Fraud is not "against regulations", it's "misrepresenting what you offer or offering a thing you aren't going to do". Not all laws are "regulations" in the same sense that, say, the banking industry is "regulated".

We did that in the UK. Starting in the 1980's, politicians tinkered with the education system. Replaced all the different competing exam boards with one standard national exam board. The only problem is that the party of the day would issue edicts like 50% of the population must go to university. To achieve this goal, they had to improve high-school exam grades. So how did they do that? They started merging high school subjects (physics, chemistry and biology became general science, arithmetic and mathematics became general math). They invented an exam system where there were foundation, general and credit exams for the same subject. Employers wouldn't consider anyone with foundation and general exam grades so those were dropped. That left the universities to sort out the mess once the students started arriving.

Having separate state and county exam boards compartmentalizes the education system and restricts the amount of damage any vote-desperate education minister or party can do.

From your description, I thought Radical Math was something out of The Onion. But no, it is really politically interwined arithmetic and algebra questions:

http://www.radicalmath.org/cat...

At night-time, birds tend to fly towards light. Many downtowns with skyscraper office blocks end up with flocks of dead birds at street level due to birds flying towards the office lights. If anything you would need bright lights at either side of the wind turbines, so the birds could see a safe path to fly along.

The transparent, libertarian way is to have your money stolen in front of you.

So, the 700,000 bitcoins that disappeared under Mt Gox were stolen "in front of" the people who owned them?

Maybe we need to define "in front of".

Neoliberals? I'm under the impression that Libertarians with the minds of teenagers are the ones so in love with Bitcoin

Neoliberals = libertarians. They mean about the same thing for the purposes of this conversation.

Neoliberals will shrug this off as an anomaly, but the ability of people of privilege to steal is enhanced by unregulated free markets.

It never fails. When there are no rules, it pays to be unruly.

Do you carry your SATA drive around with you wherever you go and attach it to every computer you use?

Yeah, there's a portable SSD in my bag, with eSATA and USB. There's a couple of 64gb SD cards in there too.

It's smaller than my smartphone and a lot more sturdy. It sits in one of those little slots on the side. Never had a problem with it.

I've had enough of trusting companies like Google to always have a particular service available and to keep their snoots out of my stuff.

On the other hand, if a company that doesn't data mine, and encrypts all data and does not acquiesce to NSA requests, then we can do business. But not for free or cheap because of data mining. I don't like F2P. I don't want anything for free. I don't trust anything that's being offered to me for free or for cheap. It just means the true price is hidden and that's creepy.

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.

50/60 Hz is pretty much DC anyway

LOL, clearly either a digital logic or RF engineer.

Tell ya what, if you're that confident, then take an aluminum crochet needle in each hand and jam them each in the +/– terminals of a 12 volt DC power supply, then in the line/neutral sockets of a variac output tuned down to 12V, and tell us again that 60 Hz is 'pretty much DC anyway.'

(Spoiler: one will be fatal and the other not.)

And then see if you can figure out why Westinghouse engineers chose the frequency at which electrical impulses best travel along human nerves as the standard power transmission frequency...

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.

Are you astroturfing?

My experience is the opposite. My former company recently lost funding and I lost my health insurance. Luckily the ACA kicked in soon after and I got coverage for about $1000 per month *less* than the last time I was on COBRA. And I'll seriously consider keeping the coverage once I get another job.

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