parse.
But I'll take a guess. You think that 30,000 guys armed with millions of dollars, fanatical recruits, and huge numbers of weapons abandoned by fleeing Iraqi forces, are unable to walk into village and towns and kill people? How complicated do you think this actually is? Your need for a fantasy narrative is making you invent something far to complicated, and you're now confusing yourself and writing incoherently.
Who said anything about defending their honor? We already defended them by delivering food, water, and medicine, and by running off and/or killing the ISIS guys on the ground that were preventing them (the Yazidis) from escaping the spot in which they were being starved to death. You know, bombing for peace. If a Yazidi family had a peaceful breakfast this morning, it was because of US air power.
Says the governor. Intelligence people on our side apparently think it's anywhere from at least "millions" to close to what the local Nineveh officials estimated. Regardless, whatever they've been extracting from the central banks they've taken apparently pales compared to the revenue they get from kidnapping, extortion, and good old fashioned robbery. And, again, millions a day in oil proceeds. I know, you're still hoping you can just have their checking account locked, right?
So, you don't think cutting off funding to them is better than going to war?
You're right. We'll use a time machine to undo the hundreds of millions in cash they stole when they knocked over a bank (you have been paying attention, right?), and then we'll take steps to make oil no longer a commodity that places like Russia and China buy, so that we can dry up the millions a week that they're earning on the black market. Then we'll force Europeans and others to stop sending them millions of dollars in ransom money for the hostages they keep taking.
Let me guess, you were thinking about calling their bank and putting a hold on their Visa card, right? Yeah.
I'm really not sure why you mischaracterize neo-nazis as a non-violent group; ignorance is hard to believe
Who said anything about non-violent? They're violent. Just like local street thugs are violent. It's a law enforcement, not a military issue. They're not on the move with tanks and missiles. They're not taking over dams, or now running oil fields. If they were, that would rise to the level of a military issue. Do you really think that if some neo-Nazi movement in the US rose to the level of them occupying large portions of US states in the north, bordering Canada, and started killing off people with French heritage by the thousands, and the US government couldn't or wouldn't do anything to stop them as they spilled across borders, that Canada wouldn't take steps to prevent that cancer from spreading? Your example of such a huge militarized operation involving tens of thousands of neo-Nazis filling mass graves in the while the US military runs away from them leaving them to expand their territory as they promise they're coming next for other countries and territories... is a total fantasy. Because that's not happening and won't. They'd never make it past the skirmish-at-the-compound (a la Waco, TX) level, let alone occupy whole swaths of the upper midwest, slaughtering thousands of people.
On the other hand, that's exactly what IS happening with ISIS. One you can deal with as a law enforcement problem. The other is a military problem.
told Saddam what he had to do to keep us from coming back and left with the approval of the international community
Which Saddam never did. You get that, right? He kept building/importing long range missiles. Kept shooting at the aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones that were set up to keep him from continuing his ethnic slaughter in the north and south, kept starving people as he skimmed aid money to rebuild his guard and more palaces, continued to play cat and mouse with UN inspectors, never disclosed what he did with all of the VX that the UN inspectors originally saw, and so on.
He never did any of what he agreed to do when he was pushed back out of Kuwait - that conflict in effect never ended, because Saddam chose not to actually live up to the agreement that kept him alive and in limited power. Intelligence agencies from multiple countries had strong reasons to think that he was still in possession of at least some of his huge pile of chemical weapons (he was), making missiles (he was), shooting at aircraft (he was), killing rivals (he was)... and every attempt to find and catalog his chemical weapons was rebuffed by his people on the scene. It's quite possible that he himself was being lied to about how much he still had, by people who didn't want to lose their lives (and those of their families) by telling him the truth about how much had been trucked to Syria or otherwise abandoned. Doesn't matter: complete lack of his cooperation, ongoing targeting of allied aircraft, and the continuing deaths of Kurds and other minorities at his hands were line-by-line violations of the agreement that kept the Gulf 1 invasion from rolling the rest of the way into Baghdad. Eventually that operation did happen, because he (Saddam) effectively insisted on it by never changing his Kuwait invasion period posture.
The answer you're looking for is best stated as an old signature line.
"Bombing for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity."
