Exactly. Good encryption makes cloud backup a perfectly safe option. Encrypt your stuff something good and secure like GnuPG, stick it in one or more cloud providers, and then just worry about backing up your keys. Keys are small enough that you can even keep your backups as hard copies, and you only have to do the physical backup once instead of every week or whatever. It's a pain in the ass to type hard copies in correctly, but printed paper survives a lot better in a fire safe than digital media. Keep one easy to use digital copy and one heat-resistant paper copy in your fire safe and do the same in a safe deposit box somewhere.

I've been emailing myself important encrypted documents for years and letting gmail index them for easy retrieval. I can't imagine going back to dealing with having to regularly get physical media backups somewhere off-site and safe. It's just bits. Use computers to move them.

...as long as they're cool with all of our multinational tech companies doing the same favor for the Chinese government. I mean, laws are laws, right?

This. And it's way scarier than brutality. If the cops don't cover for each other and they can't file false reports, you can usually avoid getting roughed up or shot by not getting physical with them (although recent videos show for certain that even that's no guarantee--it just protects you from malice, not incompetence). Once they start filing false reports and backing up each other's lies, they're effectively beyond any control. They can do literally anything and get away with it, and a force that has unlimited power and no oversight will attract and eventually be dominated by people who will abuse it. That kind of culture is what turns healthy democracies into pre-industrial hellholes and keeps pre-industrial hellholes from ever developing into healthy democracies.

I'm willing to cut the officer a (very) small amount of slack here. People are calling it a "cold-blooded" shooting. It looks like more of a hot-blooded shooting. They'd been struggling and he was amped up. Hitting the guy with the TASER and having him not fall probably scared the hell out of him. He wasn't able to handle himself properly and he did a very wrong thing. He should answer for that just as any of us would answer for it if we shot somebody after a fight. But falsifying the report? That's fucking cold-blooded. Planting evidence (if that's what that object is)? Terrifying. I watched the video and was distrubed by the shooting, but casually dropping an object next to the body and calling in that he had a weapon? That gave me chills. That's the sort of thing that should be a capital offense if anything should. That's a direct, premeditated attack on civilization. None of us are safe.

Most patterned contacts are printed with arrays of dots and are easy to detect. They also don't move as the iris expands and contracts, which is a dead giveaway.

Most iris scanning equipment doesn't attempt to detect patterned lenses. It is, however, possible to detect them.

As for retinal scans, I don't know of any places where they're in general use and I'm not familiar enough with the failure modes to know whether contacts would affect them.

I'm definitely interested in expert input from somebody who confuses iris scans and retinal scans.

You can "get past" an iris scan with patterned contacts, but patterned contacts are also detectable. If they're enforcing a "no patterend contacts" rule, you're going to have a very hard time going undetected.

It could be even more interesting than that. My idea works something like this:

1) These things aren't so much visas as a "right to employ one foreign worker of class X." It should be transferrable with minimal friction. Just register the owner of the token and the name of the employee you're using it for.
2) If you want to hire a foreign worker, go right ahead. By his start date, you just need one of those tokens. Buy it at auction from the government when new ones are issued or buy it on the secondary market.
3) The worker himself can bring his own token. If he's a kick ass engineer with a lot of cash in the bank from kick ass engineering, there's no reason why he shouldn't be able to pay his own way and get rid of market uncertainty.
4) Those tokens can be broken down by job class (tech, medical, etc.).
5) The tokens have a shelf life before they expire. If you only need somebody for a year, you can buy one that's expiring in a year. Or by one with 2 years left on it and resell it if you're up for taking some market risk. The same can use token after token and stay here indefinitely as long as somebody is willing to pay.

The most interesting thing that I can see about it is the information it gives us. The prices of the various work classes would tell us how impacted each profession is. The prices of the tokens at different maturities will give us a "yield curve" that is actually a market projection of future demand for a given skill set.

Another benefit is that the best and the brightest really do get the right to work. We don't deport a genius who was worth an extra $150K a year just because of some paperwork snafu or bad luck in a lottery. We don't give a buffoon a visa just because he was in the right place at the right time.

I've been kicking it around for a while and I haven't figured out any obvious flaws. I'm open to hearing any if anybody has ideas.

It seems like we could easily get around this problem by restructuring the system so that visas are auctioned off and can be resold. If it's possible to underpay an otherwise equally valuable foreign worker by $20K, the market price of the visa should build that in and do away with the profit in doing so. Even better, we can look at the market price for visas an decide whether the tech industry is telling the truth about shortages.

Unless I'm reading the statistics incorrectly, that's a difference of nearly $1.4 billion dollars in Q4 of last year alone. Mr. Cook may believe in it that much, but he's not spending his own money. If you're going to spend $1.4B in investor money, make sure you have a *really* good explanation when the investors ask you why you did it. Apple isn't just Tim Cook's vehicle for social change. It's also a company that makes tech products for profit.

Given that, it seems like he's picking his battles pretty wisely and getting a solid amount of public response for his buck.

