What? Obama's new wonder-plan is what TOOK AWAY our low deductible plan and forced us, for more money, to buy one that will cost us thousands more each year in premiums, and ten thousand more a year in deductibles. The people you're defending - Obama, Pelosi, Reid - forced us to buy a high deductible plan with fewer benefits, minus the doctor we'd used for years, and more. Obama didn't "outlaw" bad, expensive coverage, he just forced us into that exact situation. Thanks for shilling for him, though - it's nice to see that BS so transparently on display for all to see.

Well to be fair the deep-red state Kentucky had a very successful rollout of Obamacare (rebranded as "Kynect"), including it's own health insurance exchange AND medicaid expansion -- the whole Obamacare enchilada.

Under Obamacare, the federal insurance exchange was never intended to serve the entire country. In fact ideally nobody would have to use it, because states were supposed to set up their own exchanges that would better reflect the needs of their citizens than a federal one would. If you are forced to use the federal exhange, it's because politicians who run your state made that choice for you.

Of course some states have had their own exchange rollout disasters -- including blue states like Maryland and Oregon. If you're experienced with this kind of project you'd expect that. But others have had very successful rollouts, including a handful of red states like Kentucky.

I used to have affordable insurance for my wife and I. The ACA killed it. Were forced to go to a new plan that:

1) Has much higher monthly premiums (we went from roughly $230/month to about $500/month)

2) Has a hugely higher deductible (we went from $2,500 a year to about $12,000 a year). This means that we are much, much farther out of pocket every year, especially if we actually need medical care beyond one or two simple visits annually.

3) We are past any risk of pregnancy. None the less, we are being forced to pay for elaborate maternity care that we cannot possibly use.

4) The new plan forced us to give up the doctor we've been using for 15 years unless we want to pay cash for that in a way that doesn't help with our deductible.

5) The two best local hospitals are no longer available to us unless we want to pay retail for their use, and get no benefit against our deductible.

Prior to this "affordable" new act, we had no need to change insurance, doctors, hospitals or anything else for well over 10 years.

Because of how the math is working out, we're told to expect that next year's premiums will go up by another 45-55%. Thanks, Mr. Obamacare Cheerleader, if you're one of the people who helped to empower the people who snuck this 100% partisan monstrosity through congress on Pelosi's "deeming" technique. Thanks a lot.

So you are ALSO saying that the information presented is incorrect ... that the people at HHS had NO idea that the site wasn't full of holes in terms of security and functionality. That the "cherry-picked" emails that show the administration knew the site was a train wreck are referring to something else, because the site wasn't a train wreck when it went live. Right? I see. So if that's incorrect, then what you're saying is that the administration did NOT know that the site was a train wreck. Which makes them stupefyingly incompetent.

So your idea of "nothing to see here" is either:

1) The administration knew exactly what a train wreck the thing was, but lied about it. Or...

2) The administration, at every level, was so foolish and incompetent that it had no idea whether or not the system was useless, and in lacking any sort of knowledge one way or the other, just assumed it was fine.

So what you're saying is that: 1) The administration didn't knowingly force people to use a badly designed, insecure web site that wasn't ready for prime time. That's just something the administration's critics made up, out of context. 2) The administration has fixed all of the security concerns, and that the whole platform is now working as they promised it would, and that anyone saying otherwise is lying and spinning the glorious real facts on the ground. I see.

Apple's design choices inspire people

FTFY: Apple's design choices inspire hipsters

Personally, I think all the previous versions of the iPhone (before 6) are butt fucking ugly, clunky looking things. And funny enough, their new phones look more like Samsung phones than their old POS designs. The only people who like (or are ooh and aah "inspired" by) the designs are hipsters who buy Apple for their hipster chic-ness and anyone else they can convince it's hipster chic. I also think this stupid idea would be so common if media types didn't give Apple such prominent media placement on TV and film all the time; they wouldn't be so cool. (At one time they had an advantage over Windows when they used Motorola chips in the 90s with monolithic memory as opposed to segmented memory when using media software in the pre pentium days... but now they have no advantage.)

I've used both extensively and haven't seen much difference except that the OSX 'Finder' app is the worst piece of shit file manager ever built and I keep feeling cheated that I have to pay for every little thing, nickle and dimed on Apple whenever I need to find something that works reasonably like a better file manager. Other than being Unix based it's got nothing over Windows (and I hate Windows 8, but given I can add 'classic shell' it's no worse than OSX). And fuck you if you say Windows isn't stable. I have no issues with Windows stablility since XP, and I have had OSX lock up so hard you could use it to cut glass. And retina displays? I don't care of the resolution is high, if you make the screen so fucking small I can't read it anyway, I don't care. People don't just buy 24 inch monitors for resolution. So in summary, fuck right off about 'inspiring people'.

Fuck, nothing better to throw me into a rant on the topic of computers than telling me that Apple design can 'inspire' me. Fuck right off.

The difference is that when you make someone who starts up a business pay all of the country's taxes, they're forced to simply pass that along to consumers as higher prices. The consumers pay the taxes regardless, always. Businesses can't exist without people buying their goods and services.

It could, with an ethernet dial-up modem.

Having said that, I think the best solution would be Debian with Eldy installed, and a few scripts for parent-specific needs (like a revert-to-default/familiar setting) linked to big, clear buttons.

Yes, and most cases such services are paid through property taxes. If the company owns the plant and its grounds, they pay substantial property taxes. If they lease the property, the property's owner does (and passes those costs along in the lease).

We're not talking about property taxes, we're talking about income taxes.

I don't think people understand the Unix philosophy. They think it's about limiting yourself to pipelines, but it's not. It's about writing simple robust programs that interact through a common, relatively high level interface, such as a pipeline. But that interface doesn't have to be a pipeline. It could be HTTP Requests and Responses.

The idea of increasing concurrency in a web application through small, asynchronous event handlers has a distinctly Unix flavor. After all the event handlers tend to run top to bottom and typically produce an output stream from an input stream (although it may simply modify one or the other or do something orthogonal to either like logging). The use of a standardized, high level interface allows you to keep the modules weakly coupled, and that's the real point of the Unix philosophy.

I think he's off his meds again.

Exactly why I don't go to church. Which I hate. Because now I have to always tell the truth. Tell the truth or go to church. One or the other. Sigh.

Right. Just the other day the Motley Fool published effective tax rates. That takes into account not just federal taxes but aveerage state/provincial tales and other tax-related burdens that actually get paid in real life by actual companies doing actual business in all the countries they list. The effective rate for businesses in the US is 40%. The second highest, behind only the UAE.