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Comment I'm wrong, shouldn't figure trillions in my head. (Score 4, Insightful) 392

My numbers don't work. Now I'm not sure how I got that number. Perhaps I should use paper and pencil when calculating Obama-sized costs.
I'm going to show my work like this is fourth grade, so if I blew it again someone can easily point it out.

Direct federal cost: 1 300 000 000 000
people covered: 12 000 000
(roughly double the cost once you include premium increases, but let's start with just the cost we'll pay as federal taxes).

Cost:

1 300 000 000 000
_______________
                            12 000 000

Start dropping zeroes from both to get reasonable sized numbers for numerator and denominator:

1 300 000 000 000 dollars to cover
_______________
                          12 000 000 people

1 300 000 000 dollars to cover
___________
                          12 000

1 300 000 dollars to cover
________
                          12 people

108 333 dollars to cover
______
                          1 person

With premium increases, maybe $200,000 per person. So that's expensive, but not nearly as expensive as I had first calculated.

Comment Re:Only $11 million per person! (Actually $20 mill (Score 0) 392

> Your math doesn't work out. Care to show your work?

$1.3 trillion (US) federal tax cost / 12 million people = $11.3 million per person covered.
Does that look right so far, or did I fat-finger the calculation? That's US trillion, which is different from UK trillion, I believe.

In addition to the $11.3 million indirect cost to the taxpayers, we have the the significant increase in premium costs since insurance companies now have to cover people who wait until something happens before they buy insurance, and the cost of generally moving away from INSURANCE (protection from catastrophic loss) to having a third- party payer for massage therapy. That cost increase could be anywhere from 25%-140%, depending on where you live and which study you use. One person could make a reasonable argument that the total premium increases minus out-of-pocket reductions is half a trillion, and someone else could make an argument just as strong that it's two trillion. My previous post guesstimated around a trillion. That number isn't solid, of course, but we can certainly say "$11.3 million per patient federal tax cost, plus a lot more in increased premiums".

Comment Re:Only $11 million per person! (Actually $20 mill (Score 0) 392

> I can't help but noticing you left the duration out

That's the ten year cost, per the administration plan. So around $2 million per person per year, assuming cost reductions later as per the Obama administration's plan.
The short term cost is much higher per year, of course. If we recognize that kicking the can down the road doesn't actually work - that a future Congress will kick it again, the actual costs are likely to be higher, but I wanted to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. It's bad enough based on accepting his numbers - we needn't bother trying to be more accurate and figure whether it'll actually be $30 million or $40 million per person.

Comment Only $11 million per person! (Actually $20 million (Score 3, Informative) 392

Let's assume that 12 million estimate is correct, that due to Obamacare, 12 million people who weren't insured before are now insured. Of course, other people give different estimates, but let's give Obama the benefit of the doubt.

The net cost of Obamacare to the federal taxpayers is $1.3 trillion (CBO). $1.3 trillion / 12 million people covered = $11.3 million per person.
I don't think we got a good deal.

The $11 million per person covered is of course just the direct cost to the federal government. In 2013, we saw the following rate increases due to Obamacare:
Connecticut: 37% average rate increase
Florida: 42% average rate increase
Illinois: 33% average rate increase
Michigan: 39% average rate increase
Minnesota: 35% average rate increase

The trend accelerates in 2014:
Delaware 100%
New Hampshire 90%
Indiana 54%
California 53%
Connecticut 45%
Michigan 36%
Florida 37%
Georgia 29%
Kentucky 29%
Pennsylvania 28%

So there's another trillion dollars it cost average Americans, in the form of much higher premiums. A couple TRILLION dollars to (maybe) cover $12 million people. At a cost of around $20 million per person covered, I don't think I'd trumpet that as a victory if I were a Democrat. (And in fact Democrat most candidates are distancing themselves from the mess.)

Comment Re:Constitution only a few pages. You can read not (Score 1) 131

In response to Tail Hook, Congress passed laws preventing commanders from overturning jury conviction for sexual assault, requiring a civilian review when commanders decline to prosecute, requiring dishonorable discharge or dismissal for those convicted, eliminating the statute of limitations for courts-martial in rape and sexual assault cases and criminalizing retaliation against victims who report an assault. The President did nothing. So who, exactly, demonstrated the power to do something about it?

Comment Constitution only a few pages. You can read not g (Score 1) 131

The Constitution is only a few pages . You ca read it, rather than making wild guesses about what it says. So far, all your guesses are wrong. Article 2 section 2 enumerates the powers of the president. They are:
Make treaties
Appoint certain officers, subject to Senate approval
Serve as commander in chief of the armed forces
Sign or veto bills passe by Congress

There may be one more I'm not thinking of off the top of my head, but "run everything " is not in the list. 99% of what the president does is at the direction of Congress. The Constitution vests most authority in Congress. If you don't believe me, like I said you can easily read it for yourself. It's short enough that I had it memorized at one point in time.

Comment CONGRESS can coin money. This govt didn't exist (Score 1) 131

The Constitution grants CONGRESS the power to coin regulate money, not the executive. The exact wording is "Congress shall have the power..." The executive has only those powers that Congress grants it, except for a very, very few granted directly by the Constitution.

