Most private insurance has exemptions for pre-existing conditions to combat the very problem you mention of "gaming the system." This healthcare bill eliminates insurers exempting pre-existing conditions. That would absolutely lead to gaming of the system as people would only take out insurance after they get sick and then drop it after they get better, as the insurers are forced to take these customers. That is why the bill also mandates people to carry insurance, so you can't just join when you are sick. That really makes the "pre-existing" conditions point moot after a while, since you would have had coverage before any new conditions developed. You could do the same in buying and keeping your own policy for a period of time. But now everybody has to pay for health insurance or pay a fine, regardless of if they want it or not. The result is that the government gets to stick its fingers farther into everybody's business, the insurance companies get a legally-mandated larger customer base, and the citizens end up paying more in aggregate than they did before.
Also, anybody who gets hit by a car over here and left with life-threatening injuries gets treated first and asked questions later, just as you describe as happens in the UK. It's the law (Emergency Medical Treatment And Labor Act, aka EMTALA, 1986.) Many of the uninsured patients simply don't pay, but they will still get evaluated and treated any other time they come into an emergency department in the future.
Hell, some women won't even let male OB/Gyns see them in the hospital when they're in labor. If that isn't out-and-out discrimination, I don't know what is.
Okay...but isn't Obama an *American* politician? Thus an American, using the American relative scale of right and left, would be perfectly fine in calling Obama a "leftist."
And also, might Political Compass itself not be the greatest benchmark? If you look at their chart of EU governments,not a single one is shown to be to the left of center. Not a single one. So it comes as no surprise that they'd think Obama is to the right of center- because everybody else is too!
Just like your title said, political labels are relative. So why do you need to lecture Americans about how their use of a *relative* term is somehow wrong because they differ from the political spectrum in *your* area?
That's true and maybe being on the other side of that period of time has given me a little bit of a different perspective. But, and this is a big BUT, I can tell you that several things that some of the teenagers do today would have been completely unacceptable in the past. I don't know how old you are, but if we'd try to do something like text message during class, the cell phone would have been confiscated and we'd have gotten in a lot of trouble (that's what happened when people passed notes or tried to listen to Walkmans in class.) Today it's business as usual if somebody texts in class.
If you think there are few occasions where young people really need to focus, you are forgetting one huge important one: driving. Driving requires sustained focus not only for your own sake but for others' as well. A lot of people are hurt or killed because they are distracted or inattentive while driving. Not surprisingly, motor vehicle crashes are one of the biggest causes of mortality of young adults.
The instant-gratification bit in the article regarding messages is certainly true, but it goes much further than that. Many of these people born in the 1990s feel that the entire world should instantly respond to them and they get extremely impatient when it doesn't. They also tend to have the attention span of a gnat. I see a lot of people in this age range at work and I swear that most of them can't sit still for more than 30 seconds before the phone comes out and they're texting away. Some will even just start texting right in the middle of a conversation.
There are really two big problems with their behavior. One is that they are extremely impatient and rush through everything, acting like huge spoiled brats in the process ("what do you mean I have to wait two days for this package to get here! I want it nooooooooooowwwwwwwwww!!!!"). The second is that their tiny attention spans and easy distractability are recipes for disaster if they are ever in a potentially hazardous situation that requires their full attention, such as driving or operating equipment or machinery. I think that their parents had an "epic fail" in allowing them to grow up in this manner.
There is certainly a big "culture of entitlement" in the U.S. that has largely replaced individualism and a good work ethic. When you have a lot of people wanting something for nothing and only a small number of hard-working people to leech off of to get that something for nothing, are you surprised that the country is collapsing?
I don't doubt you. I have seen a bunch of the 22" screens being run at 800x600 because people said that the text is too small even at 1024x768. Several people begged me to drop the resolution down to 640x480 because they "had trouble seeing things on the computer" at higher resolutions. I wondered what the heck was going on as text on those screens at 800x600 was about 1 cm high, so they must be damn near blind if they couldn't read it, since they were all sitting right in front of the monitors. I ended up being pretty much right as those individuals were older and farsighted and didn't want to have to put on their reading glasses to use the computer.
