You assume the uninsured were not impacting the costs before Obamacare. They get sick and show up in the Emergency rooms. By law they have to be stabilized and can be released only when they are out of danger of dying. Emergency room care is very expensive. People who do these calculations for a living have estimated that given the government subsidy and the reduction of unpaid emergency care, there will be cost reductions.
The insurance companies have been raising the rates before Obamacare too. Were you really satisfied with them before? Obamacare offers them a convenient excuse that you are willing to accept that is all. Anyway a single payer system would have been simpler and better. Given how good medicare/medicaid is and how much the seniors, veterans and federal employees like their plans, it would been better for all. But sadly fear mongering trumps logical analysis all the time.
Why don't you contact the Republican party, the cross roads GPS, Americans for prosperity etc who are desperately looking for Obamacare horror stories? Every ad they made with specific claim was debunked and they are airing it with vague generalities. I am sure a well documented scare story like yours will be received with great joy and you will soon be getting a starring role in ad. Don't miss this opportunity.
True, clueless politicians made last minutes changes like, "don't show them raw premium, sticker shock, make them do subsidy calculation first" a week before roll out. True, dimwitted bureaucrats gave out contracts with idiotic levels of fragmentation and blame-dodgeability. Obama raised expectations insanely by saying "as easy as buying books in Amazon..".
But despite all of it, what the crack team of unsung IT gurus did in Nov 2013 is nothing less than heroic. How long did it take for the comparable services like Amazon, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, gmail, eBay etc to create 3 million accounts? OK, that is an earlier generation. Take the current generation of Twitter, WhatsApp, SnapChat, FaceBook, how long did they take to ramp up to 3 million accounts?
Helathcare.gov is something like eBay for health insurance. How long did it take eBay to refer 32 billion dollars worth of business? (8 million accounts, 4 K a year premium per person). No body had done in two quarters. Even banking and mutual fund sites like Schwab, Vanguard, Fidelity do not do 32 billion dollars a year. Even if the do, they did not ramp up in 2 quarters.
They bungled the roll out. They probably squandered tons and tons of money to get it done. But despite all that, no body has ever created a web site that did what Healthcare.gov has done. It is easy to criticize and do Monday morning quarterbacking. But the task they failed to well was not some simple task any hack could do or something others have done before.
They won't give away any content for free. They are trying the Skype model. Netflix will store a highly fragmented bits of streams encoded and indexed in the box you supply. They will read and write and use it as cache to dish out to your neighbours. You will have no idea of what is in your netflix box.
The question is: who does have legal jurisdiction on data stored in a given country? The courts of that country, or the courts of the nationality of the company who manages the data storage?
There are myriad of such questions. But the answer is always the same, "whatever is in the best interests of the richer guy".
US has a reliable grid and the utility companies are flush with cash fighting to protect their entrenched interests. The PBS report was about places like Nigeria, Libya, rural India, rural Pakistan, and such places. There is no grid or the grid is not all that reliable. There there is real demand for electricity and lack of capital. They are mostly using portable gas generators. Solar easily competes with them. But the large scale adaptation is lacking because of lack of capital and investments.
Netflix innovation will be directed to help its bottom line. Paying Comcast's ransom actually makes it difficult for a Netflix competitor to gain foot hold, and creates an incentive for Comcast to put up road blocks to upstarts.
It is entirely possible Netflix would come up with a compensation model that lets people with high bandwidth connections to "voluntarily" participate in an "incentive" program and provide buffering services, traffic origin obfuscation services. But if FTC/FCC enforces strict "truth in labeling" law, "6 Mbps means 6 Mbps, unlimited means unlimited" customers might save more.
But the ground reality is, if you steal a dollar or two from million people you can get away with the crime. It is when you steal a million or two from one or two people you get into trouble. So in the end customer apathy, lack of interest in saving a few dollars a month would doom the enforcement efforts.
Origin of the word Amazon comes from myths about a tribe of female warriors, who would chop their right breasts off, because that interfered with their drawing of the bow string. A for opposite/without mazo for breast. A+mazon means without breasts.
