I'm not trying to pull an Ad-Hominem but frankly I don't trust the analysis of a fancy sounding scientific organization I've never heard of, with members I never heard of, who are publishing AIDS denialists.

It's like you presented me with a 300lb fat man and told me he was an elite marathon runner and showed me all these charts, and anecdotes, and finishing times of him being an elite runner. Common sense and experience tells me there's something wrong with the claim, every other fat man who claimed to be a marathoner was actually slow, I know if I look long enough I'll find a picture of him hopping in a Taxi or walking a 10k and claiming it was 42, I simply don't trust the fat man as a source of fast running.

If the analysis in that article is correct it will be replicated in credible sources, if the analysis is flawed it will be confined to the denialist sphere.

The models are largely based on the same underlying science, where they vary is in different ways of applying the science. It's not like competing Copernican vs heliocentric models of the solar system, it's more like using algorithm X or Y to simulate phenomena Z, or what statistical model do we want to use to simulate phenomena W.

Except it's still getting warmer, the rate is slightly slower but the abnormally high temperatures are getting higher, not lower. Scientists are seeing something that causes them to be more and more certain, I think there's a point at which you have to accept they're not all morons.

Say a bunch of models all predict a particular type of coin has a bias of 53% heads.

Then a thousand coins of that model are all flipped 1000x, and they average to 50.04% heads. That's evidence that the coins are biased.

But we don't have a thousand coins, we have one coin flipped 1000x, and it came up with 511 heads.

There could be a systemic bias, or it could be a partially chaotic system acting slightly less biased than usual.

We've been waiting since the 70's and the evidence continues to get stronger. The longer we wait the more severe the consequences are and the harder it is to change direction. If you wait for absolutely incontrovertible evidence it will almost certainly be too late to stop serious warming. It's possible we've already passed the tipping point and are looking at an unavoidable increase of 2-3 degrees no matter what we do.

So it does sound like the Tea Party groups were being targeted to a greater extent (but not exclusively) though I'm not sure that's illegitimate.

"Tea Party" is a partisan term to a much greater extent than "progressive". There's lots of Republicans who identify themselves as members of the Tea Party and people have even talked about a Tea Party splitting off from the Republicans. As a term for a group it's somewhere between "progressive" and "Democrat" in its relationship to parties.

I still think it's wrong to the extent that Tea Party groups were targeted more but Tea Party is more closely associated with the Republican party than the progressive groups.

1. So what's your proposal for dealing with people without insurance who get sick? Because the current system is they go to emergency and get treated in a very inefficient manner.

2. My point was you were using ridiculous hyperbole.

3. Using that logic they're also to pay the parking meter at gunpoint.

4. The mandate was developed in 1989, they had almost 20 years to vet it. And the Federal vs State distinction is nonsense. The Republicans pushed it as a Federal program as an alternative to Clinton's proposal. Romney suggested his system be used on a national scale and no one really disagreed. The only point Republicans started making the state vs federal argument was in an effort to differentiate it from the ACA and have an excuse to oppose the ACA. Even then they barely make the argument because it's frankly a weak argument.

As for the reason Republicans now oppose it. The Republicans developed a legislative strategy of strong party discipline at the start of Obama's term. If Republicans vote for a bill it automatically becomes bi-partisan, so if no Republicans vote for it than it's not bi-partisan. If the president's major legislation isn't bi-partisan then it's a lot easier and it's a lot easier to demonize and turn into electoral gains.

Basically unless the core of the Republican party supports a bill they're all going to vote against it. Since successful healthcare reform would be a major legislative victory for Obama Republicans decided they wouldn't support it no matter what. Hence they turned on their own idea and demonized it for future political gain.

The only way the reforms work is because of the mandate so people can't just opt in only when they get ill.

Oh, and while complaining about "stupid evasions, stupid excuses, and absurd morally abhorrent counter arguments" you use a nonsense comparison like "mass genocide" (because normal genocide isn't bad enough?) and hyperbole like "forced into it by literal gun point".

That gun you're so worried about is a fine that's a whole 2.5% of income in 2016.

And that horrible mandate was endorsed by the Heritage foundation, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Jim DeMint (current president of the Heritage foundation) as recently as 2008.

So can you step off you high horse of supposed intellectual integrity and actually show some? You've been confronted with a false conspiracy you endorsed, and I still don't know if you acknowledge you were wrong or if you'll pop out the IRS "scandal" again in the future even though you should know it's BS. You've also been confronted with the fact that the horrible individual mandate used to be a Republican favourite. Considering that you're almost certainly a fan of many of the people and organizations who formerly endorsed the mandate that's fact you really need to acknowledge.

In your first reply to me you simply changed the subject and claimed victory, I showed how your reply about the ACA growing more unpopular was false, and so you changed the subject and claimed victory again. Why are you even typing this? Anyone who happens to read the thread will notice your avoidances and evasions. And you're certainly not convincing me by ignoring inconvenient facts. If you think you have a good argument then stop evading and make it.

Actually I didn't say anything about the trend, I said the components were more popular than the whole, and it was more popular as a whole when explained (I couldn't track down that poll though it would be hard to do fairly). The only component that's particularly unpopular is the mandate but that's the part that's actually critical (and formerly endorsed by the Republican party).

