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 dunno, this sounds like a false choice to me. Whether Common Core is good or bad is debatable, and I'm sure there are a lot of people willing to debate you on that. Do the SATs need to be changed? Yes. I could agree with that. But this doesn't mean that the changes suggested are the best way to go about it, or even if the changes are better than what we have now.

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.

There's a little bit more to it than that. UV is in virtually all normal light sources as well, it's the duration and intensity that are harmful. The reason animals are bothered would seem to be that there is a flashing light of a particular color in the otherwise dark night. You are probably at roughly equal risk if you frequent establishments that use blacklights.

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.

He huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI 'the very worst job I have ever had'.

Have people stopped reading the last sentence of the typically summary altogether with the part of the brain that doesn't type?

On a not-so-tangential side note, it would be nice in the eagerly awaited Beta Redux to be able to click preview prior to furnishing the subject line, and actually get the preview to go along with the lecture. Just about every time this happens to me I want to paste "cat got your tongue" into the subject line until I've actually seen the damn preview I requested, at which point I'm far less than entirely motivated to go back and remove the shim.

It's like childhood. You ask a question. Someone corrects how you presented the question. The question itself never gets answered. If the question can't be properly understood, it needs to be addressed before diving off into an answer. If it's just a matter of persnicketty dress code, probably the answer needs to come first if you're raising a young scientist rather than a young bureauocrat.

However, one must make an exception to this basis rule in extreme cases of shifting the burden: when someone publishes something for thousands to read, and every damn reader has to read the final sentence three times because you've changed "The" into "He"—a hundred times worse than the natural error "he"—which is enough to turn us all into syntactic Cylons.

FFS whoever submitted that, get your mental back-light fixed.

Seems to depend on a case by case basis.

My math worked out great. Previously I paid 50% of the premium for my company's blue cross PPO group health insurance plan to the tune of $400/mo. It had a $60 copay, $60 drug copay, and $5000 annual deductible.

Now I pay $350/mo for a blue cross Silver PPO with the same doctors I had before. It has a $30 copay, $150 drug copay (the drug copay seems to be where the insurance companies are really jacking up prices, I guess since they can't stop you from signing up if you're already sick) and I think a $4000 annual deductible. Thanks to my employer not being an asshole and giving me the other $400/mo it used to contribute towards my insurance, I'm coming out on top even after the extra $150/mo for my meds.

Foolhardy explorers foolish enough to venture into their domain, of course.

Right, because who needs to pass a law requiring a gun registry when we can just ask the NSA for a list on demand?

Oh, wait, maybe this is a BAD thing.

You gun nutjobs would probably be a lot more successful at making your case if you could string together at least 140 characters that make sense. Right now, people like you are actively keeping the phrase "gun nutjob" alive, and you're turning off people like me who actually support your position. I know it's asking a lot of someone with a room temperature IQ, but could you at least try to think before you click "post"?

you jest, but once my 3 year old son purchased $28 of nothing from nexon through google play.

The apps are designed to make it really easy for both non-readers and readers alike to buy stuff with flashy graphics.

Yah, well, obviously you are not an electronic engineer and don't understand sampling, filtering and audio signals.

14kHz? I'm rather much younger than Young and I can't hear the diff between MP3, CD or vinyl on my old fashioned high power hifi anymore. HiFi is for young whipper snappers only...

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