> that the government had the power to make unreasonable ones before.

The Constitution is the founding document that CREATED the federal government. It didn't exist "before". Before the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, we had only a loose coalition of states, with the confederation itself having virtually no power - not even the power to tax.

Submission + - Middle-School Dropout Codes Clever Chat Program That Foils NSA Spying (wired.com)

wabrandsma writes: from Wired:

The National Security Agency has some of the brightest minds working on its sophisticated surveillance programs, including its metadata collection efforts. But a new chat program designed by a middle-school dropout in his spare time may turn out to be one of the best solutions to thwart those efforts.

John Brooks, who is just 22 and a self-taught coder who dropped out of school at 13, was always concerned about privacy and civil liberties. Four years ago he began work on a program for encrypted instant messaging that uses Tor hidden services for the protected transmission of communications. The program, which he dubbed Ricochet, began as a hobby. But by the time he finished, he had a full-fledged desktop client that was easy to use, offered anonymity and encryption, and even resolved the issue of metadata—the “to” and “from” headers and IP addresses spy agencies use to identify and track communications—long before the public was aware that the NSA was routinely collecting metadata in bulk for its spy programs. The only problem Brooks had with the program was that few people were interested in using it. Although he’d made Ricochet’s code open source, Brooks never had it formally audited for security and did nothing to promote it, so few people even knew about it.

Then the Snowden leaks happened and metadata made headlines. Brooks realized he already had a solution that resolved a problem everyone else was suddenly scrambling to fix. Though ordinary encrypted email and instant messaging protect the contents of communications, metadata allows authorities to map relationships between communicants and subpoena service providers for subscriber information that can help unmask whistleblowers, journalists’s sources and others.

Submission + - First Hands-on with the Incredible New Oculus Rift VR Headset (roadtovr.com)

muterobert writes: One of the stand-out demos put me in front of an alien on some sort of Moon-like world. The alien was looking at me and speaking in an unfamiliar tongue. When I moved my head, its gaze followed me. Its big and detailed eyes, combined with reaction to me as I moved, imbued it with a sense of living that was really cool. Spaceships flew over head and drew my gaze behind me, leading me to look at some incredibly detailed scenery.

Submission + - From PHP 5 to 7 (halls-of-valhalla.org)

halls-of-valhalla writes: Since around 2005 we've heard talk about PHP 6 development. There have even been books sold about it. But where is PHP 6? As of July of this year it was decided that there won't be one and that PHP will skip directly to PHP 7. Why is it skipping to the next major version, and what ever happened with PHP 6?

In 2005, work began on a project headed by Andrei Zmievski to bring native Unicode support to PHP by embedding the International Components for Unicode (ICU) library and internally representing strings as UTF-16. Because this project would lead to major internal and user-affecting changes, it was planned to be the next major PHP version (i.e. PHP 6) along with a few other features.

By using UTF-16 as default encoding, developers would need to convert the code and all input (e.g. data from requests, database, etc.) from one encoding to UTF-16 and back again. This conversion takes a lot of CPU time, memory (to store the much larger strings), and creates a higher complexity in the implementation due to the increased need to detect the proper encoding for the situation. In light of all of this and the relatively small gain, many contributors became unwilling to use "trunk" as their main development branch and instead either using the stable 5.2/5.3 branches or refusing to do development at all. This shortage of developers led to delays in the project.

After a vote in July of 2014, it was officially decided that the next major release would be called PHP 7. The primary reason for even considering the name is the widely-known existence of the previous failed attempt of a new major release, and the existence of numerous books and other resources which already referred to the previous PHP 6. To address potential confusion, there was an RFC (i.e. request for comments) and a vote on whether or not to reuse this name.

In the end it was decided to release PHP 7 as the next major version, arguing that the worst case scenario is that they needlessly skipped a version as opposed to the worst case of releasing it as PHP 6 which is widespread confusion in the community.

Read the full story here: Valhalla News — From PHP 5 to 7

Comment the 4th says what they CAN'T do (Score 2) 131

The fourth amendment, and the rest of the bill of rights, lists things the government shall not do.
Separately, the enumerated powers clause lists what they are allowed to do, and says they may not do anything else oter than what is listed - all other powers are reserved to the states and the people, the Constitution says.

Nothing in the Bill of Rights or anywhere else in the Constitution gives the executive the right to perform searches, except that Congress has legislative power (limited to the enumerated powers) . It's Congress that grants the executive search power, by passing a law saying they can search _____ when _____. The fourth LIMITS that, saying Congress may not allow unreasonable searches. The Constitution does NOT say that all reasonable searches are allowed.

Submission + - Verizon FiOS is now symmetrical

An anonymous reader writes: Verizon just announced their SpeedMatch campaign for all their FiOS customers. From their site: "NOW YOU CAN UPLOAD AS FAST AS YOU DOWNLOAD. .... And to get the most from your Internet, your upload and download speeds should be equal."

Comment so now "all commerce" is just power stations? (Score 1) 103

You asked "why does the boat (infrastructure) need to be in the ocean (internet). You said very specifically that you were talking about ALL commerce, NOT just about critical infrastructure. Would you like to flip-flop a third time and go back to critical infrastructure? If so, refer to my explanation of why public health services are connected.

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