Or it could be amazingly appropriate. That corporation wants only females willing to chop their own breasts off to be in the "team".
Lots of charts about trends in solar energy here and here. The contrarian view from a business anlayst from Forbes is here.
The Forbes guy says the cost reduction is largely due to subsidies and incentives. But he also says we need to worry about depletion of silicon too like worrying about depletion of fossil fuels.
Also, Clean Tech supporters often assert that the point of competitiveness will be accelerated because conventional energy prices must rise, primarily because of depletion of fossil fuel resources. But they don’t seem to think that the depletion of silicon needed to make photovoltaic cells; depletion matters, but the rate of depletion is often exaggerated.
.
This guy says depletion of fossil fuel is over estimated and depletion of silicon is something to worry about. This genius does not seem to understand half the mass of planet Earth is silicon! Silicon dioxide is sand/earth/mud/rock. Of course it costs tons of money, energy and effort to separate silicon from sand. But we are not going to run out of silicon before we run out of fossil fuels. And the capital markets will listen to this Einstein because he writes for Forbes. Not to you and me because we are Dilberts who work a wage and write in Slashdot. Eventually solar will become cost effective, and there will be a mad rush into it. This is how booma and busts are created, methinks.
A serial hybrid motorcycle could be very efficient. A simple 4 or 5 HP gas engine tuned for efficiency turning a generator to charge medium sized battery. A pure electric drive train, motor probably built into the hub of the rear wheel eliminating drive chains/shaft. Some over night charging off the grid. Pure electric range probably not much. This configuration can be optimized for fuel efficiency.
But the higher cost of such a vehicle cuts into possible savings due to fuel efficiency. Places where fuel costs are high, say India, capital to buy more expensive motorcycles is scarce. Still I expect this configuration come out of China, India, and other scooter/ motorcycle/ moped dominated markets of South Asia. Not DARPA.
I heard about an innovative financing of solar panels for such capital scarce regions. Instead of trying to sell the panels to the customers, they try to rent it or sell only the electricity to the customers. So people look at it as so many nyra/rupee/dinar per month instead of total cost to buy it out right. It was an NPR report from couple of years ago. Not much news about it since. So it must have died soon after the report.
It is so illogical and insane it is so frustrating. The world capital markets are sloshing around with some 2 or 3 trillion dollars in cash. They don't find opportunities worth investing. At the same time converting free solar energy into usable form of electricity is deemed unviable because the capital costs are high. The only cost for solar and wind energy is the amortization and debt service. There is no more recurring expenses like buying coal or natural gas.
If you believe in free markets, Adam Smith and invisible hand of the markets, at least a few billion dollars will flow from these capital market to projects of solar energy and efficient hybrid motor cycles and pure electric mopeds. But the pundits of Wall Street keep saying the investment is not worth it. Mostly people are comparing the average cost of electricity production by solar with that of natural gas or coal. But Solar energy production peak comes close to peak electricity demand and peak spot price of electricity. Still it is not worth it?
May be if we link the western grid with the eastern grid and couple peak demand of eastern seaboard demand at 4 to 6 pm with peak production in Arizona may be it would become more profitable? Don't know.
Thinking back there was a time, a company sued Microsoft in court about something similar.
Most computer makers accept money from software vendors to pre-install crap ware, nag ware etc on their new PCs. Lots of the bad customer experience in Windows happen because these crapware are installed as the default handlers for many standard files. They all want to be launched at boot time so that they might appear to launch very fast if a foolish customer actually uses them. And each one of them would check for updates on launch. In the days of dial-up and they have to time out one by one to get the boot sequence completed. Then in the transition period when people have broadband, some of the crap ware will try to launch the modem interface. Absolutely horrible user experience. Anyway, AOL was paying oodles of money to the vendors to preinstall AOL in them.
Microsoft had Netscape and AOL as the big things to be killed in its target list. So it had secret contracts with computer makers to prevent them from pre installing Netscape. Netscape did not know what hit it. But AOL realized it and filed suit against Microsoft to prevent it from forcing the computer makers to exclude AOL from the desk top.