What a stupid, empty, non-sequitor of a hippy aphorism. If someone has a camp full of heavy weapons, out of which they are launching daily slaughter and earnest attempts at genocide (a la the Yazidis, just as an example ISIS victim group), and you use an airstrike to stop that slaughter... the resulting end of the campaign to kill that group of people isn't good, from where you sit? You'd rather, instead of "bombing" to stop them, that we line up a huge logistical support operation and send in ground troops to get in protracted firefights to the same? And take weeks or months to set it up, by which time of course all of the Yazidis would be very thoroughly dead at the hands of ISIS?
If you really think your quoted platitude makes sense, then you'd also be against anyone using force to stop a rape in progress, right? Because that would like "Violence For Safety," right? Right?
You might look up the definition of sovereign state [wikipedia.org]. Throwing bombs on another states territory without explicit permission is an act of aggression.
You're right! So when Syria launches missiles and artillery at our NATO ally, Turkey, and creates a huge and dangerous refugee problem that extends across multiple borders, it's something to worry about, isn't it? I doubt that Syria had "explicit permission" to strike Turkey. Worrying about the sovereignty of Syria (as it pours money and weapons into the hands of groups that call for the total destruction of another country, Israel, and has camped out in its territory a large and heavily armed and financed group - ISIS - that is attacking other countries and promises to do more) is hilarious.
By that logic (or lack thereof, IMO), Europe has every right to bomb neo-Nazi targets on US soil as a "defensive" measure against far-right ideology, and the US has every right to bomb Scandinavia as a "defensive" measure against socialist ideology.
Do find a lot of examples of neo-Nazi idiots with hundreds of millions of stolen dollars and heavy weapons rounding up thousands of people and promising to slaughter them because of their religion, or marching cops and soldiers into trenches and machine gunning them down? Are you finding lots of examples of Scandinavian socialists wagging their fingers at the camera and then lopping heads of of hundreds of people, including journalists? No? Do you see either group promising to tear down embassies and kill everyone in them, and then heading that general direction in stolen armored vehicles carrying RPGs and worse? No?
Neo-Nazis talk a lot. But they're just noisy idiots. ISIS actually do what they say, and now control large swaths of land in which they are actually in real life murdering thousands of people, and bragging about it.
If all ISIS did was post angry rants online, you'd be right. But they're an army of 30,000+ people who have completely taken over large territories, only recently held a dam that, if damaged, could seriously threaten US and European (among others) people in large numbers on the ground in key cities. Defanging these guys isn't merely an ideological exercise, it's necessary in very simple, practical terms. Something you're pretending you don't understand so you can make hollow points with people who also don't want to think it through. We have a fellow NATO member that is being swamped with refugees, and which has had air strikes and artillery lobbed at it from the the nice peaceful Syrian government that you think shouldn't have its feathers ruffled.
This doesn't mean I approve of Obama's specific strategy and tactics. This (a large air campaign involving lots of locals, too) didn't have to happen. But his utter bumbling in the wake of Syria's use of chemical
Can someone convince me that in the absence of a specific invitation by the legitimate Syrian government, which is the case this time, this [US] action cannot be defined as aggression?
IS/ISIS/ISIL is the aggressor, slaughtering thousands of people for being insufficiently Islamic, etc.
Hitting their command/control and training operations, from which tens of thousands of them are directed and supplied, is DEFENSIVE, not aggressive. That they happen to be running their little shop of horrors out of towns they've captured in Syria simply means that that's where some of the defensive action has to take place.
Like this is any mystery to anybody, right? Right?
Nah. You just talked about subsidies. You said: "They're not going to help here, because our situation is exactly what the law calls for. If you're making more than $60k, you don't GET subsidies, you have to GIVE subsidies to other people (like you)."
Exactly. If you don't qualify for subsidies, then there IS NO CHEAPER MAGIC SOLUTION than those that the regulated insurance companies in the state advertise. They don't have the option of having secret cheaper-than-the-exchange plans. So if you call a hotline and complain that your new insurance plan is too expensive, their ONLY OPTION is to try to find a way to qualify you for a plan that somebody else is forced to help you buy. Otherwise, the price is what the price is.
Especially the one that pointed out that it was those very same insurers that you implicitly praise that raised their rates to where they are now.