I'll second that. I currently am doing a stint in a place that uses newer WYSE thin clients accessing a Citrix server, hooked up to 22" monitors for their computers. The maximum resolution the thin clients can handle is 1024x768, which is horribly limiting for those who have to use something even as mundane as a spreadsheet, let alone the complex electronic medical records system that is the real reason that the computers even exist there. EMR systems use a ton of screen real estate as they are generally full of tabs and sidebars and pack a LOT of information into each screen. Using one of those at 1024x768 is roughly analogous to viewing a typical optimized-for-1024x768-and-above website on an an average smartphone. You're looking out through a porthole and scroll and scroll and scroll just to view the entire page. I have used identical EMR systems (also running a remote instance over Citrix) at other places that have low-end PCs that can drive monitors at 1280x1024 or 1680x1050. I'd be willing to bet that the loss of productivity with people fighting with the low-resolution thin client screens is greater than the amount the place "saved" by using thin clients instead of the low-end PCs.
I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with the fact that the E6400s seem to all run pretty warm. I got the somewhat thicker and considerably less-expensive E5400, which shares the same guts as the Intel IGP versions of the E6400. I suppose the extra thickness of the E5400 allows for a better cooling arrangement as I haven't had this problem at all. The older 65 nm Core 2 Duo T7250 I have in the E5400 (it was the least expensive CPU offered that still had SpeedStep) probably also runs hotter than just about all of the 45 nm Penryn derivatives in the E6400.
If you are trying to minimize the cost that the rest of the population has to pay when a motorcyclist gets in a crash, then simply have the motorcyclist pay for their own medical treatment rather than subsidize it. Motorcycles are small and don't generally cause much damage when they strike some other object or vehicle, unlike the amount of collateral damage a tractor trailer does if it jackknifes across an interstate during rush hour. Thus the costs are really just what it takes to patch the motorcyclist back up. I do understand that some people will just skip out and not pay the bill, but I haven't observed motorcyclists being any more or less likely to do that than anybody else who did something dumb and got hurt.
I would have to agree that all of the problems I've had with MythTV have been hardware-related once I got the thing set up and configured properly. I run MythTV 0.21 on Debian stable and it has been flawless. The only problems I've encountered are the crappy digital cable box I have to use to decrypt the channels needs to be powered on and off roughly every other month and the occasional pulled-from-a-dumpster-dive-machine PSU dying.
And one of the reasons why medical students go into specialties instead of primary care (other than the facts that primary care is more difficult to do well and carries a lot less prestige) is that Medicare/Medicaid dictated horrible reimbursements for primary care and better reimbursements for specialists. Thus the salaries of primary care providers went down and fewer wanted to do it.
The infant mortality statistic has a lot of things that affect it and make it appear much worse in the U.S. than it really is, if you actually read the scientific literature on the topic, such as the CDC's infant mortality data rather than just regurgitating propaganda. First, not all industrialized countries even calculate infant mortality the same way. Secondly, American doctors are much more likely to deliver the infant in a pre-term threatened pregnancy, while in Europe they are more likely to not intervene and the fetus is miscarried. A delivered infant that dies counts in the stats, while a miscarriage generally does not. The U.S. has the some of the lowest pre-term infant mortality rates in the world according to the literature, but that fact is certainly NOT being publicized. Yes, term infant mortality rate could use a little work here, but some of the biggest risk factors for that one are solved culturally (i.e. reducing the number of teen pregnancies, which are correlated with higher infant mortality rates) rather than medically.
I second using OpenOffice.org to enter equations. I liked to take notes on the computer in classes that had much of any written text in the notes (I took notes in a notebook for calculus, statics/strengths, physics and such that had almost all equations as notes). Since I was an engineering major, just about every class had at least some equations as part of the notes and I could bang out equations pretty easy with the text math symbol input in OpenOffice.org Writer. One other neat trick is to do the Ctrl-Shift-U + Unicode key code or key code + Alt-X shortcut to quickly put Greek symbols in notes.
