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.

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.

go home Sean Young, you're drunk

Nobody said they were first to build a device with a capacitative screen, just they were first to market with an OS purpose designed for them. E.g. the multitouch pinch-to-zoom stuff that wowed the audiences.

Other phone OSs were more capable than the early versions of iOS, but they didn't have any of the gee-whiz effects, and adding a capacitative screen to an OS that didn't support multitouch actually made them worse, not better to use..

Nobody actually said that, and I am (and was) aware of the Prada's hardware capabilities. It was an excellent design, and I have no doubt at all that Apple paid it a LOT of attention when they were planning the iPhone, but...

The OS and software didn't match the hardware design. Running an OS written in Flash on top of WinCE very quickly exposed the limitations of both of those products, including no possibility of multitouch.

I did. I developed for Palm, WinCE, Psion/Symbian and Nokia N770/800 (including for SIP/Skype calls) etc before the iPhone as well.

The single biggest differentiator between iPhone and its predecessors was the capacitative screen. Everybody in the business knew it was coming, and would change interfaces. Even Microsoft was experimenting with the multitouch Surface, but Apple were fastest to get in with a phone that had multitouch and dispensed with the stylus (needed for resistive screens).

They did well, and with Fingerworks, managed to patent some of the early multitouch ideas, but they were not especially novel concepts, even at that time.

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.

There are over six million people in US prisons, only a small minority of which are in there for violent crimes. You're 8.5x more likely to go to prison for a non-violent drug offense such as possessing a trivial amount of drugs or even living in the same home as a drug dealer and being charged as an accessory. Your are 6x more likely to be in prison for a public order or "victimless" crime such as prostitution than a violent crime. You are 2.5x more likely to be in prison for a "weapons violation" in which nobody was hurt than you are for a violent crime.

So why is it OK to be happy about the prospect of people in prison being killed in a fire?

One solution to many of the technical, administrative and financial problems of running prisons would be to imprison fewer people. Canada imprisons less than 1/6 the fraction of its population than the US, and it's not a crime-ridden hell hole; Germany 1/9th and Denmark 1/10th the US incarceration rate. We could half our prison spending and spend the money on education (or give people a tax break if you prefer), and still have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.

Why do we have so many people in prisons? Well, putting people behind bars is good for a prosecutor's career, especially if he has political ambitions. Also in states with privatized prisons the taxpayers are financially penalized for having occupancy rates less than 95 or even 100%. Think about that. Your prisons are overcrowded, so you hire a politically contractor and build a virtual guarantee into the contract that prisons will remain overcrowded.

Anyhow, a coarse net wouldn't rain fire down on prisoners. Stretch a piece nylon (very flammable) rope and try to ignite it by throwing burning stuff onto it. Even if it does catch it will only smolder. So net would be cheap and practical, which is precisely why it would never be used in the US: not enough profits to prison operators.

fly a gun inside

Unfortunately, that means they have to be several kilometers in width...