What's going to be interesting... Or maybe just vomit-inducing is the "response" book that comes out. Portraits of Courage and Principle in the White House or something. You know it's already been commissioned. They need to have an alternative narrative.
I won't eat the clickbait, but you can tell from the summary that they started with a narrow, non-representative sample of office workers, and the methodology probably just gets worse from there.
For a treatment like this, which has just been approved, and furthermore is the first treatment of its kind to ever become available, I think it'd be "fair" to sell it, initially, at such a huge price. A fair transaction, to me, is one where both parties benefit, and nobody on the sidelines dies as an externality.
If they can get 20 millionaires to opt for the treatment at close to a million a piece, that's almost 20 million in development costs recouped. The millionaires are essentially forced to put their money back into the economy in a more-useful context (medical research) instead of hoarding it. Some of the money that they *should* have paid in taxes to fund research like this in the first place. After the moneyed wave of early adopters has blown through, R&D costs are recouped, and then the procedure can be performed at rates affordable to the working class - theoretically.
Theoretically because this assumes all parties are acting in good faith, and also the underlying assumption that healthcare functions as a free and fair market. It never has, and it never will, due to the intrinsically non-optional nature of so much of the work that's done in medicine. Insurance companies and the other instruments of finance that have been shoehorned into the industry only serve to further obscure whatever free-market forces there are. Even for millionaires, question #1 is going to be: Does my insurance cover it? And that will sway people's decisions.
Separate from that is the question of whether the pharmaceutical company will drop the price by a fair amount. Here I define "acting in good faith" as lowering the cost enough so that everyone who needs the treatment can get it, or if it's not possible to do that and remain profitable, to lower the cost as much as is possible. What we have seen demonstrated over and over is that these people do not act in good faith. The solution to that problem starts with neverending vigilance, and branches out with several options from there...
To further your analogy... The team owners realized they can make more money off bloodsport, so after a long campaign of convincing the spectators that referees are inherently bad and make the game boring, the refs have now been removed.
But I think it's fairer to say it works well 0% of the time, since there is no actual work being done. Which is not to say it's useless; recreation is a necessary part of life. But it's not work. So it is a great example - of capital getting shuffled around, a couple people getting rich off it (while being subsidized by the state typically), and nothing being produced. Sounds a lot like the US economy, actually.
I'd love to see some hanging chads. That way you discount the votes of individual idiots who don't know how to punch holes in paper. Or if you're concerned with them getting counted the wrong way deliberately by individual election officials, it's not hard to shuffle the boxes and/or the people.
With digitized voting, one bad actor can affect all the votes. And you won't be able to tell. And they might not even need a plant on the inside of the election commission. Give me hanging chads any day.
Paper ballots don't help anyone but "the people", who as you noted, don't particularly care right now. Much better for the players involved to keep the question of election security open, so you can plausibly claim fraud if it doesn't go your way. Or, maybe you even get to commit the fraud yourself - that's a perfectly logical progression once playing by the rules goes out the window. It's already been demonstrated that a huge chunk of the population would simply ignore any election shenanigans. Either they don't care, or their team won anyway, and stopping for any kind of thought or analysis would disrupt the cheer routine.
Take a look at the solutions being offered to questions about the last election:
(1) Ignore the issue, or divert attention to something else (boogeyman army of illegal Mexicans voting for example)
(2) Contest the results after the fact.
Neither of these solves the problem of election integrity. But they do create great spin opportunities. And as we know, these guys are way more practiced at cultivating an image than doing anything useful. Most everyone involved feels it would be easier for them to compete on PR than on actual reforms. And they're probably right. Real reforms cost them money from donors. PR costs them comparatively nothing. Style prevailed over substance in the 2016 election - and the same would have been true had the electoral college done their job and threw out the unqualified candidate.
It's gonna be the small churches that protect us. Call them faith-creators. The man in the pulpit has rightfully taxed his flock, it doesn't belong to some dictator in Rome!
I didn't suggest bags of cash - what I did was state that I didn't know all the details. I don't know the intricacies of all their accounting maneuvers. I do know that they are extraordinarily complex, designed to obscure where costs really are, and designed to generate profit at the expense of actual healthcare. I am glad that someone who has worked in the industry was able to come through and illuminate a tiny bit of how that works.