Please do not conflate these two issues. On one hand consumers, or a section of consumers are change averse. On the other hand established interests are lobbying to preserve their stranglehold on the market by putting road blocks to competition. These two are not the same.
If there was a group that benefitted financially by the presence of start button, and it lobbied state governments to prevent Microsoft from taking it away then you would have the comparison right and you realize how ridiculous it is.
Imagine a tech savvy guy planning to commit some serious crime. He/She could find a patsy, take a few photographs on the sly. And get to work at home subtly adding makeup to make the eye slightly apart, or contact lenses with off-center pupils, add lipstick to make the lips slightly longer etc. Keep altering it tell Gaussian Face declares that new face of the criminal and the photo of the patsy both hash to the same 150 pixel canonical image. Now, commit the crime in full view of the security camera, and the police will go after the patsy.
One of the most prominent features of Lord Shiva, is His third eye. Paint a third eye on the forehead to completely discombobulate Gaussian face.
The other stunning form of Lord Shiva is His half-female version . If you could manage this form, you would discombobulate not just Gaussian Face but also fellow humans too.
Extending the theory, painting random noses, lips, eyes and other features on cheeks, foreheads etc would defeat these automatic face recognition systems.
Human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and SCOTUS decisions, are areas that overlap sometimes but not always. Genuine progressives put human rights before the others.
Still, you would not pack heat and stalk the justices right? Like the rightwing nutjobs are doing in Nevada. That was my point.
In a scathing dissent, fellow conservative Scalia called the Thomas opinion a "freedom-destroying cocktail" that would encourage "malevolent" tipsters to make false reports. It matters not whether the caller gave details about her alleged accident. The issue, said Scalia, is "whether what she claimed to know was true."
Is Scalia seriously suggesting police can act on a tip only after proving that tipster is telling the truth? The operative word is "reasonable" suspicion. The number of false reports to 911 is vanishingly small, and there is very reasonable to believe the tipster was telling the truth.
Just last week he suggested seriously people unsatisfied with taxes should rebel. Wonder what would happen if people who strongly believe that "the citizens united decision was unconstitutional and dilutes the franchise of American citizens, and allows foreign non citizens to set up shell corporations to influence US elections" to pursue second amendment remedies against the SCOTUS. Lucky for Scalia most progressives still believe in elections, democracy, rule of law and that SCOTUS interpretation of the constitution is the only legal interpretation.
I am dumbfounded and speechless. I am finding myself agreeing with Clarence "who put *that* on my coke can" Thomas! And shockingly Thomas is disagreeing with Scalia!. Who knows! Justice Thomas might actually summon up enough courage and mental faculties to frame a cogent question in the next hearing. Or the world could be coming to an end.
Will they pack the extra battery in its own tiny frame, that attaches to the front (or the back) of the car? I could easily imagine a two anchor point connection to the car with one central rubber wheel on the other side. The pack should be around 24 inches long, full car wide, and may be 30 inches tall. It should hug the car very close, and probably have about 12 inches of ground clearance. The central wheel should be pivoted. The anchor to the car also would have horizontal pins to allow freedom to swing up/down to take the bumps in the road. The push-packs (or the pull-packs) fully charged should be available at battery rentals. Rent one when you want to go far. Or buy one and leave it in the garage when you don't need it. Why haul the heavy extra battery on days when you don't need them?
In an ideal world the anchor points and the battery interface would be standardized and third party companies will come up with the push/pull pack battery rentals. But I expect every manufacturer to come up with proprietary non-interchangeable walled gardens of batteries, connections etc.
You don't have to encrypt the whole message. Just create a 4 byte digest of the message, salt it, encrypt it and append it to the message. The server can just verify the digest has been encrypted using a known signature. The encryption need not be strong. Much less than 40 bits would do. In fact even symmetric key encryption (where anyone dredging through the binary can find the keys) would be sufficient. The aim is not to make it uncrackable. The aim is to force Microsoft to "sign" as AOL. The moment AOL calls it AOL signature, if Microsoft ever uses it, it would be committing forgery. The lawyers will stop it.
