My silver plan was $373 from BCBS of texas and the drug copay is much lower and my annual deductible is $1500.

It's better than my old corporate plan. And now I can get my drugs from local pharmacies again instead of Medco.

Medco was pretty bad. I would occasionally get bottles with 1 or 2 less pills (never 1 or 2 more). And they sent a lot of mail- if you didnt' read every single one; you might miss a rules procedure and that would cost you 10-15 days of pills while things got straightened out.

If the federal bureau of whatever doesn't get the job done ... nothing, they'll still be there next year.

Because, as we all know, nations are eternal, can never collapse or experience hardship, and don't compete with each other.

I already signed up and paid for my ACA policy, and love what it does for me.

But I recognize the challenge for people with families. They've been subsidized by corporations at the expense of childless couples and single people for years.

I think a better fix would be for people like me to pay $50 more per month so policies for people with kids would be less. We want to encourage people to have children.

I wouldn't count on that subsidy from corporations continuing-- my last corporations had cut benefits every year of the last seven years AND rates for children and spouses had increased for at least the last three years.

In my case; the ACA has allowed me to retire and start several small businesses instead of working another 16 years (despite not needing the money) because of my preexisting conditions. Since I don't think it's likely I would have been able to find employment with insurance all the way- an uncovered period was probably in my future.

Even if it was for a "good cause". Let's for a moment even assume that the NSA is an all-holy entity that could never do anything wrong and that we trusted them implicitly, not because our software forces us to but because we genuinely wanted to.

Note the subjunctive.

Even then the security software would be a security hazard. Simply and plainly because there is (at least) one way to access data that is absolutely beyond your control. You cannot even audit the security level of the entity holding the additional key to your data.

If you need to give your non-tech boss a way to understand the severity, that's like having a general key to your office and the safe with all the highly classified and mission critical papers deposited at your local police force. While by itself not a problem (provided you trust your police), they are not required to give you any information concerning the key's storage or whereabouts. You will not be notified how they themselves will keep that key safe, nor do you get any kind of information should that key get stolen. You will not be notified if some potential attacker or burglar, or even a competitor, gets access to that key, legally or illegally.

I'm still searching the US Constitution where it says that the feds can force me to be my brothers keeper by force.

Your right of course, constitutionally, socialized medicare should be a state program. Although the constitution has 27 amendments, and another one for civilized health health care would certainly get my vote.

But that's beside the point. Surely your argument with respect to socialized healthcare isn't REALLY predicated on the fact that the program is managed from the wrong level of government?

Were it local-governor-care instead, would that really make you substantially happier? How so?

Speedreading for the general web though, seems like a dumb idea.

I frequently look for solutions to problems on the web... speed reading/skimming is handy for that -- is what I'm reading matching what I'm looking for? Is it worth slowing down here, or should I skim ahead, or jump to the next article...

Naturally short articles spread over 20 pages are the demons of this process, and information locked inside a video is satan himself.

I do find speed reading novels and fiction to be entirely counter productive though. Its like shoveling down a fine dinner.

This is Singapore, the country continually rated as one of the world's greatest countries for economic freedoms... soo

Well now you're just being a jerk about it.

It's in the 9th.

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

s/heal/heel

Second time this morning. Bad fingers, bad.

That view is no longer tenable

I've attentively followed every stray tidbit to cross my radar about the shadow sector since the publication of The Puzzle Palace, about the peripheral ghosts of which my algebra professor had direct experience.

The gold box agencies can do traffic analysis at scale. They can model metadata at scale. They can't break every damn cipher at scale—neither can they employ the rubber hose password-getter at large scale (the Soviets managed to cover about 10% of their population with blue welts over a thirty year period, but ultimately this did no favours to their economy).

The best approach to scaling crackers is to leak key bits in the purportedly pseudo-random number nonce stream. This is the hardest tampering to identify from the outside of a black box. Even when the black box is reverse engineered and one discovers that random is far from uniformly random (with no stray key-space correlates), some idiot applies Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

How about we agree to make a small exception for the industrial-scale tainting of purportedly random numbers, where discerning the difference between malice and stupidity achieves an elite level of algebraic epsilon? Oh, look, one digit in the source code for the random number generator has a wrong digit. Must have been a careless mistake—as if careless mistakes are a dime a dozen in the land where a poor man's nonce is a persistent agency's key-space collapsing back-channel.

The NSA does not randomly shoot holes in the protection of the American public. Worse than having no back door is having a back-door that somehow becomes shared with the wrong people. What they want is to inject a weakness that only they can exploit, even when their adversaries discover their handiwork.

Just off the top of my head, one way to achieve this is to require that exploiting the leak requires having the intercept history of the channel in hand since day one. The unfortunate flip side is that the specificity of these methods of single-party Achilles-heal exploitation becomes a smoking gun to the presence of a far-from-blind watch master. No ruse is totally perfect.

But you can always keep 90% of the population busy debating whether metadata has any value, such that any debate that makes any progress at all contains only those people who were already sophisticated cranks (recruitment/rubber-hose scale, to mention the carrot and stick). It all works out.

If scale matters, assigning a scant value to metadata can not be so much as trivially entertained by a thinking person. Pity we have so few.

even after the Affordable Care Act, millions of poor Americans will remain uninsured because governors, mainly Republicans, have refused to expand Medicaid

The logical fallacies are strong with this one.

s/basis rule/basic rule

That's a natural error, where my brain had the right word, and my speedy fingers went "close enough" as they often do when there's a hot, fresh, unfinished coffee on my desk they're trying to rush off and levitate.

Semantic interference often contributes. I think my brain went square dancing for a brief moment with the Peano postulates.