Even before the penalty for non enrollment was set to zero, you could have still paid the $700 tax penalty and then had whatever plan for health insurance you wanted. If the market decided that there was no demand for those non eligible plans, then it means that the market collectively decided that keeping the old plans + 700 dollar additional annual cost was not a good value proposition compared to what replaced them. The net effect of everything taken together was that you would have to pay additional taxes.
You know, tariffs and gas prices going up have the effect of raising taxes. When the things you buy and the gas you buy costs more, you have to pay more in real dollars in sales and gas tax on those items. The tariffs and the gas prices also have the effect of killing industries locally, which might be more impactful nationally than predatory insurance plans that basically only cover going to the doctor's office for checkups. If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.
> Even before the penalty for non enrollment was set to zero, you could have still paid the $700 tax penalty and then had whatever plan for health insurance you wanted.
Nope, the net effect of the ACA was to make all those plans evaporate. No longer available. We tried. It was impossible to keep our plans and doctors.
You mention "the market" a few times. The ACA forced a paradigm shift, there was no market left. Not as it was pre-ACA. We have several doctors and medical professionals in our family. Believe me when I tell you that they all say the ACA is shit and it destroyed US healthcare. This is not to say it was perfect before the ACA, but it certainly was not this bad.
After a few experiences I concluded that the system the ACA has created is now worse than the DMV. I never thought I would find something that would top the DMV.
We had one horrific experience that I will not recount here in detail. My son tore his ACL. It took WEEKS to get his care sorted. It was incredible to witness the dysfunction and horrifically low quality of care we experienced.
I have friends who will travel to different countries in Latin America for medical care because of what the ACA did to their healthcare in the US. I was talking to one today over lunch in fact. He has been without US health insurance for a decade now. When he needs anything important he goes down to Argentina, gets better care and at a lower cost.
> If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.
The list of government abuse is long and wide. Don't get me started. My post was not intended to be a compendium. That said, yes, we have much to question...and if people ever got their heads out of their asses, we would.
Simple truth: Both major political parties deserve a solid spanking. They have caused more damage to the US over the last, say, 50 years (pick a number) than one could express in a simple post. Politics in this nation has become so disgusting it inspires projectile vomiting.
It violates people's internal sense of morality in a strangely strong way to do that for whatever reason. It's a white lie but ultimately it's an act of kindness to take the electronic intercom from RadioShack that your father is pretty sure "just needs a new rheostat"
It is kind of morally gray. The intent isn't to deceive. It's to help them against themselves. I've taken many kids clothes and toys from family members who no longer need them. They just don't want to throw something away that could be of use. If my young kids use them, great! If not and they're in good condition, I'll donate them to Goodwill or something. Otherwise it's going in the trash.
What CARVER score would you give an AWS data center? I would probably put it around the 40 to 50s. Where would you put your own individual company by itself on the CARVER matrix as it relates to enemy forces? Pretty damn low.
Which is why your job as a responsible company you should have verified your offsite backups on 28th Feb.
Just like you would if wildfires started breaking new records in Oregon, if that's where your (for some reason sole) cloud region is.
It should already be set up, of course, but from a data point of view this is when you're thankful that at least this raised risk came with a heads up.
If a senior leader at Doordash swore to God that your sandwich would 100% guaranteed make it to you, regardless of whether or not there was a car crash, then yeah, maybe you should complain
Yeah I agree with you. If they made a specific promise to some unlikely case out of their control, then I would expect compensation.
Did Amazon make such a promise? They didn't as far as I know. My understanding is they provide specific guarantees like given an AZ outage, your data is still safe (provided you architect correctly).
Correct analogy would be: they promised to make 3 copies of my sandwich, from 3 different restaurants, and deliver them by 3 different cars, taking different routes, in case one of them gets in a crash. But in this case all 3 restaurants were bombed by Iran!
Stagflation is when the economy stagnates yet inflation is higher than ideal. Inflation and economic activity are typically correlated, and the conventional wisdom back in the day was that you couldn't have unemployment going up and things costing more, because it was expected that demand going down puts a downward pressure on prices. When people aren't hiring and buying but things cost more and more, life just kind of sucks. The last time this happened was in the 1970s in the aftermath of a few oil embargoes that made oil prices go through the roof and a disastrously expensive failed war in Vietnam, there was gas rationing, it sucked.
You may notice a few key similarities now with oil embargoes, reduced hiring, an extremely expensive war, and rapidly expanding government debt as a result of that war. If you want a qualitative feeling about people's moods in the 70s, you can watch such movies as:
Taxi Driver
The Deer Hunter
The Warriors
Americathon
Network
So what? A Google Pixel 9 Pro costs only about 4 times what a bare RPi 5 with a run of the mill camera costs, yet with its NPU it can perform 45 trillion operations per second with a camera that can reach 240 frames per second at a resolution of 2 megapixels. Do you think that's insufficient to autonomously pilot a drone moving at highway speeds towards a target that it identified as a fighter jet? In addition, it has an onboard battery, GPS, cellular and WiFi connectivity, pressure sensor, accelerometer, and USB connectivity. A phone by itself could replace practically all of the brains of a single use drone and they sell phones literally in the millions. The hardware is terrifyingly easy to source.