That's a nursing home. A hospital smells like a combination of industrial disinfectant, diarrhea, and the hard-to-describe smell that people with active bacterial infections and ulcerated sores give off. It often varies from floor to floor- the ICU and pediatrics floors don't have much of a smell, the surgical floors smell a bit worse, and the general medicine floors can sometimes make you nauseous.
I agree. You need decent hardware just to have a decently-quick and decently-reliable server and this means that a lot of the very low-power stuff is not going to cut it. I originally built a file/print/backup/media server out of an old 1 GHz PIII system with 256 MB non-ECC PC100 I got from surplus for free. I thought that the PIII ought to be plenty of horsepower to basically be a gigabit NAS, but I was wrong. Very wrong. I had the unit set up with a SiI3114 SATA card driving a few 250 GB SATA disks in md RAID 5 and delivering that to a RTL-8169 GbE card. The performance was atrocious as I couldn't get much better than about 20 MB/sec reads and 12 MB/sec writes. The unit would also sometimes get a bit flaky after a few months of uptime as there would be unexplained errors that cropped up, which I have a strong hunch were due to the lack of ECC RAM. Yes, the unit only drew something like 30 watts at idle and 50 at load, but its performance was absolutely awful.
I ended up getting a dual 2.67 GHz Xeon DP motherboard with a gig of registered ECC DDR-266 off eBay for $20 to actually make a decent server. I put the exact same cards and HDDs in there from the PIII setup and it's like night and day. Yes, the Xeon setup consumes far more power than the PIII. I haven't tested it, but I estimate it draws about 60-80 watts at idle and 200-220 at full load. The unit has three independent PCI/PCI-X buses (the SATA and GbE cards are running at 66 MHz in the PCI-X slots on two separate buses) and enough CPU horsepower to drive them, unlike the PIII unit, so it actually works well, unlike the PIII unit. I get enough read speed out of the disks to saturate the GbE connection and the writes are disk-limited at about 60 MB/sec. So, backups are no longer an "argh, this is taking forever!" proposition. If you were wanting to go and make a more efficient unit that had the same capabilities as the Xeon setup, you'd need a modern PCIe-based motherboard with a dual-core CPU and possibly an add-in PCIe disk controller as many southbridges suck at handling the I/O associated with a RAID 5, 6, or any of the nested levels. That's going to cost several hundred dollars and it would take many years to make up the purchase price with lower energy bills- particularly when you consider that computer heat somewhat offsets the need for furnace heat in the winter.
The moral of the story is that first and foremost, your hardware needs to be powerful get the job done. If it isn't, you're just going to be unhappy no matter how little energy it consumes. Secondly, you're generally not going to be able to make up the difference in energy usage in any reasonable time frame unless your old hardware is ridiculously inefficient and the new hardware is extremely efficient and extremely inexpensive. Most people just need to actually crunch the numbers rather than just buying into the efficiency hype.
No, because the LCD's backlight almost always gets shut off when the lid is closed. The backlight is the part that draws the most watts in an idling laptop.
It can't be, since it takes the work of others for you to get an education. You're probably saying there should be no tuition, but you forget that "free" really means "somebody else is paying" as the tax payers in the state or country are the ones paying the professors and providing the lecture halls and classrooms.
Even if you gain your education all by self-study, somebody still had to do work to get the information to you, whether it is by making a book that you read or providing Internet access and a computer for you to learn online. That requires resources and unless you pay for it, somebody else had to. Just about everything has a cost associated with it, it's just a question of who has to pay. If it's not you, then it's somebody else paying for you.
Universities like the one you went to continue to stay in business because you and others continue to pay a large premium to go there. If nobody was willing to pay the higher tuition to go there versus going to a state school, then the more-expensive private university would go out of business.
Core i7s do not support ECC, so plugging them into an LGA1366 motherboard that has ECC support still means ECC doesn't work. You have to buy the Xeon equivalent of the i7 (Xeon X35xx series) to get ECC support in the CPU, and then pair that with an appropriate ECC-supporting motherboard to get ECC to work.
