Well, "set a thief to catch a thief."

One of the reasons for the dysfunction we have in Washington is that all the rules that are supposed to protect the public interest have become so complicated that they actually promote crony capitalism. You need someone who knows how to hack the system to catch people hacking the system.

Dealers try to mystify and generally complicate the process of buying a car by offering to arrange financing, making you a trade-in "deal" and obfuscating the true cost of the car. Fortunately you can get a detailed break down of the dealer's costs (including factory to dealer incentives) from Consumer Reports. Then you arrange financing elsewhere (or pay cash), sell your existing car yourself, decide on how much markup you'll pay, and resolve not to buy any additional services or warranties through the dealer. If you do those things you won't be walking into the dealership like a lamb to slaughter. They might as well try to fuck the Rock of Gibraltar. Some of them will try, but you just walk out the door and find a dealership that will sell you a car on your terms.

The last car I bought I walked into the dealer; the salesman saw I had the printouts and said, "I'm not stupid. How much are you going to pay?" I named a price 5% over the dealer's true cost. I could have opened with 3%, but I appreciated not having to go through the whole ridiculous ritual. It was a reasonable offer and the salesman immediately accepted. Half an hour later we finished up the paperwork; I dropped off a cashier's check the following day and drove my car off the day after that. It was all low-key and civilized, and by executing the deal quickly the dealership earned a fair paycheck for a couple hours of work.

This is the way buying a car should be: you tell the dealer which model you want, hand over a check and drive off. Letting the dealer do anything else "for you" is asking to be screwed over. Despite what the salesman claims, there is nothing the dealer can do to make your life simpler, except maybe fetching your plates from the motor vehicle registry. Do everything else yourself, including determining the price you'll pay for the car.

I know this is difficult for one-track minds like this AC to understand, but many issues are in fact nuanced and complex. Shockingly, law appears to be one of those. Just to name a single example: data retention laws. They vary by jurisdiction.

As someone who runs NoScript, Adblock Plus and various other user scripts, I think it's a good thing to be able to take control over your own experience. It's good not to be passive. It's good to see only what you want to see. The more people do this, the more these companies have to comprehend that this is the nature of the network in which they have chosen to participate. The Web would lose most of its appeal to me if it were entirely corporate controlled like television.

What's really sad is that other mediums like television, radio, and periodicals are one-to-many, heavily centralized, and don't include such great control over what you see. They're package deals that require you to accept the crap along with the content and are often not worthwhile.

I use startpage.com myself. I like the idea of getting actual Google search results without any sort of Google tracking. They don't even log your IP address and they're outside of US jurisdiction.

By the way I hope our federal legislators appreciate that. I hope they are proud that now, "outside of US jurisdiction" has become a selling point.

Anyone who needed to have that explained to them is demonstrably resistant to facts and so-called "common sense" and is therefore a lost cause. Mass numbers of non-individuals agreeing with you bandwagon-style is the only thing they would find persuasive.

Sick citizens cost a state, not in on-the-book expenditures, but in lost productivity and higher hospitalization costs -- especially because of the large number of very sick people covered by hospitals' indigent care pools. This directly translates into higher dollar costs in health care and insurance.

The same insurance that would cost my family $8811/year in Massachusetts would cost an unbelievable $12576 in Mississippi, even though everything else is much more expensive here. Mississippi has the lowest cost of living in the country; Massachusetts is among the highest. Yet they pay 40% more for the same health insurance, when all things being equal you'd expect them to pay 30% less. Why? Is medical care cheaper here? Absolutely not. We're chock full of very expensive, high tech teaching hospitals where the cost of an aspirin would give you a stroke. We have the most expensive cost for medical procedures in the country of any state but Alaska.

So why is health insurance such a relative bargain here? Because we have by far the lowest rate of uninsured people in the country (4.0%) thanks to Mitt Romney's implementation of what later came to be called "Obamacare". Yes, our medical care is more expensive here but because we get preventive care and screening we use less of it.

Mississippi's uninsured rate is 15%, and consequently it's full of poor, unnecessarily sick people. the number of unnecessarily sick people. Here in Massachusetts when you hit 65 you can expect to enjoy 15 years of *healthy* life before your health fails. In Mississippi it's 10.8 years. Mississippi has a shocking infant mortality rate -- a total of 1% of live births. And all those unnecessarily sick babies who didn't get prenatal care cost people living in Mississippi a fortune.

So while Mississippi saves immediate cash outlay by not expanding Medicaid, that's penny wise and pound foolish. People carrying insurance end up spending so much more they could expand Medicaid for a fraction of the costs, and if you're a Mississippian you can expect to get more sick and die younger than any other state in the country. Some deal.