The simplest reason for that is that with the structure of our congress and the party discipline that both major parties maintain means that you're not voting for a person. You're voting for which party you prefer. They vote in enough lockstep that they can say whatever stupid or brilliant things they want. They can be angels or devils. As long as the parties vote together on bills, the individual doesn't matter. Most people would rather have a moron or serial killer who will reliably vote with the party that shares their preferences than a pure-of-heart genius who will reliably vote with a party that doesn't share thier policy preferences.

The problem is that the program has increased by a third in membership the span of six years (almost 48 million in 2009 to 65 million last year) while the economic base that pays for Medicaid still grows slower than the rate of growth in the program (and of health care cost as a whole).

That 1/3 increase in enrollment is not a problem so much as it's how the law was designed. More support for lower income people by expanding Medicaid and Medicaid receipts to support them. That initial growth is accounted for in the law's budgeting. As for the rate of growth, I'm wondering what data you have on that. In aggregate, the growth rate in per-capita healcare spending has declined over the past few years, averaging about 1.3% in real terms per year. Not great, but also not something that looks to be outstripping our ability to pay for it. That includes Medicare spending, so it's possible that the Medicaid data is drastically different and being averaged out, but I don't have a clean dataset in easy reach. Based on private market trends, I'd be surprised if Medicaid turned out to be growing at a uniquely high per-capita rate.

Only if you count Medicaid as part of that.

This one gets me every time. Of course you count Medicaid as part of that! A huge part of the law was getting more lower income people healthcare by providing it through Medicaid.

If they had implemented a 100% coverage single payer system, I bet there would be people who say that it didn't expand access to healthcare "unless you count that government plan." It's one thing if we accidentally made everybody too poor to afford anything but public assistance, but the Medicaid expansion was completely intentional. It was the answer to the question, "How you going to get health insurance to lower income people?"

While I don't have a lot of experience with the program, it does appear to be going downhill to me, especially with below market rates for most medical care.

I don't really know how to respond to feelings of vague unease with the quality of the program. Are you really asserting, as you imply below, that Medicaid is no better than just showing up at an emergency room? I don't think there's a lot of data to support that. The mainstream consensus is quite the opposite.

What amazes me is that the program is working more or less as designed, costs are running lower than expected, the economy has failed to collapse as predicted, and people are still saying everything was perfectly fine when stumbling into an emergency room to be stabilized and sent home was "healthcare." The idea that there have been no objectively measurable improvements to the situation baffles me.

I'll bite.

It is unconstitutional in several ways...

I'll leave that one to the Supreme Court. So far, it hasn't really taken much of a thrashing.

...and these choices were made so to pass costs on to individuals, businesses, and the states

I'm not sure I understand this. Is there some entity that could bear costs that doesn't fall under one of the categories you listed above? I mean, ultimately individuals and businesses bear all of the costs of everything that costs anything.

It made Medicare even more unhealthy by dumping more people on it.

I think you mean Medicaid. And I'm not sure why you'd say that expanding Medicaid makes it unhealthier. The program is simply becoming larger and covering more people.

And there's still no move towards long term affordable health care or universal coverage, the two alleged goals of Obamacare.

There's a very good argument to be made that offering standardized, easily evaluated insurance products on an open exchange is an important step in keeping costs in check. Any system that moved us a step away from our unholy employer-based system would do that. Enabling consumers to choose from more than one option in something that resembles a market is a major step in the right direction, even if we didn't also kill off the employer-based option in the process.

As for it not moving toward universal coverage, I don't know how a multiple percentage point drop in the uninsurance rate isn't a move "towards" universal coverage. If the criticism is that the end result will not be universal coverage, that's true. But at a glance, it looks like results in that direction a pretty positive.

Even stranger, let's say we the Iranians totally capitulate and give us unconditional surrender. What do we get? Their word that they'll behave and regular inspections of the weapons program. But if we make a deal before they capitulate completely, we'll get their word that they behave and regular inspections of the weapons program. So if we beat the shit out of them, inspections will work and we don't have to trust them. If we negotiate, inspections don't work and it's all just Obama trusting them like an idiot.

I'm not a nuclear weapons expert, but it seems to me that this all simply hinges on the definition of "inspections" and whether inspections are enough to keep tabs on the weapons program. My instinct says that any country as large as Iran can probably build a bomb somewhere without inspectors knowing it, but I'll assume for the sake of argument that inspections are good enough to put a stop to it. If that's the case, does anybody have a good argument that the inspections we'd get under this deal are somehow inadequate and the inspections we'd get under their hypothetical "Ronald Reagan dumps his 3 foot long dick on the table and the Iranians quake in fear and agree to everything" deal would do the trick?

The mere presence of Iran at the bargaining table suggests that sanctions were working. Ratchet up the sanctions.

To achieve what, exactly? Play out the scenario for us.

Right. Israel would surely just figure that the Palestinians built the nuke themselves fair and square and leave it at that.