What I was replying to were assumptions implicit in the post. Something like: "Insurance companies would never pay for something that doesn't improve people's health." The company's feel-good mission statement being confused with their actual business model. Certain politicians and their donors love that narrative, but it's too wrong and too consequential to leave unchallenged.
Where does the article say that? Did you get the wrong link or something? It says that illegal sales haven't completely disappeared, which is not the same thing you said.
If you think marriage and any kind of hookers are comparable, you haven't put any thought into either arrangement. Either that, or your wife really hates you, or you've been around some super clingy hookers.
Why are they paying? It fits right in with their strategy: Provide what the market wants (not necessarily what patients need) and try to look useful doing it, to justify their continued existence and all the corporate welfare payments. It was probably calculated that "They denied my heart surgery!!" would hit them harder than just paying and jacking up their rates accordingly. Listen to any of their recent radio ads if you want it laid bare that they are spending serious money for nothing more than good PR. They know they aren't getting any more cash out of the individual market, and besides, everyone is legally mandated to be their customer anyway. The ads don't even try to drive sign-ups. They are feel-good spots to make their middleman money-shuffler business look like it actually does something useful.
Perhaps some highly-specialized doctors who only perform stent surgery kick a little extra back to the insurance company, for sending all that business their way. That sort of arrangement plays out all the time. The insurance company controls the purse strings, and if they start denying these claims, well... anyone who works in that specialization will be out of a job. The insurance companies have had decades to set up these kind of arrangements, and they always make sure they come out on top. The costs get shuffled around as best they can, but eventually you end up in the situation we have now, which is that our country spends double what anyone else does, for shittier care.
No, I have no evidence these particular kickbacks are happening, but it sounds just as plausible as your argument, for which there was also no evidence. It'd fit right in with their business model. You think it wouldn't, because your understanding of their business model is incomplete. You've bought the narrative and glossed over the reality.
They have a smaller pool to work with, but the totalitarian nature of the place assures that 100% of that pool (which is not zero) will probably get drafted to hacker camp before puberty. Just like they do with their couple of rocket scientists and nuclear physicists. The US government has a way bigger pool to draw from, but they don't snap up nearly as high of a percentage - because it wouldn't make sense. A 2,000-hacker team is not 10x better than a 200-hacker team. ESPECIALLY when secrecy is needed.
With these kind of operations, quantity isn't paramount. That's what categorizes it as asymmetric warfare, and that is precisely why NK is so terribly interested in it.
The best thing to do when the battery starts to go is to put in a new battery. For some phones, that means a $15 order on Amazon plus 15 seconds of your time to swap it. For Apple phones, that means $80 plus travel back and forth to the Genius Bar, or a couple weeks with your device gone in the mail.
In case you hadn't heard, resources (including human) are very limited in North Korea, and the government there is very forceful and particular about what people do. If they have 10 "computer guys" to go around, they may assign all 10 to the hacking part of their asymmetric-warfare plan, and zero to setting up Wi-Fi at the airport.
Wi-fi at the airport gets the regime nothing. Asymmetric warfare gets the regime nearly everything they have.
The term "concentration camp" heavily implies a particular race (or similar broadly categorized group) being concentrated there for the purpose of removing that group from the general population. Not individual dissidents or troublemakers who are there for specific crimes. (Crimes against the state, for example.)
Work camp, labor camp, prison camp, maybe even death camp... there's many better-suited terms to choose from.
How current are we talking? Because I did an OS wipe around 3 weeks ago, used whatever the default installer on Mozilla's site is, and let it update itself using all the default settings, and NoScript works here. I do recall reading something last month about there briefly being no version of NoScript that would run on the latest Firefox, but whatever that was, it appears to be fixed.
Welcome? I've been in that world for years. Anyway, most robocalls play a recording of an actual human voice, so I fail to see what they'd gain by using a synthesizer. I doubt that *recording the message* is the thing that limits their profits.
The storage and CPU cost of recording audio are so small that they reached the point of irrelevance 15-20 years ago, for low-end consumer hardware. More like 40 years ago for professional grade equipment - around the time that CDs were introduced. Despite what a bunch of "audiophile" sites trying to push a product will tell you, it is not difficult, expensive, or taxing in any way to work with PCM audio of a sufficient bit depth and sampling rate to cover the entire range of human hearing. Or even dog hearing!
