Fair enough, even if I disagree (any important legislation is going to be verbose) but the objection wasn't that the law was too complex. The objections were over "death panels", or "socialized medicine" or what-have-you. None of which was in the bill, but that didn't stop people inventing reasons to dislike it.
That's true, but the fact of the matter is that the bill doesn't work without it. People never like the price tag on something. And other states have tried to implement the popular provisions without the mandate, and what happens is exactly what you'd expect - only risky folks get insurance, since everybody else can get it if they need it, and the costs are through the roof. Put simply, insurance works best with a large risk pool. I personally think that one single pool would be the largest of all, and thus cheapest per member, but the single-payer system got voted down.
Horse shit. That is all. All of this "radical socialist" stuff is pure grade-A horse manure. I'd go into details, but you won't believe me anyway. I'd tell you to look at the facts, since they stand for themselves, but you obviously haven't looked at them because you don't much care. I mean, you obviously aren't too bothered by the possibility of spouting off nonsense.
The scary thing is that you probably believe it, and thus your definition of even the political middle is closer to fascism than anything else.
The country right now is full of people who don't actually know what the President has done, but are perfectly happy to listen to Fox News or otherwise make up their own stories about what he's done, and then hold him accountable for it. Look at the healthcare law - if you poll Republicans about the specific provisions of it , they're hugely in favor of it, but then when you ask them what they think of the President's healthcare law they're vehemently against it.
I thought the Federal government already had the power to pre-empt normal communications infrastructure in a time of national emergency. For example, pretty much every radio or TV station, as well as all cable systems, must be able to be activated to broadcast a message from the President. It's part of the EAS that's usually used for severe weather warnings. I thought that the government also had the authority to "commandeer" those facilities if necessary for communications
Isn't this more-or-less extending that same power to the internet? Talking about "continuity of government" sounds like "when we've been hit by a nuclear bomb, we're going to make sure we can communicate by whatever means necessary". You know, the cold-war era thinking about second strike capability and command and control and so on.
Software patents exist as a class of patents because a software patent was issued and there was a lawsuit that upheld the patent. AFAIK there's no legislation specifically expanding the class of patents to cover software. Thus it's the concern of the judiciary. Furthermore, even if there were legislation, it would still be within the scope of the judiciary to decide whether software could be considered an invention under the Constitution. They've already decided that mathematics can't be patented, for example.
In a similar vein, there's not actually any legislation requiring that the police read a suspect his Miranda rights. That's the result of a Supreme Court ruling on it, and since we live in a common-law system and that's binding precedent, any case where a suspect isn't read his Miranda rights will be thrown out by any lower court.
It's a mistake to think that only legislation is law. Legislation can override precedent that "fills in a gap", but what we think of as the body of law is jurisprudence as informed by the legislation. That's what makes us a common-law system.
No, I understood you, thanks. But you're asking for two things that (you've noticed!) don't line up, so if you want to have your cake and eat it too, you can take my advice and not be a dick about it. Or not, I don't really care, but it sounded like you had a problem and were more interested in a solution than pedantry.
Consumer-level satnavs aren't intended, built, or particularly suitable for connecting to a computer. A cheap dedicated Garmin GPS unit (as opposed to satnav) will do just fine in terms of locating or waypoints or connecting to a computer (I have one on a boat that works great), but it's not great at taking you through roads. They were built for trails and don't waste money, power, or size on color displays, voice synthesis, or a list of nearby gas stations. There are ones available that also do turn-by-turn, but they're substantially more expensive and won't ever work as well as a proper satnav. And it's overkill for hooking up to a computer, because they draw a lot of power the extra power draw, size, and cabling/weather problems. The $27 puck above will mag-mount to your roof, has a 5-foot cable, and is powered from the USB port you have to power anyway to use the computer.
If you insist on it being one device, you're pretty much out of luck unless you want to drop serious cash and end up with a mediocre compromise solution. But if you want computer-based geolocation capability and also road navigation, you're rather substantially better off by buying the $60-ish decent satnav and the $30 GPS receiver.