For which they had no choice. They are required by law to suddenly provide a range of coverage that was not previously built into their pricing. If you were suddenly told that you had to provide a bunch of new services or else, would you just eat the loss, or raise your prices in order to maintain your business? Insurance companies work on smaller margins than companies in many, many other industries. Remove that margin, and they are out of business. Now, that may be what the ACA backers secretly want, but in the meantime, you raise your prices to deal with the fact that your government has just substantially raised your costs.
They *knew* that they had just a few years before those rates became government controlled
They've always been government controlled. Every state in the union has an insurance regulating body to which those companies must turn for approval in order to change rates. And each of those scenarios plays out in something of a vacuum, because laws prevent insurance companies from providing services across state lines. The government has been entirely in control of this stuff for decades (as if you didn't know that!).
In civilized parts of the world, that would be considered collusion and price fixing.
No, it's known as state regulation. The companies who have a very innovative way to deliver the same (government approved) class of services with less overhead MAY be able to offer a lower price if they can survive doing so. But there's generally very, very little latitude in the cost/price recipe before the insurer is on intolerably thin ice.
Your state's governor was one of the ones that worked to sabotage the implementation of the ACA.
No, my state's governor is a major liberal Democrat, and was a serious cheerleader for ACA. He promised that our state would be a shining example of the law's implementation, and swore that he would use our local tax dollars to make a better web-facing exchange experience than the federal site could ever be. Then he made his deputy governor more or less a full-time ACA guy. He then spent over $200 million to completely botch the whole thing, and it had to be scrapped.
You've identified changes the law needs, but nothing like that has even been discussed since the only ACA votes that Congress will try are about repealing the whole thing.
No, these issues were discussed loudly and often BEFORE the law was completed. The Republicans pointed out these and many more baked-in flaws, but were of course ignored. The president keeps saying this is now all a matter of "settled law," and has said he will not accept changes to it. Same thing that Pelosi and Reid say, obviously.
Yet you're still unable to find any blame that should be directed at the Republicans.
Right. Because their input was refused, they were not allowed in the writing of the law, and they DID NOT VOTE FOR IT. This resulting mess was created and rammed through entirely by the Democrats. It's theirs and their mess. They are why I'm out thousands of dollars more this year than last for inferior results.
Slashdot Mirror
I recommend a project that auto-edits slashdot headlines to avoid trailing prepositions.
Poor headline grammar is something up with which we should not put.
Typical RC planes can only be flown within a short distance of the field
People have been playing with long-range RC for many years.
And there have been various autopilots, orientation tools, and FPV-style links for a long time. Greatly predating the kids-with-multirotors era.
All this drone stuff will be fine until one manages to crash into an airliner, bringing it down. Then the FAA will be swamped with people demanding to know why the drones were allowed in the first place.
Which is also true of traditional RC aircraft, which have been flown for decades - with plenty of opportunities to get up into the path of full-scale aircraft. The carnage has been incredible, one plane after the next falling out of the sky.
The problem isn't going to be people shooting crop health, checking their gutters, doing an aerial during a TV shoot, or getting real estate photos. The problem is going to be malicious users. Just like wrong-headed people who choose to be malicious with lead pipes, shotguns, or kitchen knives.
A bunch of laws telling law abiding people not to fly their camera robot over 400' will mean exactly nothing to someone who doesn't care about laws.
The question was why this is interesting to the slashdot audience. The answer is that this demographic is interested in how the government looks into and acts upon things that most people think of as not-really-public-stuff.
And what does it have to do with technology?
Regardless of your take on how the editor wrote the headline, the concept here (the government empowering trash collectors to police your behavior after looking through what you throw out) is right there in keeping with the government doing all sorts of other things that involve prying into your behavior with an eye towards controlling it. Technology is the most common or at least a highly visible venue for that sort of intrusion these days, so other blatant examples of government micromanagement (like looking through your trash) serve nicely to remind technologists of the larger underlying issues, and that there ARE such issues.
to excite slashdot's conservative majority
OK, you got me. For a moment there I thought you were taking yourself seriously, and having a rant, however misguided. It's a shame there's no satire/sarcasm tag to reward you for your sense of humor. That was a good one!
Maryland's rain tax is a fine monument to, and classic symptom of its lefty/progressive entrenched government monoculture.
