Exactly. If you don't qualify for subsidies, then there IS NO CHEAPER MAGIC SOLUTION than those that the regulated insurance companies in the state advertise. They don't have the option of having secret cheaper-than-the-exchange plans. So if you call a hotline and complain that your new insurance plan is too expensive, their ONLY OPTION is to try to find a way to qualify you for a plan that somebody else is forced to help you buy. Otherwise, the price is what the price is.

For which they had no choice. They are required by law to suddenly provide a range of coverage that was not previously built into their pricing. If you were suddenly told that you had to provide a bunch of new services or else, would you just eat the loss, or raise your prices in order to maintain your business? Insurance companies work on smaller margins than companies in many, many other industries. Remove that margin, and they are out of business. Now, that may be what the ACA backers secretly want, but in the meantime, you raise your prices to deal with the fact that your government has just substantially raised your costs.

They've always been government controlled. Every state in the union has an insurance regulating body to which those companies must turn for approval in order to change rates. And each of those scenarios plays out in something of a vacuum, because laws prevent insurance companies from providing services across state lines. The government has been entirely in control of this stuff for decades (as if you didn't know that!).

No, it's known as state regulation. The companies who have a very innovative way to deliver the same (government approved) class of services with less overhead MAY be able to offer a lower price if they can survive doing so. But there's generally very, very little latitude in the cost/price recipe before the insurer is on intolerably thin ice.

"There are more Android devices to choose from."

But there are also other iPhones to choose from. Apple still sells the 5s and 5c...

There are a lot of Android smartphones but not actually that many if you look at the models that sell in large numbers. Basically, there is Samsung.

That is not quite the same, since the goal was logic, rather than chemistry. Fluid/pneumatic logic was used in early embedded ICBM targeting and control systems, because it could withstand a thousand times as much radiation as an electronic circuit of that era.

People got along just fine before them....

Campfires gave rise to story telling and conversation, leading to the expansion of the human mind. This started about 400,000 years ago, and continued until the mid 1950s, when television became widespread, and families stopped talking to each other. It has been downhill since then.

That's the problem with fish stories -- they smell and get bigger every time they are told. :-)

I wanna live forever...somehow....

You know, I've noticed that even though there's a strong impulse to make smores, and preparations made, it always ends up with everybody drunk and just burning the marshmallows on the end of a stick, eating all the chocolate and then running around the campfire naked before tripping over a branch, passing out and waking up covered in ticks and mosquito bites.

I've been part of so many camping trips where there was every intention of making smores and it never seems to work out.

They also led to the rise of marshmallows, binge drinking and running around the fire naked.

God, I love camping.

You didn't watch the video... clearly. He refutes all of your rather mundane arguments with ease. Everything you said, without a doubt is fatalism. You say you're accepting reality. You're not. You're accepting things as they are now, and refusing to believe things could change.

Death is not inevitable. It's just an, as of yet, unsolved problem. If I were to tell you a meteor was heading towards earth, and was scheduled to hit us, killing everyone alive in 100yrs, would you say "Well, we've never stopped a meteor before, we'd better just accept it!"?? Of course not... but that's what we're saying. In 100yrs everyone alive today WILL be killed... not by a meteor, but by aging. For a hell of a lot less money than it would take to stop a celestial object, we could stop aging. So lets stop burring our heads in the sand and take care o fit. The problem of aging will be solved, and not too far off in the future. Likely it will be too late for us, but not for our children or our grandchildren. So lets do it.

Speaking as a die-hard liberal, Obama has screwed up a fair number of things. He was also handed a really bad situation, with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent botching of the occupation, and the collapse of the mortgage industry and effects across the whole economy. I'm not sure a president since Lincoln has stepped into a worse situation.

I don't buy it -- that excuse stopped working when he hit term two. GW Bush had to deal with the dotcom collapse. Reagan had to deal with the savings & loan crisis. Many presidents don't have the best starting territory. Some have fantastic starting territory and get lauded in spite of it (see Clinton during boom times).

Trying to "excuse" a failure in office because of situational considerations is Rationalization at its finest. Always someone else to blame.

Can we get this in perspective please?

How many phones does Samsung and Google sell every time there is a new Android phone?

Edward Snowden. He's also responsible for all future acts of Terrorism, wars, and the color Beige.

> you've got way more explaining to do on how god came from nothing as a fully formed

Why do you assume _your_ definition?? That is not the _standard_ definition of God:

God, much like "Now", is eternal. God has _always_ existed -- the exact same argument you are using for energy of the physical universe.

  > The origin of the universe is well within the purview of science,

There are zero experiments one can repeat to demonstrate how the universe began. Without the ability to repeat an experiments you have at best, Philosophy, not Science. Or are you completely cluess how the Scientific Method works?