From your description, that's clearly the +++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR +++ +++ REDO FROM START +++ .

Simple, really.

Somehow I think Pearson is more of the threat in this particular situation. Government is just the tool that the corporation is using.

Hold it right there, you said it perfectly:

...W8...

That's the best advice I've seen so far! I'm happy to W8 and not install Windows 8.

Windows 8: Just W8.

Cheers,

Re-reading my previous post about externalization, I realize that it sounds like I'm painting amiga3D with the one-percenter brush, and that's actually not my intention. I think a different dynamic is at work in posts such as h(er|i)s.

I cannot find a link to it now, but I recall reading about a social experiment, where the researcher went door-to-door and just gave each household a $20 bill. He did this daily for some period of time, perhaps a few weeks. At first, the receivers of this unexpected money were very happy and surprised. As time went on, they came to expect the money, and to even be unpleasant if the researcher was perceived to be "late" in making his rounds. After the researcher stopped giving money at all, the people were quite angry and upset with him.

All this despite the fact that them receiving $20 daily was a complete fluke of luck that their neighborhood had been chosen by this researcher.

I think some of the upset about the ACA is that most people have had no understanding of how high averaged-across-the-boards insurance costs actually are. Being suddenly faced with a (sometimes substantially) higher bill for the same level of service as before, or sometimes even less service than before, is a rude shock. This shock is not at all abnormal -- the situation with health insurance in the US is seriously fubared, and many of us have been protected from that fubar-ness by either having insurance through our jobs, or by exercising our option to forgo insurance altogether. Many folks haven't had to deal with that expense -- they were, in some ways, analogous to the people getting a free $20 a day, though they might not have known it. And now they are no longer shielded from the expenses. (Setting aside that the insurance companies have also been ramping up their premiums as a whole in the run-up to the ACA's enactment.)

The ACA sucks donkey balls, in many respects. Which makes it all the more horrible that this is actually an improvement over what we've had so far (what with pre-existing condition bullshit, dropped policies, benefit caps, obscene profit margins...). My hope going forward is that, longer term, the anger expressed by amiga3D and others will lead to increased public pressure for a saner insurance system.

By *not* purchasing insurance you are placing the costs of the risk that you may need significant medical attention on society rather than on yourself. As such, you are externalizing the risk of injury and the medical costs associated and "assfucking" your neighbors in your haste to accumulate wealth.

The externalization of costs is one of the primary goals of one-percenters and those who aspire to join those ranks. Externalization of negatives is deemed as an absolute positive, in complete disregard of the ultimate impact on others: this is expected behavior for sociopaths, who eschew any concept of responsibility to anyone but themselves. So naturally, any requirement that costs not be externalized and foisted onto others is anathema, and is fought tooth and nail.

Much as we see now with the US Congress, where the faction bought and paid for by Koch & Co. are playing chicken with the global economy in an attempt at fending off one such requirement.

There's a cream for that.

But we can't tell yet if your insurance will cover it.

And clearly you're trying to trick me into accessing your creation here, whereupon you'll claim some sort of damages!

Look out, it's a trap!!

Well, I don't smell any hint of corruption here, no sirree!

</sarcasm>

I recall reading that there's some evidence that certain varieties of schizophrenia are essentially the symptoms of toxoplasmosis infection, to such an extent that treatment with drugs designed to kill toxoplasmosis cures some patients of schizophrenia.

See Google for more.

Heh. I don't know how much of that change is just middle age, and how much of it is bigger macro-cycle stuff having to do with end-of-empire nation-scale depression and assorted emotional fallout. Then again, I did grow up in DC and have been pretty cynical from my teen years onwards; then again again, life now does seem to hold less opportunity than it did, at least on a personal level...

[...sigh...]

Loving the album artwork too. Monorails -- especially as something snazzy and hip -- man, that dates things. :)

Cheers,

Russell Brand is the new cowbell?

Quantizable and meaningfully quantizable are both beside the points of usefully quantizable, and useful to whom.

Case in point: one of my wife's middle school students in humanities (basically English + history) was getting quite competitive and was obsessing over her grades in specific, narrow areas, to the point that her overall performance in class was deteriorating -- her scores on individual tests and assignments were good, but her actual comprehension was lacking. After talking with the parents, my wife floated the notion of not providing the child with a grade, i.e. not quantizing her performance, in an effort to get the child to stop obsessing over the number. The student calmed down, stopped obsessing, and her understanding of the material increased. And, in not being so competitive about the number she was assigned, she became friendlier and socialized more.

Part of the dynamic in this case is something that gets lost by any test-centric approach. Specifically, there's more to school than just the subject matter, particularly at the younger grades. How does one quantize a student's sociability? Friendliness? Cooperativeness? Etc. Many of these different aspects certainly can be quantized, but without any objective measure for doing so, these numbers are meaningless outside of the subjective context of whomever is assigning them. Sure, 1 + 1 = 2. But how does one objectively work out the math for "my pet hamster died and I feel sad and don't know how to talk about it, and don't want to"? Or, "I don't get along well with this teacher because our communication styles are too different, and she reminds me of that horrible Aunt Edith who spits when she talks and always gives me scratchy wool for Christmas, and I'm allergic to wool"?

Humans are deeply contextual. Math isn't. Trying to apply math to human contexts doesn't always work very well, and often has unintended consequences. One of the biggest issues is when a number score ostensibly represents a particular metric, but a deeper inspection of the scoring algorithm reveals that the metric doesn't actually measure what it's supposedly measuring. Quantization represents a gross kind of summarization, and in extreme cases, the baby does get thrown out with the bathwater (that is, all of the detail that's been summarized away). Sometimes the numbers do effectively lie.

O say does that scar-strangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the sheep, and the home of the slaves...