And there is no way to convince me that the state can't defeat them with its little finger
Which state are you talking about? If a state doesn't have a coherent, functional military with the resolve to fight against these guys, then there's nothing else up their sleeves to use. Iraq wasn't ready for this. ISIS just kidnapped another 68 Iraqi soldiers to use as extortion leverage, and has killed a bunch more using suicide bombers. Recent recruits there have no stomach for fighting people like that with only what Iraq has that passes as its own air power for support. Their "little finger" isn't nearly enough to protect and hold the dam in Mosul, for example, let alone stamp this group out of existence.
I see you wrote words after "Warmist religion" but, really, what's the point of reading them after that?
Because "warmist religion" is indeed a convenient shorthand way to refer to the thought process of legions of people who opine on this topic.
Well here in our state, we've now got a rain tax. So all they have to do is tweak the law that makes guesses about how much grass you have (and this how much you should be charged each year when it rains X amount), and instead make guesses about how much wind-interfering surface area your house has, and how that might be disturbing, through turbulence, the mating habits of a special sub-species of gnats.
Not that you'd like to make a useful point by actually speaking of substance or anything. No, it's just "you're wrong, and I know secret things that you don't." Which is always a sure sign that you don't, actually. My perspective is shaped by daily reality: higher premiums, wildly higher deductibles, millions of people still not covered, millions of people now covered by charging other people for their consumption, more national debt, and a coming tsunami of yet more rate increases for millions of people. Yay, it's "Affordable!"
All that paper is useless
Other than the fact that they can use it to pay off more muscle, to make up for not always being able to attract enough true believer goons. Also works for buying supplies, getting people on airplanes, and other things that you can't get with ammo left in the dirt by the fleeing Iraqi army.
If kidnapping, extortion, and good old fashioned robbery were so profitable, the everybody would be doing it.
In places without the rule of law, everybody (with the muscle) IS doing it. That's why it's a major industry in certain parts of Africa, Central America, and the Middle East. Which of course you know, but would rather ignore.
If you think they can do all this damage without continued aid from the US/Europe (Saudi, especially them. You are so barking up the wrong tree), Russia, China, whoever is competing for the territory, then I'll have to assume you own several bridges and the Haney Farm...
This sentence is impossible to parse.
But I'll take a guess. You think that 30,000 guys armed with millions of dollars, fanatical recruits, and huge numbers of weapons abandoned by fleeing Iraqi forces, are unable to walk into village and towns and kill people? How complicated do you think this actually is? Your need for a fantasy narrative is making you invent something far to complicated, and you're now confusing yourself and writing incoherently.
Hilarious copypasta from comedy web site.
I also like their satire about chem trails.
Who said anything about defending their honor? We already defended them by delivering food, water, and medicine, and by running off and/or killing the ISIS guys on the ground that were preventing them (the Yazidis) from escaping the spot in which they were being starved to death. You know, bombing for peace. If a Yazidi family had a peaceful breakfast this morning, it was because of US air power.
Hundreds of millions, eh? From a single bank
Says the governor. Intelligence people on our side apparently think it's anywhere from at least "millions" to close to what the local Nineveh officials estimated. Regardless, whatever they've been extracting from the central banks they've taken apparently pales compared to the revenue they get from kidnapping, extortion, and good old fashioned robbery. And, again, millions a day in oil proceeds. I know, you're still hoping you can just have their checking account locked, right?
So, you don't think cutting off funding to them is better than going to war?
You're right. We'll use a time machine to undo the hundreds of millions in cash they stole when they knocked over a bank (you have been paying attention, right?), and then we'll take steps to make oil no longer a commodity that places like Russia and China buy, so that we can dry up the millions a week that they're earning on the black market. Then we'll force Europeans and others to stop sending them millions of dollars in ransom money for the hostages they keep taking.
Let me guess, you were thinking about calling their bank and putting a hold on their Visa card, right? Yeah.
I'm really not sure why you mischaracterize neo-nazis as a non-violent group; ignorance is hard to believe
Who said anything about non-violent? They're violent. Just like local street thugs are violent. It's a law enforcement, not a military issue. They're not on the move with tanks and missiles. They're not taking over dams, or now running oil fields. If they were, that would rise to the level of a military issue. Do you really think that if some neo-Nazi movement in the US rose to the level of them occupying large portions of US states in the north, bordering Canada, and started killing off people with French heritage by the thousands, and the US government couldn't or wouldn't do anything to stop them as they spilled across borders, that Canada wouldn't take steps to prevent that cancer from spreading? Your example of such a huge militarized operation involving tens of thousands of neo-Nazis filling mass graves in the while the US military runs away from them leaving them to expand their territory as they promise they're coming next for other countries and territories ... is a total fantasy. Because that's not happening and won't. They'd never make it past the skirmish-at-the-compound (a la Waco, TX) level, let alone occupy whole swaths of the upper midwest, slaughtering thousands of people.
