What? Obama's new wonder-plan is what TOOK AWAY our low deductible plan and forced us, for more money, to buy one that will cost us thousands more each year in premiums, and ten thousand more a year in deductibles. The people you're defending - Obama, Pelosi, Reid - forced us to buy a high deductible plan with fewer benefits, minus the doctor we'd used for years, and more. Obama didn't "outlaw" bad, expensive coverage, he just forced us into that exact situation. Thanks for shilling for him, though - it's nice to see that BS so transparently on display for all to see.

I used to have affordable insurance for my wife and I. The ACA killed it. Were forced to go to a new plan that:

1) Has much higher monthly premiums (we went from roughly $230/month to about $500/month)

2) Has a hugely higher deductible (we went from $2,500 a year to about $12,000 a year). This means that we are much, much farther out of pocket every year, especially if we actually need medical care beyond one or two simple visits annually.

3) We are past any risk of pregnancy. None the less, we are being forced to pay for elaborate maternity care that we cannot possibly use.

4) The new plan forced us to give up the doctor we've been using for 15 years unless we want to pay cash for that in a way that doesn't help with our deductible.

5) The two best local hospitals are no longer available to us unless we want to pay retail for their use, and get no benefit against our deductible.

Prior to this "affordable" new act, we had no need to change insurance, doctors, hospitals or anything else for well over 10 years.

Because of how the math is working out, we're told to expect that next year's premiums will go up by another 45-55%. Thanks, Mr. Obamacare Cheerleader, if you're one of the people who helped to empower the people who snuck this 100% partisan monstrosity through congress on Pelosi's "deeming" technique. Thanks a lot.

So you are ALSO saying that the information presented is incorrect ... that the people at HHS had NO idea that the site wasn't full of holes in terms of security and functionality. That the "cherry-picked" emails that show the administration knew the site was a train wreck are referring to something else, because the site wasn't a train wreck when it went live. Right? I see. So if that's incorrect, then what you're saying is that the administration did NOT know that the site was a train wreck. Which makes them stupefyingly incompetent.

So your idea of "nothing to see here" is either:

1) The administration knew exactly what a train wreck the thing was, but lied about it. Or...

2) The administration, at every level, was so foolish and incompetent that it had no idea whether or not the system was useless, and in lacking any sort of knowledge one way or the other, just assumed it was fine.

So what you're saying is that: 1) The administration didn't knowingly force people to use a badly designed, insecure web site that wasn't ready for prime time. That's just something the administration's critics made up, out of context. 2) The administration has fixed all of the security concerns, and that the whole platform is now working as they promised it would, and that anyone saying otherwise is lying and spinning the glorious real facts on the ground. I see.

You would be amazed how unselfaware many startups are. In the late 90's, early 2000's time period I frequently had to remind people in companies with 2 - 200 employees selling niche products that "But Microsoft does it that way!" was an argument against doing it that way for us, because we were anything like Microsoft in terms of resources, product or market.

You'd think that no one would ever have to be told that, but the reality is that most people look at something as incredibly difficult to build as Windows (in software) or an iPhone (in hardware) and think, "Yeah, I could knock that out over a weekend and ship a few million units a year, no problem!"

I'm 55, this is true, but it hasn't diminished my interest in software, it's just something else that fascinates me and just happens to be the root cause as to why "work sucks" sometimes. My Dad is 80, a retired mechanical engineer, last we spoke about programming he had got one of his games he wrote in Delphi running on android and was playing with the python graphics library.

Solving coding problems the fun part. The work part is getting the solution to the customer, ironically few engineers are willing to tackle the work problem, or accept other people's solutions to it. So what you generally end up with is an imposed solution from above that doesn't work because the people who wrote the process haven't got a clue how the engineers are currently keeping it together. Rather than tackling the problem by demonstrating a superior answer, the engineers do their best to pretend the work problem doesn't exist.

BTW: If you're solving the "same [coding?] problem over and over again", you're doing it wrong

I mostly agree but I would say that a good engineer provides (and meets) a deadline of his own making. Good managers have clear business plans but they can't create them if software systems randomly pop out of the basement shouting "surprise". The most overlooked and underrated skill for a "professional" engineer is business administration skills (and vica-versa with PHB's). Someone who speaks both languages is far more useful than someone who speaks only his native tongue.

Yeah it's easy to become disillusioned, if you don't have the political clout to organise your own work and "lead by example" to meet their vague goals, then get it or get out. If you do have some influence then vague, numerous, and ever changing management goals are your best weapon against the idiocracy, simply pick the brain farts that give you license to do TheRightThing(tm) and politely deflect the others.

*you - the royal version.

The difference is that when you make someone who starts up a business pay all of the country's taxes, they're forced to simply pass that along to consumers as higher prices. The consumers pay the taxes regardless, always. Businesses can't exist without people buying their goods and services.

I've never been able to find any reliable under-reporting data for men, so this would be extremely interesting to see.

A priori I find it fairly implausible that men failing to report sexual assault is a lot more common than women, but would love to see the data. One informal observation is that in the multi-thousand-comment threads that are spawned after every accusation leveled at a public figure like Michael Shermer, there seem to be a lot of women self-identifying as victims of sexual assault but no men. Given that rates of sexual assault on adult men are reported at 10% of women's rate, and that male children are at least as vulnerable as female children (as the data here suggest) it is more than a little odd that no man seems willing to self-identify as a survivor.

At the very least this speaks to the way in which we silence men's voices in these debates, which in my view should be understood not in terms of women vs men but citizens vs predators (most predators are men, but most men are not predators.)

Whom? - A suprising number of well educated people are still unwilling to give Jane Goodall's pioneering work the recognition it deserves. These same people tend to belive animals are little more than automata, some even refuse to belive chimps have a mind of their own.

Two words: "kin selection".

Humans and chimps are social primates. We live in groups that are relatively close to us, genetically, although humans practice exogamy (mating outside their immediate kin group) a lot more aggressively than any of our cousins.

So to say "fighting for mates is always one vs one" is to say "kin selection does not exist", which it manifestly does.

War is mate competition carried out by other means. There is no other rational for it (war is always economically irrational, although this is not generally understood because it "just makes sense" to so many people that war is somehow a good idea.)

No individual of any species ever under any circumstances kills another member of the same species for any reason other than mate competition, either for themselves or for close kin (this is not quite true, but it should be the starting point of any analysis of deadly interpersonal violence.) Killing has zero to do with hunting behaviour--both male and female bonobos hunt, and don't kill each other. Elk are vegetarian, and do kill each other. Only when reproduction is on the line does the risk of being killed in a potentially deadly fight make evolutionary sense, in humans as well as in other species.

In humans, war creates all kinds of mating opportunities beyond the simple-minded "conquer the enemy and rape their women" scenario. In particular, it creates opportunities on the home front of all kinds, and that is a very fundamental part of its completely irrational appeal.

Fighting for mates is always one vs one, winner take all, and yes they are trying to kill their opponent. War as practised by humans and chimps is fundementally different, it is a coordinated social activity most animals simply don't comprehend let alone practice.

>They could have saved a lot of time and harsh words if they let Northern Ireland vote on independence!

They did. Northern Ireland voted to stay in the UK, almost immediately upon the Irish winning their independence from the UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

"I would hold that all three of your choices are opinion..."

So, I think the question is, if we take all possible opinions on an issue, is at least one of them fact?

I would say yes.