"For a reasonable price you can EITHER have a vehicle that goes over land OR a vehicle that goes over water". They're both vehicles, right? If you spend a lot of money, you can get hovercrafts that work sorta-well on each, but why shouldn't there be a cheap, good solution to both problems? It's because they're different in every way other than superficially (they both are vehicles! they both use the GPS!) and they've been optimized for their particular problem domain.
Interesting. SoCal likely has worse illegal immigration than where I live, but it seems very strange that illegal immigrants would call an ambulance, even if they really needed one. You'd think they'd rather stay as low profile as possible...
We tried to do it the proper way (we called it the public option) and people wouldn't go for it. They called it socialism and said it couldn't possibly work, despite the fact that the people protesting it most loudly already had socialized health care and that there are existence proofs that it did work. But facts don't seem to bother a lot of people around here.
Good thing the bill has a provision that "Insurers must spend a certain percent of premium dollars on eligible expenses, subject to various waivers and exemptions; if an insurer fails to meet this requirement, there is no penalty, but a rebate must be issued to the policy holder." IIRC the percentage is 85%, so 85% of premiums can't go into pockets in the insurance company, and need to be spent on healthcare, or else they go back to subscribers.
Funny, I actually work on an ambulance and have for years. It's never happened, not in many thousands of calls. Literally not once, in an area with a relatively large number of illegal immigrants. If it happened all the time, I'd think I would've seen it at least once.
What I have had are dozens and dozens of uninsured people who had a heart attack after 10 years of high cholesterol. All but one were convinced to go to the hospital anyway, so they didn't die, where they got angioplasty or bypass surgery or whatnot, and then of course couldn't afford the bill. The other guy would have died rather than be stuck with a bill he couldn't pay, except that we stuck around for 20 minutes until his heart did actually stop, at which point we were allowed to jump in and resuscitate him whether he approved or not. He ended up making it, because we were right there, but he unquestioningly would've died otherwise.
I don't know about you, but I think it's completely sick to let people die because of money. The ones we were able to convince to go to the hospital ended up surviving, but they had massive bills that they of course couldn't pay. Some got charity care, others went bankrupt, and the rest just didn't pay it and the hospital gave up. But that money had to come from somewhere, and it came from the insured people, whose costs were raised - making less of them able to afford insurance, in a vicious cycle.
Well, the thing is Obama believed his rhetoric about working with the Republicans to move the country forward. That's why Gitmo is still open - rather than forcing a state to accept the prisoners, he tried to work with the (largely Republican) state governments to do it, and they wouldn't have it. The Republicans also kept asking for modifications to the single-payer plan, which were largely accepted, and then didn't vote for it anyway.
He's grown some balls since then, but it took him being burned a lot. Not sure why he didn't give up on them sooner, especially when they started off with "let's not do anything at all in order to make him a one-term President". But, again, I think he actually believed what he said in the campaign... he seemed to make a pretty honest effort to cooperate when he could've just railroaded stuff through.
Over the course of a lifetime, its cheaper for me to invest $400 a month into a money market account
If you do that for 20 years, you end up with 96k plus interest. A lot of things cost a lot more than that, but we've decided as a society that you shouldn't just be kicked to the curb when you've exhausted your savings.
Health Insurance COMPANIES posting record profits are the ones leeching off this system you love so much. Guess what? You thought health insurance companies were profitable now? Just wait until every American by government mandate/tax is forced to spill 30% or more of their income into the pockets of health insurance company share holders.
Good thing the bill mandates that "Insurers must spend a certain percent of premium dollars on eligible expenses, subject to various waivers and exemptions; if an insurer fails to meet this requirement, there is no penalty, but a rebate must be issued to the policy holder." In other words, they can't just raise prices without the vast majority of that money going out on healthcare; they don't just get to pocket it. That's already in effect, by the way (Jan 1 '11) and it does seem to be making a difference.
I don't know where you live, but in my state every driver must be insured for liability (not necessarily damage) whether you want to or not. My state (and most others, by the sound of it) decided that the risks of people causing catastrophic damage to life and property with no monetary responsibility was worth the imposition. It's actually a pretty good analogy, since if you decide not to be insured you're breaking the law (the mandate is a tax instead), but if you aren't insured anything bad that happens is still "covered" by somebody, just like if you go to an ER and can't pay. The costs of your dickishness are also borne out by everybody else, raising their costs.