On the other hand, that's exactly what IS happening with ISIS. One you can deal with as a law enforcement problem. The other is a military problem.
told Saddam what he had to do to keep us from coming back and left with the approval of the international community
Which Saddam never did. You get that, right? He kept building/importing long range missiles. Kept shooting at the aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones that were set up to keep him from continuing his ethnic slaughter in the north and south, kept starving people as he skimmed aid money to rebuild his guard and more palaces, continued to play cat and mouse with UN inspectors, never disclosed what he did with all of the VX that the UN inspectors originally saw, and so on.
... and every attempt to find and catalog his chemical weapons was rebuffed by his people on the scene. It's quite possible that he himself was being lied to about how much he still had, by people who didn't want to lose their lives (and those of their families) by telling him the truth about how much had been trucked to Syria or otherwise abandoned. Doesn't matter: complete lack of his cooperation, ongoing targeting of allied aircraft, and the continuing deaths of Kurds and other minorities at his hands were line-by-line violations of the agreement that kept the Gulf 1 invasion from rolling the rest of the way into Baghdad. Eventually that operation did happen, because he (Saddam) effectively insisted on it by never changing his Kuwait invasion period posture.
He never did any of what he agreed to do when he was pushed back out of Kuwait - that conflict in effect never ended, because Saddam chose not to actually live up to the agreement that kept him alive and in limited power. Intelligence agencies from multiple countries had strong reasons to think that he was still in possession of at least some of his huge pile of chemical weapons (he was), making missiles (he was), shooting at aircraft (he was), killing rivals (he was)
The answer you're looking for is best stated as an old signature line.
"Bombing for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity."
What a stupid, empty, non-sequitor of a hippy aphorism. If someone has a camp full of heavy weapons, out of which they are launching daily slaughter and earnest attempts at genocide (a la the Yazidis, just as an example ISIS victim group), and you use an airstrike to stop that slaughter ... the resulting end of the campaign to kill that group of people isn't good, from where you sit? You'd rather, instead of "bombing" to stop them, that we line up a huge logistical support operation and send in ground troops to get in protracted firefights to the same? And take weeks or months to set it up, by which time of course all of the Yazidis would be very thoroughly dead at the hands of ISIS?
If you really think your quoted platitude makes sense, then you'd also be against anyone using force to stop a rape in progress, right? Because that would like "Violence For Safety," right? Right?
You might look up the definition of sovereign state [wikipedia.org]. Throwing bombs on another states territory without explicit permission is an act of aggression.
You're right! So when Syria launches missiles and artillery at our NATO ally, Turkey, and creates a huge and dangerous refugee problem that extends across multiple borders, it's something to worry about, isn't it? I doubt that Syria had "explicit permission" to strike Turkey. Worrying about the sovereignty of Syria (as it pours money and weapons into the hands of groups that call for the total destruction of another country, Israel, and has camped out in its territory a large and heavily armed and financed group - ISIS - that is attacking other countries and promises to do more) is hilarious.
By that logic (or lack thereof, IMO), Europe has every right to bomb neo-Nazi targets on US soil as a "defensive" measure against far-right ideology, and the US has every right to bomb Scandinavia as a "defensive" measure against socialist ideology.
Do find a lot of examples of neo-Nazi idiots with hundreds of millions of stolen dollars and heavy weapons rounding up thousands of people and promising to slaughter them because of their religion, or marching cops and soldiers into trenches and machine gunning them down? Are you finding lots of examples of Scandinavian socialists wagging their fingers at the camera and then lopping heads of of hundreds of people, including journalists? No? Do you see either group promising to tear down embassies and kill everyone in them, and then heading that general direction in stolen armored vehicles carrying RPGs and worse? No?
Neo-Nazis talk a lot. But they're just noisy idiots. ISIS actually do what they say, and now control large swaths of land in which they are actually in real life murdering thousands of people, and bragging about it.