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Most private insurance has exemptions for pre-existing conditions to combat the very problem you mention of "gaming the system." This healthcare bill eliminates insurers exempting pre-existing conditions. That would absolutely lead to gaming of the system as people would only take out insurance after they get sick and then drop it after they get better, as the insurers are forced to take these customers. That is why the bill also mandates people to carry insurance, so you can't just join when you are sick. That really makes the "pre-existing" conditions point moot after a while, since you would have had coverage before any new conditions developed. You could do the same in buying and keeping your own policy for a period of time. But now everybody has to pay for health insurance or pay a fine, regardless of if they want it or not. The result is that the government gets to stick its fingers farther into everybody's business, the insurance companies get a legally-mandated larger customer base, and the citizens end up paying more in aggregate than they did before.
Also, anybody who gets hit by a car over here and left with life-threatening injuries gets treated first and asked questions later, just as you describe as happens in the UK. It's the law (Emergency Medical Treatment And Labor Act, aka EMTALA, 1986.) Many of the uninsured patients simply don't pay, but they will still get evaluated and treated any other time they come into an emergency department in the future.
And by "not wanting to lose a trading partner," you really mean "not wanting to lose the group that lends us boatloads of money."
Hell, some women won't even let male OB/Gyns see them in the hospital when they're in labor. If that isn't out-and-out discrimination, I don't know what is.
Okay...but isn't Obama an *American* politician? Thus an American, using the American relative scale of right and left, would be perfectly fine in calling Obama a "leftist."
And also, might Political Compass itself not be the greatest benchmark? If you look at their chart of EU governments, not a single one is shown to be to the left of center. Not a single one. So it comes as no surprise that they'd think Obama is to the right of center- because everybody else is too!
Well, really, it's fine to have encyclopedic knowledge of any entertainment-related topic, sports included.
Just like your title said, political labels are relative. So why do you need to lecture Americans about how their use of a *relative* term is somehow wrong because they differ from the political spectrum in *your* area?
That's true and maybe being on the other side of that period of time has given me a little bit of a different perspective. But, and this is a big BUT, I can tell you that several things that some of the teenagers do today would have been completely unacceptable in the past. I don't know how old you are, but if we'd try to do something like text message during class, the cell phone would have been confiscated and we'd have gotten in a lot of trouble (that's what happened when people passed notes or tried to listen to Walkmans in class.) Today it's business as usual if somebody texts in class.
If you think there are few occasions where young people really need to focus, you are forgetting one huge important one: driving. Driving requires sustained focus not only for your own sake but for others' as well. A lot of people are hurt or killed because they are distracted or inattentive while driving. Not surprisingly, motor vehicle crashes are one of the biggest causes of mortality of young adults.
The instant-gratification bit in the article regarding messages is certainly true, but it goes much further than that. Many of these people born in the 1990s feel that the entire world should instantly respond to them and they get extremely impatient when it doesn't. They also tend to have the attention span of a gnat. I see a lot of people in this age range at work and I swear that most of them can't sit still for more than 30 seconds before the phone comes out and they're texting away. Some will even just start texting right in the middle of a conversation.
There are really two big problems with their behavior. One is that they are extremely impatient and rush through everything, acting like huge spoiled brats in the process ("what do you mean I have to wait two days for this package to get here! I want it nooooooooooowwwwwwwwww!!!!"). The second is that their tiny attention spans and easy distractability are recipes for disaster if they are ever in a potentially hazardous situation that requires their full attention, such as driving or operating equipment or machinery. I think that their parents had an "epic fail" in allowing them to grow up in this manner.
Yes, they're called "politicians."
^ +1, uncomfortably true.
There is certainly a big "culture of entitlement" in the U.S. that has largely replaced individualism and a good work ethic. When you have a lot of people wanting something for nothing and only a small number of hard-working people to leech off of to get that something for nothing, are you surprised that the country is collapsing?
I don't doubt you. I have seen a bunch of the 22" screens being run at 800x600 because people said that the text is too small even at 1024x768. Several people begged me to drop the resolution down to 640x480 because they "had trouble seeing things on the computer" at higher resolutions. I wondered what the heck was going on as text on those screens at 800x600 was about 1 cm high, so they must be damn near blind if they couldn't read it, since they were all sitting right in front of the monitors. I ended up being pretty much right as those individuals were older and farsighted and didn't want to have to put on their reading glasses to use the computer.