But regarding speech synthesis specifically - there is software out there, still being used by somebody I'm sure, that was designed to be run on consumer PCs back in the 90s. At that time, on those systems, there were computational limits that were relevant to sound quality. Whatever outdated software Stephen Hawking uses, sounds like it renders the output at no higher than 10 or 12 kHz sampling rate (compared to 40 - 50 kHz to cover the human hearing range.) But the sampling rate is a very small part of why Hawking sounds bad. The artifacts you hear from a low sampling rate are mostly limited to high-frequency sounds being cut. (And possibly temporal smearing, depending on how you filter.) It sounds similar to turning the treble knob on your stereo all the way down.
The quality problems with Hawking's synthesizer go way beyond a treble knob. Things like pacing, emphasis, minor slurring of certain sounds that are adjacent to each other, etc... problems that you take care of by making the software more intelligent, not upping the sample frequency. Which is exactly what Google is doing, and making some progress at it too. No, it doesn't sound like a human yet.
I've asked you "Why?" and your answer isn't much more than a circular re-statement of what you want to happen. The most reasoning I can pull out of it is that you're worried about their pensions creating a drag on the economy, as if the pensions of health-inspected foreign workers will cost any more than the pensions of uninspected domestic workers.
You do raise the idea of a separate, "more formal" path to permanent residence, but again I must ask why. What difference will there be in the vetting and other requirements? Is the UK going to have this separate path out of the kindness of their heart, or is it strictly to benefit the economy, like the guest worker program?
If they are so productive, well-adjusted, already raised and educated (on someone else's dime), why send them back to their home country afterwards? Surely the UK economy benefits more from retaining these best-of-the-best workers that are attracted from abroad.
It seems like "I don't care" was not an option on this poll. I think it would have been far and away the winning option. But then you wouldn't get sites like Slashdot linking to your blog or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
What's going to be interesting... Or maybe just vomit-inducing is the "response" book that comes out. Portraits of Courage and Principle in the White House or something. You know it's already been commissioned. They need to have an alternative narrative.
So, let's pretend you are writing the definition for harassment for a social media site - or any context of your choosing. What is the definition?
I won't eat the clickbait, but you can tell from the summary that they started with a narrow, non-representative sample of office workers, and the methodology probably just gets worse from there.
For a treatment like this, which has just been approved, and furthermore is the first treatment of its kind to ever become available, I think it'd be "fair" to sell it, initially, at such a huge price. A fair transaction, to me, is one where both parties benefit, and nobody on the sidelines dies as an externality.
If they can get 20 millionaires to opt for the treatment at close to a million a piece, that's almost 20 million in development costs recouped. The millionaires are essentially forced to put their money back into the economy in a more-useful context (medical research) instead of hoarding it. Some of the money that they *should* have paid in taxes to fund research like this in the first place. After the moneyed wave of early adopters has blown through, R&D costs are recouped, and then the procedure can be performed at rates affordable to the working class - theoretically.
Theoretically because this assumes all parties are acting in good faith, and also the underlying assumption that healthcare functions as a free and fair market. It never has, and it never will, due to the intrinsically non-optional nature of so much of the work that's done in medicine. Insurance companies and the other instruments of finance that have been shoehorned into the industry only serve to further obscure whatever free-market forces there are. Even for millionaires, question #1 is going to be: Does my insurance cover it? And that will sway people's decisions.
Separate from that is the question of whether the pharmaceutical company will drop the price by a fair amount. Here I define "acting in good faith" as lowering the cost enough so that everyone who needs the treatment can get it, or if it's not possible to do that and remain profitable, to lower the cost as much as is possible. What we have seen demonstrated over and over is that these people do not act in good faith. The solution to that problem starts with neverending vigilance, and branches out with several options from there...
To further your analogy... The team owners realized they can make more money off bloodsport, so after a long campaign of convincing the spectators that referees are inherently bad and make the game boring, the refs have now been removed.
But I think it's fairer to say it works well 0% of the time, since there is no actual work being done. Which is not to say it's useless; recreation is a necessary part of life. But it's not work. So it is a great example - of capital getting shuffled around, a couple people getting rich off it (while being subsidized by the state typically), and nothing being produced. Sounds a lot like the US economy, actually.