The AOL coders did not try to incorporate a challenge and response system based on public/private keys. Or use some sort of digital signature in their clients to authenticate themselves as the "true build" from AOL. Not surprised. After all they wrote AOL.
What Netflix does not matter. Comcast sold their customers 6 Mbps "unlimited download" service. They just have to provide it. Or label it right, like the way mobile companies do. For example, T-mbile says "unlimited data means unlimited data at 128 kbps, the first 2GB will be at 6 Mbps". Change the label or change the price. Just don't sell the customer "unlimited" service and then expect to be paid by content providers.
"Video streaming service Netflix Inc said it intends to raise the monthly subscription price for new customers by $1 or $2 a month to help the company pay ransom to the ISP monopolies with stranglehold on the last mile of cable built by the rate payers over theyear on public rights of way, protected by the public utilities commissions, who wantonly flout truth-in-labeling laws by selling X Mbps service and balk at providing it.
Slashdot Mirror
The insurance companies have been raising the rates before Obamacare too. Were you really satisfied with them before? Obamacare offers them a convenient excuse that you are willing to accept that is all. Anyway a single payer system would have been simpler and better. Given how good medicare/medicaid is and how much the seniors, veterans and federal employees like their plans, it would been better for all. But sadly fear mongering trumps logical analysis all the time.
Why don't you contact the Republican party, the cross roads GPS, Americans for prosperity etc who are desperately looking for Obamacare horror stories? Every ad they made with specific claim was debunked and they are airing it with vague generalities. I am sure a well documented scare story like yours will be received with great joy and you will soon be getting a starring role in ad. Don't miss this opportunity.
But despite all of it, what the crack team of unsung IT gurus did in Nov 2013 is nothing less than heroic. How long did it take for the comparable services like Amazon, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, gmail, eBay etc to create 3 million accounts? OK, that is an earlier generation. Take the current generation of Twitter, WhatsApp, SnapChat, FaceBook, how long did they take to ramp up to 3 million accounts?
Helathcare.gov is something like eBay for health insurance. How long did it take eBay to refer 32 billion dollars worth of business? (8 million accounts, 4 K a year premium per person). No body had done in two quarters. Even banking and mutual fund sites like Schwab, Vanguard, Fidelity do not do 32 billion dollars a year. Even if the do, they did not ramp up in 2 quarters.
They bungled the roll out. They probably squandered tons and tons of money to get it done. But despite all that, no body has ever created a web site that did what Healthcare.gov has done. It is easy to criticize and do Monday morning quarterbacking. But the task they failed to well was not some simple task any hack could do or something others have done before.
They won't give away any content for free. They are trying the Skype model. Netflix will store a highly fragmented bits of streams encoded and indexed in the box you supply. They will read and write and use it as cache to dish out to your neighbours. You will have no idea of what is in your netflix box.
The question is: who does have legal jurisdiction on data stored in a given country? The courts of that country, or the courts of the nationality of the company who manages the data storage?
There are myriad of such questions. But the answer is always the same, "whatever is in the best interests of the richer guy".
US has a reliable grid and the utility companies are flush with cash fighting to protect their entrenched interests. The PBS report was about places like Nigeria, Libya, rural India, rural Pakistan, and such places. There is no grid or the grid is not all that reliable. There there is real demand for electricity and lack of capital. They are mostly using portable gas generators. Solar easily competes with them. But the large scale adaptation is lacking because of lack of capital and investments.
It is entirely possible Netflix would come up with a compensation model that lets people with high bandwidth connections to "voluntarily" participate in an "incentive" program and provide buffering services, traffic origin obfuscation services. But if FTC/FCC enforces strict "truth in labeling" law, "6 Mbps means 6 Mbps, unlimited means unlimited" customers might save more.
But the ground reality is, if you steal a dollar or two from million people you can get away with the crime. It is when you steal a million or two from one or two people you get into trouble. So in the end customer apathy, lack of interest in saving a few dollars a month would doom the enforcement efforts.
