The core of the ACA was a Republican proposal (started under Nixon, then elaborated under the AEI, then implemented in MA by Romney). There were HUNDREDS of meetings with Republicans negotiating the substance of the ACA, and dozens of Republican amendments that were accepted into the ACA. The fact that at the end of the day Republicans all voted against the law that they helped write doesn't mean that they had no influence over the contents of the law, just that they ultimately thought that it was more important to try to block Obama from passing anything, no matter how much be accommodated what they claimed they wanted.

If the ACA had had no Republican input, it would have been a few sentences long, cost ½ as much, and been much easier to implement. That is, eliminate the age minimum for Medicare so everyone is allowed to buy into it. Nice and easy. But with united Republican opposition to any improvement in healthcare in the US, a few corporate Democrats (e.g. Lieberman) were able to screw everyone in order to improve profits for a few friends.

No, the law didn't have to force states to establish exchanges, because all states automatically get exchanges. The law says that all states get exchanges, and all Americans get the subsidies through their state's exchanges. The states can build their own infrastructure, or use the federal infrastructure, and the assumption when the ACA was passed, as documented in all of the financial modeling, was that only a few states would choose to build their own systems, because integrating into a shared exchange is so much cheaper than having 50 states each build their own infrastructures. And, it turned out, several of the states that tried to build their own failed and reverted to running on the federal infrastructure.

There was no talk of states losing subsidies if they didn't build an exchange. In fact, the Republican complaint was specifically that because states got the subsidy whether they built an exchange or not, that states were "forced" into the ACA. As if laws that are passed should be optional for people who don't like them, a principle firmly rejected whenever Republicans are in a position to get laws passed. :-)

The things that I print range pretty widely:
- 3D printed prosthetics for people. See http://www.enablingthefuture.o... . Yes, home printers can make prosthetics that hold up to real world use, and for a lot of people (particularly kids and uninsured) the difference between $50 and $5,000 is insurmountable. Of course you should work with a professional if you can, for obvious reasons, but they're getting into 3d printed prosthetics.
- Parts that you can't buy. For example, a clip in my dishwasher broke, and the manufacturer only wanted to sell the whole drawer assembly for $400. So I printed my own, which have lasted for years. (Nylon)
- And parts that you can buy, but it's more fun (or cheaper) to make your own. Like a replacement watch band for the Pebble.
- Scans. I have a portable scanner (structure.io) and I scan people at Maker Faires and F&SF Conventions. Fun to share and print.
- Art. I like designing things and printing them because they look cool. And there's tons of great art to download.
- Personalized/unique stuff. I've published tons of designs using Thingiverse Customizer, that let you personalize or randomly generate a unique pen, your wallet, minions, snowflakes, etc.

That being said, I don't think 3d printing is quite at the level to be ready for people with no technical or artistic interest, because there's little for those people to do with a 3d printer. They can download and print other people's designs, but I'd think they'd get bored of that after a while. Designing your own stuff is a lot more fun!

Why do you keep repeating this absurd claim? The writers of the law didn't think that many states would build their own infrastructures because it's a huge waste of time and money - building one shared exchange is obviously more efficient and lower risk than building 50. The original ACA had only the federal exchange. The state-built exchanges were injected by Republicans late in the process. So the people who wrote the law weren't trying to force states to build exchanges, just the opposite!

This claim doesn't align with the facts. The original ACA had no state exchanges - those were injected by Republicans late in the process. And even then, the assumption was that few states would choose to physically build their own exchanges, and almost all states would choose to operate their exchanges on the federal infrastructure, because that would be vastly less work/cost/risk. There was no discussion at the time of states losing subsidies based on running on state vs federal infrastructure. In fact, Republicans at the time all assumed that all states received subsidies whether they ran on the federal infrastructure or built their own. The idea that state exchanges run on the federal infrastructure wouldn't get subsidies was invented years after the fact.