I'd love to see some hanging chads. That way you discount the votes of individual idiots who don't know how to punch holes in paper. Or if you're concerned with them getting counted the wrong way deliberately by individual election officials, it's not hard to shuffle the boxes and/or the people.
With digitized voting, one bad actor can affect all the votes. And you won't be able to tell. And they might not even need a plant on the inside of the election commission. Give me hanging chads any day.
Paper ballots don't help anyone but "the people", who as you noted, don't particularly care right now. Much better for the players involved to keep the question of election security open, so you can plausibly claim fraud if it doesn't go your way. Or, maybe you even get to commit the fraud yourself - that's a perfectly logical progression once playing by the rules goes out the window. It's already been demonstrated that a huge chunk of the population would simply ignore any election shenanigans. Either they don't care, or their team won anyway, and stopping for any kind of thought or analysis would disrupt the cheer routine.
Take a look at the solutions being offered to questions about the last election:
(1) Ignore the issue, or divert attention to something else (boogeyman army of illegal Mexicans voting for example)
(2) Contest the results after the fact.
Neither of these solves the problem of election integrity. But they do create great spin opportunities. And as we know, these guys are way more practiced at cultivating an image than doing anything useful. Most everyone involved feels it would be easier for them to compete on PR than on actual reforms. And they're probably right. Real reforms cost them money from donors. PR costs them comparatively nothing. Style prevailed over substance in the 2016 election - and the same would have been true had the electoral college done their job and threw out the unqualified candidate.
It's gonna be the small churches that protect us. Call them faith-creators. The man in the pulpit has rightfully taxed his flock, it doesn't belong to some dictator in Rome!
I didn't suggest bags of cash - what I did was state that I didn't know all the details. I don't know the intricacies of all their accounting maneuvers. I do know that they are extraordinarily complex, designed to obscure where costs really are, and designed to generate profit at the expense of actual healthcare. I am glad that someone who has worked in the industry was able to come through and illuminate a tiny bit of how that works.
What I was replying to were assumptions implicit in the post. Something like: "Insurance companies would never pay for something that doesn't improve people's health." The company's feel-good mission statement being confused with their actual business model. Certain politicians and their donors love that narrative, but it's too wrong and too consequential to leave unchallenged.
Where does the article say that? Did you get the wrong link or something? It says that illegal sales haven't completely disappeared, which is not the same thing you said.
If you think marriage and any kind of hookers are comparable, you haven't put any thought into either arrangement. Either that, or your wife really hates you, or you've been around some super clingy hookers.
Why are they paying? It fits right in with their strategy: Provide what the market wants (not necessarily what patients need) and try to look useful doing it, to justify their continued existence and all the corporate welfare payments. It was probably calculated that "They denied my heart surgery!!" would hit them harder than just paying and jacking up their rates accordingly. Listen to any of their recent radio ads if you want it laid bare that they are spending serious money for nothing more than good PR. They know they aren't getting any more cash out of the individual market, and besides, everyone is legally mandated to be their customer anyway. The ads don't even try to drive sign-ups. They are feel-good spots to make their middleman money-shuffler business look like it actually does something useful.
Perhaps some highly-specialized doctors who only perform stent surgery kick a little extra back to the insurance company, for sending all that business their way. That sort of arrangement plays out all the time. The insurance company controls the purse strings, and if they start denying these claims, well... anyone who works in that specialization will be out of a job. The insurance companies have had decades to set up these kind of arrangements, and they always make sure they come out on top. The costs get shuffled around as best they can, but eventually you end up in the situation we have now, which is that our country spends double what anyone else does, for shittier care.
No, I have no evidence these particular kickbacks are happening, but it sounds just as plausible as your argument, for which there was also no evidence. It'd fit right in with their business model. You think it wouldn't, because your understanding of their business model is incomplete. You've bought the narrative and glossed over the reality.
Source: apple.com, Amazon.com
Oh, so now it only costs twice as much as other phones' batteries... until the price cut expires in a year.
Sounds about as good as the Republican tax plan.