Or it could be amazingly appropriate. That corporation wants only females willing to chop their own breasts off to be in the "team".
The Forbes guy says the cost reduction is largely due to subsidies and incentives. But he also says we need to worry about depletion of silicon too like worrying about depletion of fossil fuels.
Also, Clean Tech supporters often assert that the point of competitiveness will be accelerated because conventional energy prices must rise, primarily because of depletion of fossil fuel resources. But they don’t seem to think that the depletion of silicon needed to make photovoltaic cells; depletion matters, but the rate of depletion is often exaggerated.
. This guy says depletion of fossil fuel is over estimated and depletion of silicon is something to worry about. This genius does not seem to understand half the mass of planet Earth is silicon! Silicon dioxide is sand/earth/mud/rock. Of course it costs tons of money, energy and effort to separate silicon from sand. But we are not going to run out of silicon before we run out of fossil fuels. And the capital markets will listen to this Einstein because he writes for Forbes. Not to you and me because we are Dilberts who work a wage and write in Slashdot. Eventually solar will become cost effective, and there will be a mad rush into it. This is how booma and busts are created, methinks.
But the higher cost of such a vehicle cuts into possible savings due to fuel efficiency. Places where fuel costs are high, say India, capital to buy more expensive motorcycles is scarce. Still I expect this configuration come out of China, India, and other scooter/ motorcycle/ moped dominated markets of South Asia. Not DARPA.
I heard about an innovative financing of solar panels for such capital scarce regions. Instead of trying to sell the panels to the customers, they try to rent it or sell only the electricity to the customers. So people look at it as so many nyra/rupee/dinar per month instead of total cost to buy it out right. It was an NPR report from couple of years ago. Not much news about it since. So it must have died soon after the report.
It is so illogical and insane it is so frustrating. The world capital markets are sloshing around with some 2 or 3 trillion dollars in cash. They don't find opportunities worth investing. At the same time converting free solar energy into usable form of electricity is deemed unviable because the capital costs are high. The only cost for solar and wind energy is the amortization and debt service. There is no more recurring expenses like buying coal or natural gas.
If you believe in free markets, Adam Smith and invisible hand of the markets, at least a few billion dollars will flow from these capital market to projects of solar energy and efficient hybrid motor cycles and pure electric mopeds. But the pundits of Wall Street keep saying the investment is not worth it. Mostly people are comparing the average cost of electricity production by solar with that of natural gas or coal. But Solar energy production peak comes close to peak electricity demand and peak spot price of electricity. Still it is not worth it?
May be if we link the western grid with the eastern grid and couple peak demand of eastern seaboard demand at 4 to 6 pm with peak production in Arizona may be it would become more profitable? Don't know.
Most computer makers accept money from software vendors to pre-install crap ware, nag ware etc on their new PCs. Lots of the bad customer experience in Windows happen because these crapware are installed as the default handlers for many standard files. They all want to be launched at boot time so that they might appear to launch very fast if a foolish customer actually uses them. And each one of them would check for updates on launch. In the days of dial-up and they have to time out one by one to get the boot sequence completed. Then in the transition period when people have broadband, some of the crap ware will try to launch the modem interface. Absolutely horrible user experience. Anyway, AOL was paying oodles of money to the vendors to preinstall AOL in them.
Microsoft had Netscape and AOL as the big things to be killed in its target list. So it had secret contracts with computer makers to prevent them from pre installing Netscape. Netscape did not know what hit it. But AOL realized it and filed suit against Microsoft to prevent it from forcing the computer makers to exclude AOL from the desk top.
So the analogy I used actually happened!
If there was a group that benefitted financially by the presence of start button, and it lobbied state governments to prevent Microsoft from taking it away then you would have the comparison right and you realize how ridiculous it is.
The goal is not to get the patsy convicted in a court. Just to draw a red herring across the trail of the police.