Mississippi has one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country -- a shocking 1% (10 per 1000 live births) of newborns in Mississippi don't make it. Sick, uninsured babies are very expensive.

I have a family with kids. Under ACA my cost for a silver level plan, after my tax credit, works out to $712/month. That's a lot: almost as much as we pay for food. But considering how much we use the doctor and even the hospital, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

How high is "insanely high"?

For a family with two 40 year-old non-smokers and two children under 21, making the median household income of $50,054/year, the average annual silver plan premium, nation-wide would be $9700/year. That's a lot, but not unreasonable given what a silver plan covers. But here's the kicker: Uncle Sam cuts your taxes to the tune 65% of your premium, so effectively you only pay $3373/year. If you were getting anything close to silver plan coverage for much less than $281/month, I'd be very surprised. You can do this calculation for yourself at http://kff.org/interactive/sub... if you like. If you have a reasonably profitable consultancy, the prospect of paying $9/day to insure four people shouldn't be that daunting.

But some small businesses don't generate much income at first, and the tax breaks in Obamacare don't help you because you aren't paying much federal income tax yet. That's what the Obamacare Medcaid expansion is for. It covers *all* your health care expenses if you make 138% of the poverty line or less. Unfortunately about half of the states have opted not to expand Medicaid, even though the expansion woulds be entirely funded by the federal government. If you live and work in one of these states and make less than 138% of the poverty line, you need to get coverage at work or you're screwed. Even a bronze plan, at $249/month, is more than people who are supposed to be covered by Medicaid expansion can pay. Blocking Medicaid expansion at the state level is a key tactic in ensuring that working people experience Obamacare as ruinously expensive.

Finally, it's important to remember that Obamacare doesn't set insurance premiums. What you pay *for* is regulated, but the *amount* you pay for it is determined by the market. Increases in premiums, or too-good-to-be-true plans that are dropped, result from outlawing practices like dropping you from your insurance when you get sick, or raising the premiums so much when you get sick that you're forced to drop your coverage. So the increased premiums under ACA are simply the market price for insurance that actually works the way people expect it to (i.e., when you get sick, it pays for care until you are no longer sick).

If you are one of those people who pre-ACA had awesome health insurance for your entire family below $100/month, your old insurance was almost certainly too good to be true. Insurance companies dropped those policies when the ACA outlawed the deceptive practices that made them profitable.

I don't dispute that. What I contend is that, while doing so, one should recognize that it amounts to viewing the world through the lens of one's own interests. Any decisions made are tempered by that knowledge.

It's a self-awareness beyond standard ego consciousness. It tends to make you truly ashamed of and prepared to abandon any sort of self-centered, exploitative motive.

It's one of those things that anyone is capable of doing, provided they really want to.

I don't know. There is something romantic about choosing to be a geek, against the grain, up the hill, against all odds and disincentives, doing it because you really want to and not because you were bribed into it. It shows great courage and spirit, which I believe is closer to what life is all about. The ones who "go with the flow" and do whatever is the path of least resistance are cowardly and hedonistic by comparison.

I would go so far as to say that you never truly reached adulthood until you can clearly and effortlessly distinguish objective, evidence-based reality from your own subjective feelings and opinions and wishes. Objectivity is when your own tastes and preferences do not influence your decision-making about anything important.

Until you can do that, life is a chaotic mess with no solutions except those that create more and more problems.

It's also the problem with alienation and dehumanization, not merely depression. Go out sometime and see for yourself, how rarely people talk to one another like fellow human beings. Usually they would rather talk at someone, listen poorly and keep interrupting (because they have no patience) even when they are listening to an answer to their own question, and generally can't relax and slow down and "take in" much of anything. The irony is, this rushed and hurried approach to life is so error-prone that they accomplish fewer of their goals than they would otherwise.

Compared to that, depression is just a particular special case, an instance of a much more widespread problem with the way we live.

What does it matter, on a plane like the 777 that costs $260 to $377 *million* dollars to acquire? That's less than 4 hundreths of a percent of the acquisition cost. 100K$ is peanuts on the scale of costs it takes to acquire and operate a large airliner.

And since it is not, strictly speaking, a piece of *safety* equipment, there's no need to take planes out of service to install it. Just require it on new planes, and maybe retrofit existing large airliners when they're down for major maintenance.

It seems likely to me that the probably reason this device isn't required is engineering conservatism. Before something like this is required, you have to convince people that (a) it's a good idea, and (b) this is a good implementation of that good idea.

The document in question was an internal CIA investigation that concluded that the CIA's post 9/11 extraordinary rendition and torture program had not produced any useful intelligence. That contradicts the CIAs reporting to congress on the program.