The only difference is that you can choose not to drive, but you can't choose not to receive healthcare. It would be better logically if you simply couldn't be treated if you didn't have insurance or otherwise could pay, but we decided already to have universal healthcare when we decided that people dying in the streets is bad.
Actually it's military jargon for ordnance that's failed to go off as intended. It should have exploded, but it didn't. The abbreviation is UXO. Like most jargon, and language in general, literal correctness is less important than preciseness, and unexploded ordnance has a very specific definition.
Care to elaborate? I'd always understood that truth wasn't a defense (defence?) against an accusation of libel in the UK, and thus any damaging speech could be sued over - even if it was only damaging because the plaintiff earned it. This all makes it much easier to punish people for saying things you don't like, unlike in the US where it needs to be demonstrably false and demonstrably harmful.
Am I wrong? If so, I'd love to hear how it actually works, instead of just calling people "fat bastards".
If you're a conservative, it amounts to a government agency fleecing an innocent business to support their habit of taking businesses to court to enforce arbitrary standards.
A reasonable conservative wants.. a reasonable amount of regulation. They don't want businesses regulated to a crazy and excessive degree. But they want business to be done openly and honestly too.
Unfortunately, there don't seem to be that many "reasonable conservatives" left. It's a shame... there are two distinct political philosophies that need representing and can coexist, but today's GOP doesn't do a very good job of it. I'm almost a socialist, but I firmly believe that the free market does most things better - even electricity, if the market is properly set up.
If today's GOP were really in favor of the free market, they'd see cap-and-trade as a reasonable way to hold people accountable for the externalities of pollution, and create an incentive to improve. But they're more interested in give-the-rich-guys-money-ism. It was pretty well understood in Reagan's time that trickle-down "economics" was a political sham with no basis in reality, but a lot of people seem to actually believe it nowadays...
tl;dr - Republicans need to be like you describe, for the health of our nation. Unfortunately, they seem to be forcing those people out as RINOs if they don't also buy the line about gay marriage and so on.
But the money isn't speech. The ad, pamphlet, etc is. Citizens' United decided that corporations had a Constitutional right to free speech. If they did have such a right, then it wouldn't be fair to limit their expenditures. But the obvious problem with that ruling is that corporations don't - and shouldn't! - have a right to free speech.
Corporations have to be people so they can own things and we can sue them. That's a well-established legal fiction. But they don't inherently get any human rights because of that. I, and many-to-most other people, think that granting corporations human rights is a mistake. What's next - the right to bear arms?
Interesting. I'm just starting to get into iOS development, but I thought they were pretty much similar libraries.
And, as it turns out, from further down that page:
To be fair, you should be able to use CGColor identically on both OS X (10.3 or later) and iPhone OS, and CGImage to draw.
Jwz's complaint seems to be that the documentation isn't clear that the CG approach is the "blessed" way, and the one they'd be sticking with, but that's not entirely the same thing as "different APIs"
iOS also isn't running on a full fledged OSX core.
I don't know if you're using "core" to mean "kernel" or "basic OS layout", but either way you'd be wrong. iOS is derived from OSX and shares the Darwin/XNU kernel, BSD subsystem and even the BSD userspace stuff with OSX. Most of the frameworks (Cocoa, etc) are also essentially the same or very similar.
Not to mention kidnap people (we call it arrest) or break into someone's house (we call it a search warrant) or murder people (we call it capital punishment). The government is the institution we transfer some of our power to, then we control it with elections and checks on power to prevent it from being used recklessly. Before we figured that out, we had dictatorships (where one person assumed power due to force/divine provenance/etc), and before that we had anarchy (where everybody had all power, at least potentially)
This is pretty basic theory on society, more than 250 years old. It was pretty well understood by the time Paine's Common Sense was written, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough, even if I disagree (any important legislation is going to be verbose) but the objection wasn't that the law was too complex. The objections were over "death panels", or "socialized medicine" or what-have-you. None of which was in the bill, but that didn't stop people inventing reasons to dislike it.