As for the trend the polls have been pretty stable. There might be a slight negative trend in this year but the polling data is really noisy.

Btw, you didn't mention anything about my other points. The question about the shutdown/debt limit standoff, or the non-scandal with the IRS. Do you concede either of those points or do you have some issue with my reasoning?

Ok, what if the climate scientists are wrong. But not in the way you think.

What if they're being too conservative in efforts to not sound alarmist. What if we're looking at 4-6 degrees celsius, and the consequences end up being ecosystem collapse on a massive scale, food harvests dropping 20%+, sea levels and storm surges force people to push back from the shoreline of coastal cities, and the combination of warming and ocean acidification causes large ocean creatures to simply go extinct.

There's uncertainty and denialists always assume that it's going to be less severe than scientists assume, but it's also possible for it to be worse.

The idea is that all people are getting is very biased high level descriptions and misrepresentations of the bill. When they actually look at the bill in detail they're generally fairly satisfied. As for your anecdote, do you have any way to tie those changes to the ACA?

Since you think the bill is wrong what do you think they should have done instead?

Actually yes. Every poll done on the ACA has shown that people approve of all the individual components and are a lot more approving of the whole when it's explained to them.

So I assume you disapprove of the standoff by John Boehner and the congressional Republicans. Where a minority of congressmen (ie the majority of the majority) for a party who received less than 50% of the congressional vote used the threat of an economic collapse to try and overrule the President and the Senate.

Until it was proven that they weren't and there was no political bias to the IRS audits

Hard to do that when it didn't cost 600+ million dollars in the first place.

If Glenn Beck's organization is debunkinging a negative rumour about ObamaCare than it's probably false.

There's nothing wrong with not compromising your principles, the trick is having uncompromising principles but knowing when to compromise in your actions.

To take the Tea Party metaphor they're the worst of both worlds, their principles are constantly changing, but whatever principle they decide on their actions are completely uncompromising.

I think this is what Shuttleworth is accusing the Mir opponents of, developing a new principle just to justify their opposition to Mir, but I'm not sure I agree with this assessment.

It sounds like the crux of the issue is that Canonical runs Mir and they insist any contributor grants them the right to re-release the code under a license of their choosing.

This isn't an unjustified request as we've seen previous license compatibility issues come up and there's reasons you might want to change licenses (the kernel is under GPLv2 until the end of time). However, giving a single organization control over the license is risky, people left XFree86 in part because of a license change, and we've seen what can happen to the IP controlled by a private company with SCO. I really don't think it's a good idea for a single private company to control the licensing of the Linux display server.

If the Mir licenses were controlled by a board with representation from Canonical, Red Hat, Debian, etc I think that would be better as you can still update the licensing but you're not at risk of one company going bad.

Is that government regulations or the hospital? I'm sure there's government regs but restaurants don't look kindly on you bringing in your own steak either and I'm pretty sure doctors don't want to deal with patients bringing in their own bottles of "aspirin" and worry about what additional unknowns might be circulating through your system.

Modern healthcare is just not a thing that works well with market forces. The patient, if they're even in a situation to choose and negotiate, has a horrible bargaining position and finds it extremely difficult to make an informed decision. Doctors and hospitals have some really bad incentives when it comes to cost control and patient outcomes. Almost all the things that make markets work well are absent in healthcare.

You've seen the pictures of giant prehistoric dragonflies.

I, for one, am happy we don't have to deal with hordes of giant prehistoric mosquitoes.

Right now everyone thinks BB is dying. The Founders jumping in and saying they want to buy the whole thing says they believe it still has life. Maybe they're just trying to attract interest and pull in more bidders.

The summary is misleading to the point where I think it's deliberate:

"Healthcare.gov, the site to be used by people in 36 states to get insurance as part of the Affordable Care Act, has apparently cost the U.S. Government $634 million. Not only is this more than Facebook spent during its first 6 years in operation, it is also over $500 million above what the original estimate was: $93.7 million. Why, in a country with some of the best web development companies in the world, has this website, which is poor quality at best, cost so much?"

Lets look at "Not only is this more than Facebook spent during its first 6 years in operation"

This is worded like it's comparing the cumulative cost of Facebook's first 6 years to the ~3 years that Healthcare.gov has been in development. But they're actually talking about the annual cost of Facebook compared to the cumulative cost of Healthcare.gov. As for Facebooks annual cost Facebook spent 449M in 2010, 1.1B in 2011, and 3.19B in 2012. FB also has the advantage of a far slower rollout, dealing with far less sensitive data, and needing far less integration with other systems so it's unclear if it's a valid comparison for things other than load.

There's another whopper in "it is also over $500 million above what the original estimate was: $93.7 million". So lets look at what the article actually said:

Take that out, and you’re left with roughly $363 million spent on technology-related costs to the healthcare exchanges – the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions of the FFEs.

So Healthcare.gov was never supposed to cost $93.7 million, only the contract to CGI to write the code was $93.7 million, the rest of the numbers had nothing to do with that.

There's certainly issues with Healthcare.gov but this story looks like a partisan plant to me.