Imagine a tech savvy guy planning to commit some serious crime. He/She could find a patsy, take a few photographs on the sly. And get to work at home subtly adding makeup to make the eye slightly apart, or contact lenses with off-center pupils, add lipstick to make the lips slightly longer etc. Keep altering it tell Gaussian Face declares that new face of the criminal and the photo of the patsy both hash to the same 150 pixel canonical image. Now, commit the crime in full view of the security camera, and the police will go after the patsy.
The other stunning form of Lord Shiva is His half-female version . If you could manage this form, you would discombobulate not just Gaussian Face but also fellow humans too.
Extending the theory, painting random noses, lips, eyes and other features on cheeks, foreheads etc would defeat these automatic face recognition systems.
He at least used to pretend to listen to the arguments. Now a days he has even stopped pretending. Pretty soon he will start snoring from the bench.
Human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and SCOTUS decisions, are areas that overlap sometimes but not always. Genuine progressives put human rights before the others.
Still, you would not pack heat and stalk the justices right? Like the rightwing nutjobs are doing in Nevada. That was my point.
In a scathing dissent, fellow conservative Scalia called the Thomas opinion a "freedom-destroying cocktail" that would encourage "malevolent" tipsters to make false reports. It matters not whether the caller gave details about her alleged accident. The issue, said Scalia, is "whether what she claimed to know was true."
Is Scalia seriously suggesting police can act on a tip only after proving that tipster is telling the truth? The operative word is "reasonable" suspicion. The number of false reports to 911 is vanishingly small, and there is very reasonable to believe the tipster was telling the truth.
Just last week he suggested seriously people unsatisfied with taxes should rebel. Wonder what would happen if people who strongly believe that "the citizens united decision was unconstitutional and dilutes the franchise of American citizens, and allows foreign non citizens to set up shell corporations to influence US elections" to pursue second amendment remedies against the SCOTUS. Lucky for Scalia most progressives still believe in elections, democracy, rule of law and that SCOTUS interpretation of the constitution is the only legal interpretation.
I am dumbfounded and speechless. I am finding myself agreeing with Clarence "who put *that* on my coke can" Thomas! And shockingly Thomas is disagreeing with Scalia!. Who knows! Justice Thomas might actually summon up enough courage and mental faculties to frame a cogent question in the next hearing. Or the world could be coming to an end.
Why did they give you that proton torpedo? You make your own windows in doors. Also doors in walls.
In an ideal world the anchor points and the battery interface would be standardized and third party companies will come up with the push/pull pack battery rentals. But I expect every manufacturer to come up with proprietary non-interchangeable walled gardens of batteries, connections etc.
You don't have to encrypt the whole message. Just create a 4 byte digest of the message, salt it, encrypt it and append it to the message. The server can just verify the digest has been encrypted using a known signature. The encryption need not be strong. Much less than 40 bits would do. In fact even symmetric key encryption (where anyone dredging through the binary can find the keys) would be sufficient. The aim is not to make it uncrackable. The aim is to force Microsoft to "sign" as AOL. The moment AOL calls it AOL signature, if Microsoft ever uses it, it would be committing forgery. The lawyers will stop it.
The AOL coders did not try to incorporate a challenge and response system based on public/private keys. Or use some sort of digital signature in their clients to authenticate themselves as the "true build" from AOL. Not surprised. After all they wrote AOL.
What Netflix does not matter. Comcast sold their customers 6 Mbps "unlimited download" service. They just have to provide it. Or label it right, like the way mobile companies do. For example, T-mbile says "unlimited data means unlimited data at 128 kbps, the first 2GB will be at 6 Mbps". Change the label or change the price. Just don't sell the customer "unlimited" service and then expect to be paid by content providers.
"Video streaming service Netflix Inc said it intends to raise the monthly subscription price for new customers by $1 or $2 a month to help the company pay ransom to the ISP monopolies with stranglehold on the last mile of cable built by the rate payers over theyear on public rights of way, protected by the public utilities commissions, who wantonly flout truth-in-labeling laws by selling X Mbps service and balk at providing it.
FIFY