That's true, but the fact of the matter is that the bill doesn't work without it. People never like the price tag on something. And other states have tried to implement the popular provisions without the mandate, and what happens is exactly what you'd expect - only risky folks get insurance, since everybody else can get it if they need it, and the costs are through the roof. Put simply, insurance works best with a large risk pool. I personally think that one single pool would be the largest of all, and thus cheapest per member, but the single-payer system got voted down.
He lost because he now posses a copy of "Fifty Shades of Grey"
Horse shit. That is all. All of this "radical socialist" stuff is pure grade-A horse manure. I'd go into details, but you won't believe me anyway. I'd tell you to look at the facts, since they stand for themselves, but you obviously haven't looked at them because you don't much care. I mean, you obviously aren't too bothered by the possibility of spouting off nonsense.
The scary thing is that you probably believe it, and thus your definition of even the political middle is closer to fascism than anything else.
The country right now is full of people who don't actually know what the President has done, but are perfectly happy to listen to Fox News or otherwise make up their own stories about what he's done, and then hold him accountable for it. Look at the healthcare law - if you poll Republicans about the specific provisions of it , they're hugely in favor of it, but then when you ask them what they think of the President's healthcare law they're vehemently against it.
I thought the Federal government already had the power to pre-empt normal communications infrastructure in a time of national emergency. For example, pretty much every radio or TV station, as well as all cable systems, must be able to be activated to broadcast a message from the President. It's part of the EAS that's usually used for severe weather warnings. I thought that the government also had the authority to "commandeer" those facilities if necessary for communications
Isn't this more-or-less extending that same power to the internet? Talking about "continuity of government" sounds like "when we've been hit by a nuclear bomb, we're going to make sure we can communicate by whatever means necessary". You know, the cold-war era thinking about second strike capability and command and control and so on.
Software patents exist as a class of patents because a software patent was issued and there was a lawsuit that upheld the patent. AFAIK there's no legislation specifically expanding the class of patents to cover software. Thus it's the concern of the judiciary. Furthermore, even if there were legislation, it would still be within the scope of the judiciary to decide whether software could be considered an invention under the Constitution. They've already decided that mathematics can't be patented, for example.
In a similar vein, there's not actually any legislation requiring that the police read a suspect his Miranda rights. That's the result of a Supreme Court ruling on it, and since we live in a common-law system and that's binding precedent, any case where a suspect isn't read his Miranda rights will be thrown out by any lower court.
It's a mistake to think that only legislation is law. Legislation can override precedent that "fills in a gap", but what we think of as the body of law is jurisprudence as informed by the legislation. That's what makes us a common-law system.
Do you similarly object to computers saying they're "made in China" but using chips made in the USA and Israel?
Do you similarly object to computers "made in China" but using chips made in the USA and Israel?
No, I understood you, thanks. But you're asking for two things that (you've noticed!) don't line up, so if you want to have your cake and eat it too, you can take my advice and not be a dick about it. Or not, I don't really care, but it sounded like you had a problem and were more interested in a solution than pedantry.
Consumer-level satnavs aren't intended, built, or particularly suitable for connecting to a computer. A cheap dedicated Garmin GPS unit (as opposed to satnav) will do just fine in terms of locating or waypoints or connecting to a computer (I have one on a boat that works great), but it's not great at taking you through roads. They were built for trails and don't waste money, power, or size on color displays, voice synthesis, or a list of nearby gas stations. There are ones available that also do turn-by-turn, but they're substantially more expensive and won't ever work as well as a proper satnav. And it's overkill for hooking up to a computer, because they draw a lot of power the extra power draw, size, and cabling/weather problems. The $27 puck above will mag-mount to your roof, has a 5-foot cable, and is powered from the USB port you have to power anyway to use the computer.
If you insist on it being one device, you're pretty much out of luck unless you want to drop serious cash and end up with a mediocre compromise solution. But if you want computer-based geolocation capability and also road navigation, you're rather substantially better off by buying the $60-ish decent satnav and the $30 GPS receiver.