They have a smaller pool to work with, but the totalitarian nature of the place assures that 100% of that pool (which is not zero) will probably get drafted to hacker camp before puberty. Just like they do with their couple of rocket scientists and nuclear physicists. The US government has a way bigger pool to draw from, but they don't snap up nearly as high of a percentage - because it wouldn't make sense. A 2,000-hacker team is not 10x better than a 200-hacker team. ESPECIALLY when secrecy is needed.
With these kind of operations, quantity isn't paramount. That's what categorizes it as asymmetric warfare, and that is precisely why NK is so terribly interested in it.
I'd have thought the rights rested with the individual, or in this case, his estate. I guess not?
The best thing to do when the battery starts to go is to put in a new battery. For some phones, that means a $15 order on Amazon plus 15 seconds of your time to swap it. For Apple phones, that means $80 plus travel back and forth to the Genius Bar, or a couple weeks with your device gone in the mail.
In case you hadn't heard, resources (including human) are very limited in North Korea, and the government there is very forceful and particular about what people do. If they have 10 "computer guys" to go around, they may assign all 10 to the hacking part of their asymmetric-warfare plan, and zero to setting up Wi-Fi at the airport.
Wi-fi at the airport gets the regime nothing. Asymmetric warfare gets the regime nearly everything they have.
The term "concentration camp" heavily implies a particular race (or similar broadly categorized group) being concentrated there for the purpose of removing that group from the general population. Not individual dissidents or troublemakers who are there for specific crimes. (Crimes against the state, for example.)
Work camp, labor camp, prison camp, maybe even death camp... there's many better-suited terms to choose from.
How current are we talking? Because I did an OS wipe around 3 weeks ago, used whatever the default installer on Mozilla's site is, and let it update itself using all the default settings, and NoScript works here. I do recall reading something last month about there briefly being no version of NoScript that would run on the latest Firefox, but whatever that was, it appears to be fixed.
Welcome? I've been in that world for years. Anyway, most robocalls play a recording of an actual human voice, so I fail to see what they'd gain by using a synthesizer. I doubt that *recording the message* is the thing that limits their profits.
The storage and CPU cost of recording audio are so small that they reached the point of irrelevance 15-20 years ago, for low-end consumer hardware. More like 40 years ago for professional grade equipment - around the time that CDs were introduced. Despite what a bunch of "audiophile" sites trying to push a product will tell you, it is not difficult, expensive, or taxing in any way to work with PCM audio of a sufficient bit depth and sampling rate to cover the entire range of human hearing. Or even dog hearing!
But regarding speech synthesis specifically - there is software out there, still being used by somebody I'm sure, that was designed to be run on consumer PCs back in the 90s. At that time, on those systems, there were computational limits that were relevant to sound quality. Whatever outdated software Stephen Hawking uses, sounds like it renders the output at no higher than 10 or 12 kHz sampling rate (compared to 40 - 50 kHz to cover the human hearing range.) But the sampling rate is a very small part of why Hawking sounds bad. The artifacts you hear from a low sampling rate are mostly limited to high-frequency sounds being cut. (And possibly temporal smearing, depending on how you filter.) It sounds similar to turning the treble knob on your stereo all the way down.
The quality problems with Hawking's synthesizer go way beyond a treble knob. Things like pacing, emphasis, minor slurring of certain sounds that are adjacent to each other, etc... problems that you take care of by making the software more intelligent, not upping the sample frequency. Which is exactly what Google is doing, and making some progress at it too. No, it doesn't sound like a human yet.
I've asked you "Why?" and your answer isn't much more than a circular re-statement of what you want to happen. The most reasoning I can pull out of it is that you're worried about their pensions creating a drag on the economy, as if the pensions of health-inspected foreign workers will cost any more than the pensions of uninspected domestic workers.
You do raise the idea of a separate, "more formal" path to permanent residence, but again I must ask why. What difference will there be in the vetting and other requirements? Is the UK going to have this separate path out of the kindness of their heart, or is it strictly to benefit the economy, like the guest worker program?
If they are so productive, well-adjusted, already raised and educated (on someone else's dime), why send them back to their home country afterwards? Surely the UK economy benefits more from retaining these best-of-the-best workers that are attracted from abroad.
It seems like "I don't care" was not an option on this poll. I think it would have been far and away the winning option. But then you wouldn't get sites like Slashdot linking to your blog or whatever.