If all ISIS did was post angry rants online, you'd be right. But they're an army of 30,000+ people who have completely taken over large territories, only recently held a dam that, if damaged, could seriously threaten US and European (among others) people in large numbers on the ground in key cities. Defanging these guys isn't merely an ideological exercise, it's necessary in very simple, practical terms. Something you're pretending you don't understand so you can make hollow points with people who also don't want to think it through. We have a fellow NATO member that is being swamped with refugees, and which has had air strikes and artillery lobbed at it from the the nice peaceful Syrian government that you think shouldn't have its feathers ruffled.
This doesn't mean I approve of Obama's specific strategy and tactics. This (a large air campaign involving lots of locals, too) didn't have to happen. But his utter bumbling in the wake of Syria's use of chemical
Can someone convince me that in the absence of a specific invitation by the legitimate Syrian government, which is the case this time, this [US] action cannot be defined as aggression?
IS/ISIS/ISIL is the aggressor, slaughtering thousands of people for being insufficiently Islamic, etc.
Hitting their command/control and training operations, from which tens of thousands of them are directed and supplied, is DEFENSIVE, not aggressive. That they happen to be running their little shop of horrors out of towns they've captured in Syria simply means that that's where some of the defensive action has to take place.
Like this is any mystery to anybody, right? Right?
Nah. You just talked about subsidies. You said: "They're not going to help here, because our situation is exactly what the law calls for. If you're making more than $60k, you don't GET subsidies, you have to GIVE subsidies to other people (like you)."
Exactly. If you don't qualify for subsidies, then there IS NO CHEAPER MAGIC SOLUTION than those that the regulated insurance companies in the state advertise. They don't have the option of having secret cheaper-than-the-exchange plans. So if you call a hotline and complain that your new insurance plan is too expensive, their ONLY OPTION is to try to find a way to qualify you for a plan that somebody else is forced to help you buy. Otherwise, the price is what the price is.
Especially the one that pointed out that it was those very same insurers that you implicitly praise that raised their rates to where they are now.
For which they had no choice. They are required by law to suddenly provide a range of coverage that was not previously built into their pricing. If you were suddenly told that you had to provide a bunch of new services or else, would you just eat the loss, or raise your prices in order to maintain your business? Insurance companies work on smaller margins than companies in many, many other industries. Remove that margin, and they are out of business. Now, that may be what the ACA backers secretly want, but in the meantime, you raise your prices to deal with the fact that your government has just substantially raised your costs.
They *knew* that they had just a few years before those rates became government controlled
They've always been government controlled. Every state in the union has an insurance regulating body to which those companies must turn for approval in order to change rates. And each of those scenarios plays out in something of a vacuum, because laws prevent insurance companies from providing services across state lines. The government has been entirely in control of this stuff for decades (as if you didn't know that!).
In civilized parts of the world, that would be considered collusion and price fixing.
No, it's known as state regulation. The companies who have a very innovative way to deliver the same (government approved) class of services with less overhead MAY be able to offer a lower price if they can survive doing so. But there's generally very, very little latitude in the cost/price recipe before the insurer is on intolerably thin ice.
Your state's governor was one of the ones that worked to sabotage the implementation of the ACA.
No, my state's governor is a major liberal Democrat, and was a serious cheerleader for ACA. He promised that our state would be a shining example of the law's implementation, and swore that he would use our local tax dollars to make a better web-facing exchange experience than the federal site could ever be. Then he made his deputy governor more or less a full-time ACA guy. He then spent over $200 million to completely botch the whole thing, and it had to be scrapped.
You've identified changes the law needs, but nothing like that has even been discussed since the only ACA votes that Congress will try are about repealing the whole thing.
No, these issues were discussed loudly and often BEFORE the law was completed. The Republicans pointed out these and many more baked-in flaws, but were of course ignored. The president keeps saying this is now all a matter of "settled law," and has said he will not accept changes to it. Same thing that Pelosi and Reid say, obviously.
Yet you're still unable to find any blame that should be directed at the Republicans.
Right. Because their input was refused, they were not allowed in the writing of the law, and they DID NOT VOTE FOR IT. This resulting mess was created and rammed through entirely by the Democrats. It's theirs and their mess. They are why I'm out thousands of dollars more this year than last for inferior results.