"For a reasonable price you can EITHER have a vehicle that goes over land OR a vehicle that goes over water". They're both vehicles, right? If you spend a lot of money, you can get hovercrafts that work sorta-well on each, but why shouldn't there be a cheap, good solution to both problems? It's because they're different in every way other than superficially (they both are vehicles! they both use the GPS!) and they've been optimized for their particular problem domain.
http://www.amazon.com/GlobalSat-BU-353-USB-GPS-Receiver/dp/B000PKX2KA/
There you go. $27, free shipping, spits out NMEA over a virtual serial port.
Interesting. SoCal likely has worse illegal immigration than where I live, but it seems very strange that illegal immigrants would call an ambulance, even if they really needed one. You'd think they'd rather stay as low profile as possible...
We tried to do it the proper way (we called it the public option) and people wouldn't go for it. They called it socialism and said it couldn't possibly work, despite the fact that the people protesting it most loudly already had socialized health care and that there are existence proofs that it did work. But facts don't seem to bother a lot of people around here.
Good thing the bill has a provision that "Insurers must spend a certain percent of premium dollars on eligible expenses, subject to various waivers and exemptions; if an insurer fails to meet this requirement, there is no penalty, but a rebate must be issued to the policy holder." IIRC the percentage is 85%, so 85% of premiums can't go into pockets in the insurance company, and need to be spent on healthcare, or else they go back to subscribers.
Funny, I actually work on an ambulance and have for years. It's never happened, not in many thousands of calls. Literally not once, in an area with a relatively large number of illegal immigrants. If it happened all the time, I'd think I would've seen it at least once.
What I have had are dozens and dozens of uninsured people who had a heart attack after 10 years of high cholesterol. All but one were convinced to go to the hospital anyway, so they didn't die, where they got angioplasty or bypass surgery or whatnot, and then of course couldn't afford the bill. The other guy would have died rather than be stuck with a bill he couldn't pay, except that we stuck around for 20 minutes until his heart did actually stop, at which point we were allowed to jump in and resuscitate him whether he approved or not. He ended up making it, because we were right there, but he unquestioningly would've died otherwise.
I don't know about you, but I think it's completely sick to let people die because of money. The ones we were able to convince to go to the hospital ended up surviving, but they had massive bills that they of course couldn't pay. Some got charity care, others went bankrupt, and the rest just didn't pay it and the hospital gave up. But that money had to come from somewhere, and it came from the insured people, whose costs were raised - making less of them able to afford insurance, in a vicious cycle.
Well, the thing is Obama believed his rhetoric about working with the Republicans to move the country forward. That's why Gitmo is still open - rather than forcing a state to accept the prisoners, he tried to work with the (largely Republican) state governments to do it, and they wouldn't have it. The Republicans also kept asking for modifications to the single-payer plan, which were largely accepted, and then didn't vote for it anyway.
He's grown some balls since then, but it took him being burned a lot. Not sure why he didn't give up on them sooner, especially when they started off with "let's not do anything at all in order to make him a one-term President". But, again, I think he actually believed what he said in the campaign... he seemed to make a pretty honest effort to cooperate when he could've just railroaded stuff through.
Over the course of a lifetime, its cheaper for me to invest $400 a month into a money market account
If you do that for 20 years, you end up with 96k plus interest. A lot of things cost a lot more than that, but we've decided as a society that you shouldn't just be kicked to the curb when you've exhausted your savings.
Health Insurance COMPANIES posting record profits are the ones leeching off this system you love so much. Guess what? You thought health insurance companies were profitable now? Just wait until every American by government mandate/tax is forced to spill 30% or more of their income into the pockets of health insurance company share holders.
Good thing the bill mandates that "Insurers must spend a certain percent of premium dollars on eligible expenses, subject to various waivers and exemptions; if an insurer fails to meet this requirement, there is no penalty, but a rebate must be issued to the policy holder." In other words, they can't just raise prices without the vast majority of that money going out on healthcare; they don't just get to pocket it. That's already in effect, by the way (Jan 1 '11) and it does seem to be making a difference.