I'll second that. I currently am doing a stint in a place that uses newer WYSE thin clients accessing a Citrix server, hooked up to 22" monitors for their computers. The maximum resolution the thin clients can handle is 1024x768, which is horribly limiting for those who have to use something even as mundane as a spreadsheet, let alone the complex electronic medical records system that is the real reason that the computers even exist there. EMR systems use a ton of screen real estate as they are generally full of tabs and sidebars and pack a LOT of information into each screen. Using one of those at 1024x768 is roughly analogous to viewing a typical optimized-for-1024x768-and-above website on an an average smartphone. You're looking out through a porthole and scroll and scroll and scroll just to view the entire page. I have used identical EMR systems (also running a remote instance over Citrix) at other places that have low-end PCs that can drive monitors at 1280x1024 or 1680x1050. I'd be willing to bet that the loss of productivity with people fighting with the low-resolution thin client screens is greater than the amount the place "saved" by using thin clients instead of the low-end PCs.
I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with the fact that the E6400s seem to all run pretty warm. I got the somewhat thicker and considerably less-expensive E5400, which shares the same guts as the Intel IGP versions of the E6400. I suppose the extra thickness of the E5400 allows for a better cooling arrangement as I haven't had this problem at all. The older 65 nm Core 2 Duo T7250 I have in the E5400 (it was the least expensive CPU offered that still had SpeedStep) probably also runs hotter than just about all of the 45 nm Penryn derivatives in the E6400.
If you are trying to minimize the cost that the rest of the population has to pay when a motorcyclist gets in a crash, then simply have the motorcyclist pay for their own medical treatment rather than subsidize it. Motorcycles are small and don't generally cause much damage when they strike some other object or vehicle, unlike the amount of collateral damage a tractor trailer does if it jackknifes across an interstate during rush hour. Thus the costs are really just what it takes to patch the motorcyclist back up. I do understand that some people will just skip out and not pay the bill, but I haven't observed motorcyclists being any more or less likely to do that than anybody else who did something dumb and got hurt.
I would have to agree that all of the problems I've had with MythTV have been hardware-related once I got the thing set up and configured properly. I run MythTV 0.21 on Debian stable and it has been flawless. The only problems I've encountered are the crappy digital cable box I have to use to decrypt the channels needs to be powered on and off roughly every other month and the occasional pulled-from-a-dumpster-dive-machine PSU dying.
And one of the reasons why medical students go into specialties instead of primary care (other than the facts that primary care is more difficult to do well and carries a lot less prestige) is that Medicare/Medicaid dictated horrible reimbursements for primary care and better reimbursements for specialists. Thus the salaries of primary care providers went down and fewer wanted to do it.
The infant mortality statistic has a lot of things that affect it and make it appear much worse in the U.S. than it really is, if you actually read the scientific literature on the topic, such as the CDC's infant mortality data rather than just regurgitating propaganda. First, not all industrialized countries even calculate infant mortality the same way. Secondly, American doctors are much more likely to deliver the infant in a pre-term threatened pregnancy, while in Europe they are more likely to not intervene and the fetus is miscarried. A delivered infant that dies counts in the stats, while a miscarriage generally does not. The U.S. has the some of the lowest pre-term infant mortality rates in the world according to the literature, but that fact is certainly NOT being publicized. Yes, term infant mortality rate could use a little work here, but some of the biggest risk factors for that one are solved culturally (i.e. reducing the number of teen pregnancies, which are correlated with higher infant mortality rates) rather than medically.
I second using OpenOffice.org to enter equations. I liked to take notes on the computer in classes that had much of any written text in the notes (I took notes in a notebook for calculus, statics/strengths, physics and such that had almost all equations as notes). Since I was an engineering major, just about every class had at least some equations as part of the notes and I could bang out equations pretty easy with the text math symbol input in OpenOffice.org Writer. One other neat trick is to do the Ctrl-Shift-U + Unicode key code or key code + Alt-X shortcut to quickly put Greek symbols in notes.
