In this case, it might be the opposite: Blacksburg is the home of Virginia Tech, and between the students and the professors it's considerably more liberal than the deep red you'd see on a coarser-grained map of the area. It does give them access to a large pool of both liberals and conservatives, if they're seeking volunteers from off campus.

At the very least they'd be able to statistically adjust it against national demographics, though the study isn't very large. I'd think of it as an interesting bit of preliminary work, but it would have to be replicated very broadly before taking it seriously.

One of the specific provisions of the ACA is to limit that cut to 20%. Companies have had to actually send rebates when they took in more than that.

Whether the middleman's value is worth even that much is a different question. It's not completely valueless: they negotiate the price with the hospital, and they're on your side in wanting to pay less. It would much much harder for you to do that yourself, since you're not an expert in the cost of care or on what anybody else paid. That's a benefit to some, and a cost to those more savvy negotiators. I can tell you that I'm not in the latter category.

I've always found it kind of odd that Republicans wanted to eliminate the latter, without eliminating the former, which is obviously more popular. It seems to me that Democrats at some point should have said, "Sure! Hey, everybody, you can stop paying for insurance."

I know that it wouldn't actually get that far, but it seems to me that they could at least have gotten the insurance companies mad at the Republicans for making "paying for insurance" the problem. It's the only unpopular provision in the law, but necessary.

What a difference 17 years make. Now there are a great many individual 12.9 gigabyte PowerPoint slide decks running around.

Thanks. No mod points today, but I appreciate somebody attempting to extract information from this rather than just apply quantum juju. #ifuckinghatesciencewriters

It depends on how you count the return. The US GDP is still going up. Perhaps it would be going up faster if we weren't jumping at our own shadows, but it doesn't appear to be bankrupting us.

We do a much better job at it ourselves. A graph of GDP shows only one visible hitch, the 2007 crisis. That had nothing to do with terrorism, unless you want to call the widespread fraud by the major investment banks "terrorism" (and I bet you could find some people to agree with you if you wanted to). It certainly wasn't Al Qaeda's fault; any hitch in the graph around September 2001 is lost in the noise.

Here's the problem; I *have* heard all of their arguments before. There's not going to be anything novel here. This is pretty well-trodden ground.

That's not a formal proof. It's an allocation of my time and resources. They can generate new conferences faster than you can refute them. "You can't dismiss me until you've heard MY version of this old argument, and you can't know that it's the same thing until you've heard it" gives them an infinite lease on my time.

So I'm not going to "hear them out". Somebody, I imagine, will, because an odd number of people seem to enjoy re-fighting this. And if they manage to derive an argument with a shred of merit, I suspect it will get back to me. If it takes a long time to do that, well, that's how it is with all ideas. Valid ideas stand the test of time; truth lends them durability because it can be independently re-discovered.

That means that I don't have to give them any time to consider their ideas. And for them to insist I do is dishonest. Any argument they might have to make has to begin with "OK, I understand why you consider the rest of my ideas idiotic, and your reasoning was sound," because it is. Until then it's just more deranged babble.

If I'm following the discussion (and thanks so much for this; I was hoping somebody would explain the concept), the value of goodwill depreciates over 15 years, yes? And you can deduct that as you would the depreciation of a physical asset.

Is that reasonable? On the one hand I could see it. If Coca Cola were to stop doing whatever it's doing to build up goodwill, the value of the brand would decrease over time. The number is arbitrary but that's just the consequence of trying to codify a tax system; buildings and machines don't break down on a fixed schedule either. It does "depreciate".

But on the other hand, it feels like it's an incentive to invest in intangibles rather than tangibles, which doesn't seem like it's as productive for the economy. I know that intangibles produce jobs; that basketball team is selling entertainment, and keeping people employed from the players to the peanut vendors. But entertainment dollars are fungible; how much of Coca-Cola's goodwill produces additional jobs via additional soda sales and how much of it is just devoted to putting dollars in their pockets rather than Pepsi's owners?