I don't know where you live, but in my state every driver must be insured for liability (not necessarily damage) whether you want to or not. My state (and most others, by the sound of it) decided that the risks of people causing catastrophic damage to life and property with no monetary responsibility was worth the imposition. It's actually a pretty good analogy, since if you decide not to be insured you're breaking the law (the mandate is a tax instead), but if you aren't insured anything bad that happens is still "covered" by somebody, just like if you go to an ER and can't pay. The costs of your dickishness are also borne out by everybody else, raising their costs.
The only difference is that you can choose not to drive, but you can't choose not to receive healthcare. It would be better logically if you simply couldn't be treated if you didn't have insurance or otherwise could pay, but we decided already to have universal healthcare when we decided that people dying in the streets is bad.
Actually it's military jargon for ordnance that's failed to go off as intended. It should have exploded, but it didn't. The abbreviation is UXO. Like most jargon, and language in general, literal correctness is less important than preciseness, and unexploded ordnance has a very specific definition.
Care to elaborate? I'd always understood that truth wasn't a defense (defence?) against an accusation of libel in the UK, and thus any damaging speech could be sued over - even if it was only damaging because the plaintiff earned it. This all makes it much easier to punish people for saying things you don't like, unlike in the US where it needs to be demonstrably false and demonstrably harmful.
Am I wrong? If so, I'd love to hear how it actually works, instead of just calling people "fat bastards".
If you're a conservative, it amounts to a government agency fleecing an innocent business to support their habit of taking businesses to court to enforce arbitrary standards.
A reasonable conservative wants .. a reasonable amount of regulation. They don't want businesses regulated to a crazy and excessive degree. But they want business to be done openly and honestly too.
Unfortunately, there don't seem to be that many "reasonable conservatives" left. It's a shame... there are two distinct political philosophies that need representing and can coexist, but today's GOP doesn't do a very good job of it. I'm almost a socialist, but I firmly believe that the free market does most things better - even electricity, if the market is properly set up.
If today's GOP were really in favor of the free market, they'd see cap-and-trade as a reasonable way to hold people accountable for the externalities of pollution, and create an incentive to improve. But they're more interested in give-the-rich-guys-money-ism. It was pretty well understood in Reagan's time that trickle-down "economics" was a political sham with no basis in reality, but a lot of people seem to actually believe it nowadays...
tl;dr - Republicans need to be like you describe, for the health of our nation. Unfortunately, they seem to be forcing those people out as RINOs if they don't also buy the line about gay marriage and so on.
But the money isn't speech. The ad, pamphlet, etc is. Citizens' United decided that corporations had a Constitutional right to free speech. If they did have such a right, then it wouldn't be fair to limit their expenditures. But the obvious problem with that ruling is that corporations don't - and shouldn't! - have a right to free speech.
Corporations have to be people so they can own things and we can sue them. That's a well-established legal fiction. But they don't inherently get any human rights because of that. I, and many-to-most other people, think that granting corporations human rights is a mistake. What's next - the right to bear arms?
Interesting. I'm just starting to get into iOS development, but I thought they were pretty much similar libraries.
And, as it turns out, from further down that page:
To be fair, you should be able to use CGColor identically on both OS X (10.3 or later) and iPhone OS, and CGImage to draw.
Jwz's complaint seems to be that the documentation isn't clear that the CG approach is the "blessed" way, and the one they'd be sticking with, but that's not entirely the same thing as "different APIs"
iOS also isn't running on a full fledged OSX core.
I don't know if you're using "core" to mean "kernel" or "basic OS layout", but either way you'd be wrong. iOS is derived from OSX and shares the Darwin/XNU kernel, BSD subsystem and even the BSD userspace stuff with OSX. Most of the frameworks (Cocoa, etc) are also essentially the same or very similar.
Not to mention kidnap people (we call it arrest) or break into someone's house (we call it a search warrant) or murder people (we call it capital punishment). The government is the institution we transfer some of our power to, then we control it with elections and checks on power to prevent it from being used recklessly. Before we figured that out, we had dictatorships (where one person assumed power due to force/divine provenance/etc), and before that we had anarchy (where everybody had all power, at least potentially)
This is pretty basic theory on society, more than 250 years old. It was pretty well understood by the time Paine's Common Sense was written, for example.