No. The ACA was originally written with only a single, federal exchange. Republicans insisted on the addition of the idea of state-run exchanges late in the process IMO as a tactic to make things more complex and expensive, and to give Republican states more opportunities to screw things up.

The law repeatedly describes all of the exchanges as "state exchanges", with never any mention of the idea that some exchanges wouldn't count as being "established by the state" if it was implemented by Federal rather than State IT staff. And nobody at the time argued that state exchanges run on the federal infrastructure weren't entitled to subsidies - quite specifically, Republicans argued against ACA making the assumption that all states got the subsidies. The theory that states that chose to run their exchanges on the federal infrastructure would lose subsidies was invented years later.

The question isn't the meaning of "state," it's whether the drafters of the law meant that "exchange established by the state" included the states that establish an exchange, and implemented it by integrating the state's systems with the federal exchange, or only the states that built an exchange completely on their own. Given that the law was written originally envisioning that all state exchanges were implemented by integrating into a single federal exchange, and the idea of states implementing their own exchanges was added late in the process (at the insistence of Republicans), it's quite clear that the people writing the law had no problem with the idea that states would establish exchanges, physically run by the federal infrastructure.

2/3rds of the Supreme Court agreed.

QT gives you a "least common denominator" GUI everywhere. If your UX matters at all, you're better off writing a native GUI layer for iOS and Android, so your app doesn't suck compared to competitors.

Most business models for apps are based on people using the apps. While Android leads in terms of unit sales, iOS leads (by a surprisingly large margin) in terms of app installs and usage. There are a lot of Android phones that are basically used as "feature phones" with the ability to browse the web and run apps ignored.

So if what you care about is people installing and using your app, the numbers drive you to iOS.

I should probably ignore an AC post, but in case someone reads you...

There's no data to support your theory. The data says that the number of people leaving the workforce has been going up for 10+ years because the workforce is aging, and the baby boomers are starting to retire. People being able to retire isn't unemployment (i.e. people who want jobs not finding them), it's exactly the opposite (people who don't want to work being able to stop working)!

The big about 'free phones' is weird. That was a program started under Reagan, and it's paid for entirely by the telco's, not by the government. And if you quit work to collect unemployment, you'd better be aware that (1) unemployment pays a lot less than having a job, and (2) it only lasts a few months.

Be aware that the majority of people collecting SNAP ("food stamps") are either working full time for crappy employers, or are people (students, elderly, injured vets) that can't work. And, as a society, I think we're ethically required to care for those people, at least enough so they don't starve homeless. A task we're doing a terrible job at already...

Good article. Thanks for posting!

I've run mail servers sending millions of emails (to people who requested them, not SPAM) and you run into these things fairly often. For a big site with tons of users, a request gets things fixed pretty quickly. For a tiny web site, it can take a long time since it doesn't affect many people so it's low priority. So raising a fuss like this is a reasonable thing to try.

BTW, the issue resolved pretty quickly. From what I read, the site added some anti-SPAM headers to their emails and got things cleared up pretty quickly.

True, but that accelerated after NAFTA. In part because the promised protections used to get the votes to pass NAFTA were not delivered on. That history of lying to get profitable deals passed is why it's important not to agree to TPP, etc., without knowing what's actually in it, and not to believe promises about the future.

The site isn't claiming that they're being censored, or that it's a Constitutional free speech issue, just that they're being blocked. It's possible that some anti-spam rule triggered against their site for some reason - anti-spam systems use statistical models and rules, and aren't always right, which is why they all have some appeal mechanism to get human judgement involved. So right now they're trying to get enough public visibility to the issue, demonstrating that the site is legitimate and that many people care about it, which gives whoever's blocking the site to have an incentive to pay attention and fix it.

If they don't raise a fuss, they'll almost certainly be ignored and stay blocked, which isn't a good outcome.

If I had to guess, the site might have gotten flagged by one of the black-listing services, and since many people subscribe to those services the one flag could cause them to be blocked everywhere. So if they can get enough attention to get that service to un-block them, it'll get better everywhere.