In the case of a general social networking tool, there kinda can be only one. People won't check every site every day, and the one they check most often will be the one with most of their friends. If you have "Ello friends" and "Facebook friends", odds are you'll visit one site much less, and your friends there will drift further away.

There's room for various niche sites, but they need a differentiator. I can imagine Ello wanting to be the social networking site for those who want privacy, but strikes me as being kind of counter to the point of social networking. People go to Facebook *because* it violates their privacy. It does so a bit more than most realize, perhaps, but really they only seem to notice the monetization of their lack of privacy, rather than the lack of privacy itself.

Yes, but they're not improving it, and the new Maps doesn't seem to be replacing the features of Classic Maps that I really liked. Any interface needs improvement, and while I like the older interface, its failures become more grating over time.

Other factors have kept inflation low for quite some time. The Treasury and Fed have been pumping money in at a rather alarming rate, and the inflation rate remains in the target range. Occasional spikes in oil prices notwithstanding, it's been under 2% for most of the last few years. (The September figure was 1.7%; the average for 2013 was 1.5%.)

I don't understand how we're currently having falling unemployment, low inflation, a record GDP, and a booming stock market. Some of that, of course, is dubious statistical measures, but they're the same measures we've always used (more or less). All that fiat currency should be producing huge amounts of consumption and inflation, and it isn't.

I've got a sneaking suspicion that we're looking at another crunch over the next few years as the Baby Boomers start to collect Social Security in earnest, though the first wave of it is already 67 years old. That has already caused us to to briefly deplete the Trust Fund a few years ago, and its growth has leveled off. That's gonna be bumpy.

He was the one who kicked off European colonization and exploitation of the place. Other Europeans who came made only a tenuous foothold. Columbus was the one who said, "There's a place over there, and it's worth living in and taking stuff." He's the reason Europeans in general came to know about it.

It's not entirely out of keeping with other uses of "discover". The OED's first definition is "To disclose, reveal, etc., to others". The fact that it's first is historical, rather than a matter of present usage; the present use "to find out" is also very old. But it also includes notions of "finding out for oneself", i.e. not necessarily being the very first.

All told the OED gives over a dozen different shades of meaning for "discover", and I don't think this one is entirely wrong. It can be misleading, since as you say there were already people there and other Europeans had lived there, but he was an important "first" whatever word one applies.

Still, the Trust Fund seems like a rather odd concept. It's a government promise to pay for... something it had already promised to pay, namely Social Security benefits. If the Trust Fund runs out, it's still on the hook to pay those benefits.

The program was intended to be pay-as-you-go. The SSTF was supposed to be a way to save against the Baby Bust being unable to pay for its parents, but where can you really save that kind of money? No bank can handle it; it would badly skew any stock market you tried to invest with. Effectively, they just dumped it into the general Treasury coffers, where it was all spent. The Boomers are starting to demand it back, and the burden falls right in the place the SSTF was supposed to avoid, their children.

The net effect was just to establish a highly regressive tax (since Social Security money is capped) that Reagan used to pay for a massive expansion of the US Government, doubling spending during his time in office. I used to think the SSTF was just a bad idea, but I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that it was a deliberate attempt to screw over the poor and the Gen Xers.

Cloud servers with no virtualization and 100% of the CPU? That's what OnMetal is for, motherfuckers!

In Germany, it's written all the way into the Constitution. The very first article reads (in official translation), "Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority." The second article, about personal development, specifically limits it to development that doesn't contradict the previous part.

That doesn't make the definitions any more concrete, but it does suggest that it's a country which takes it seriously, and the requirement pervades the rest of the national law. I don't know if that can be adopted into a country like the US, where a great many people want their First Amendment rights to trump everything else. I can even see the case for it. It's just that I hear it defended most vocally by people who aren't in a position to be harassed and don't see the way it can interfere with the rest of their lives.