That's a nursing home. A hospital smells like a combination of industrial disinfectant, diarrhea, and the hard-to-describe smell that people with active bacterial infections and ulcerated sores give off. It often varies from floor to floor- the ICU and pediatrics floors don't have much of a smell, the surgical floors smell a bit worse, and the general medicine floors can sometimes make you nauseous.
I agree. You need decent hardware just to have a decently-quick and decently-reliable server and this means that a lot of the very low-power stuff is not going to cut it. I originally built a file/print/backup/media server out of an old 1 GHz PIII system with 256 MB non-ECC PC100 I got from surplus for free. I thought that the PIII ought to be plenty of horsepower to basically be a gigabit NAS, but I was wrong. Very wrong. I had the unit set up with a SiI3114 SATA card driving a few 250 GB SATA disks in md RAID 5 and delivering that to a RTL-8169 GbE card. The performance was atrocious as I couldn't get much better than about 20 MB/sec reads and 12 MB/sec writes. The unit would also sometimes get a bit flaky after a few months of uptime as there would be unexplained errors that cropped up, which I have a strong hunch were due to the lack of ECC RAM. Yes, the unit only drew something like 30 watts at idle and 50 at load, but its performance was absolutely awful.
I ended up getting a dual 2.67 GHz Xeon DP motherboard with a gig of registered ECC DDR-266 off eBay for $20 to actually make a decent server. I put the exact same cards and HDDs in there from the PIII setup and it's like night and day. Yes, the Xeon setup consumes far more power than the PIII. I haven't tested it, but I estimate it draws about 60-80 watts at idle and 200-220 at full load. The unit has three independent PCI/PCI-X buses (the SATA and GbE cards are running at 66 MHz in the PCI-X slots on two separate buses) and enough CPU horsepower to drive them, unlike the PIII unit, so it actually works well, unlike the PIII unit. I get enough read speed out of the disks to saturate the GbE connection and the writes are disk-limited at about 60 MB/sec. So, backups are no longer an "argh, this is taking forever!" proposition. If you were wanting to go and make a more efficient unit that had the same capabilities as the Xeon setup, you'd need a modern PCIe-based motherboard with a dual-core CPU and possibly an add-in PCIe disk controller as many southbridges suck at handling the I/O associated with a RAID 5, 6, or any of the nested levels. That's going to cost several hundred dollars and it would take many years to make up the purchase price with lower energy bills- particularly when you consider that computer heat somewhat offsets the need for furnace heat in the winter.
The moral of the story is that first and foremost, your hardware needs to be powerful get the job done. If it isn't, you're just going to be unhappy no matter how little energy it consumes. Secondly, you're generally not going to be able to make up the difference in energy usage in any reasonable time frame unless your old hardware is ridiculously inefficient and the new hardware is extremely efficient and extremely inexpensive. Most people just need to actually crunch the numbers rather than just buying into the efficiency hype.
No, because the LCD's backlight almost always gets shut off when the lid is closed. The backlight is the part that draws the most watts in an idling laptop.
It can't be, since it takes the work of others for you to get an education. You're probably saying there should be no tuition, but you forget that "free" really means "somebody else is paying" as the tax payers in the state or country are the ones paying the professors and providing the lecture halls and classrooms.
Even if you gain your education all by self-study, somebody still had to do work to get the information to you, whether it is by making a book that you read or providing Internet access and a computer for you to learn online. That requires resources and unless you pay for it, somebody else had to. Just about everything has a cost associated with it, it's just a question of who has to pay. If it's not you, then it's somebody else paying for you.
Universities like the one you went to continue to stay in business because you and others continue to pay a large premium to go there. If nobody was willing to pay the higher tuition to go there versus going to a state school, then the more-expensive private university would go out of business.
Core i7s do not support ECC, so plugging them into an LGA1366 motherboard that has ECC support still means ECC doesn't work. You have to buy the Xeon equivalent of the i7 (Xeon X35xx series) to get ECC support in the CPU, and then pair that with an appropriate ECC-supporting motherboard to get ECC to work.