It's not as easy as plopping a new SW on it. Have you wondered why, despite this conflict dragging on for this long, autonomous targeting is still not common? It's just much harder to do, and doing it reliably is actually super hard.
Hw access is also not as easy as you think. Try getting a Pixel 9 class SoC board that you can actually dev stuff on, you'd be surprised how hard it is to get such a thing. And when you get it, it will probably be 2x as expensive for just the board.
Oh, put the Pixel 9 on it then. Have you tried doing optical flow on rolling shutter cameras?
Then, whatever solution you get, you need sufficient volume and reliable supply of the thing. Oh, you can't find the chip anymore? Good luck porting the stack you have since the pipeline is different.
Whereas these rc FPV drones you can basically build what what you find in the back of your drawer.
Do you always judge the validity of a statement according to the implications of it being true, or do you get to do it just this once as a treat? Further, how does saying a court is "corrupt" not call for "extreme measures" but referring to it as "illegitimate" does? What's the meaningful difference?
Calling members of a court corrupt, means you can pursue legal action against them, write laws, impeach, etc. calling the court itself illegitimate, implies the government that put them into power is illegitimate. Calling government illegitimate is the first move of revolutionary groups.
You do understand at least intuitively that it's not even mathematically possible - let alone practically - to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers, right? The definition of "good" and "gifted" is only used relative to an average. No amount of training can make the average teacher better than the average teacher; it's a logical impossibility, and misunderstands the central effect of training and the goal of the person being trained. No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence. Rather, the goal is to be better than one's peers and you can't have all teachers be better than all teachers unless you reject the concept of teachers being comparable.
> it's not even mathematically possible to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers
…yes, but it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.
> No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence
What are you talking about? Students are extremely invested in whether their teachers have attained objective competence. If all teachers suck equally, that is very bad for me as a student. If I'm rich, my parents can probably hire me tutors or take me to a private school. If I'm naturally talented, I can teach myself. Otherwise, I'm totally screwed.
So, yes, objective competence matters. It's extremely silly to pretend otherwise.
> it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.
I doubt you can pull this off unless you’re willing (and able) to fire at least 25% of teachers who appear not willing (and under strong unions cannot be required) to outperform the current 90th percentile teacher.
There are great teachers; there are also entirely lazy/entitled teachers who will never willingly be at the performance of the current top 10%.
Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036. You can predict that this is what will happen because this has been happening for the last century. Up until the last five years student test scores were improving, and if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough. Why? Because the concern - after a baseline is established - is seeking exceptional performance, which definitionally cannot be made routine.
> Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036.
Yes? I don't understand what you're trying to argue here. Rising standards does shift expectations. But this all sounds good. So I really don't understand what you're trying to get at.
> if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough
There are several confounding factors. It might be that teachers getting better led to better students, it might be that universal access to information led to better students. I think you're overreaching with the claim that if students get better, it means instructors got better. But, sure, let's imagine I agree. So? I am of the belief that there is a ton of room for improvement.
I think that your post stems from the belief of 2 things. That education is zero sum. And that education has a filtering function not a quality improvement function. Both of which, I deeply deeply disagree with.
I do agree in the abstract that the "human social ranking" will be just as stratified as today. But that does not preclude many many classes of improvements.
Again, sorry if I am reading too much into your position, but I feel as if you run on a set of assumption here that you expect I share with you and that to me, feel alien.
"Car" is a good example of a label that's pretty strictly agreed to. If someone tells me they've developed a new car and then shows me a motorcycle, it's easy to prove that it's not a car, even though many of its engineering principles and functional components are identical to those in cars.
With consciousness, on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any motorcycle-equivalent. Essentially everyone I've discussed the issue with (myself included) expects that any mind which runs on similar principles to ours or has similar thoughts to our thoughts is conscious.
You really don't have much experience in philosophy of language do you? It's notoriously hard to pin down the edges of such terms, even something like car or table.
Is a Reliant Robin a car or a tricycle? If it's a car, why aren't other tricycles? What about a side-car of a motorcycle? What about an APC? What's the distinction between a flying car and a plane?
It's hard to pin down the edges of any term, but there exist things which are car-like and yet universally agreed not to be cars. That's what I claim doesn't exist for consciousness.
Describing something as "car-like" is begging the question. You are presupposing an objective definition for "car" in order to draw a distinction between things that are cars, and things that are almost cars. The reason such a thing doesn't exist for consciousness is that people believe that the offered definitions for consciousness are illegitimate. It would seem logically weird for me to accept that a term is "real" if it crosses some percentage of public acceptance of the definition, and not real otherwise. I would argue that using that heuristic would make it very obvious that computers are not conscious because it's a stance that practically everybody takes outside of hackernews.
If we take the classical position that words point to real things in the world, "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience" is kind of just regurgitating the meaning of "word". The first half indicating the function, and the second half accounting for the fact we live in a world with a continuum of linguistic disparity.
Now, this position isn't the only position. But a relational model of language for example takes his assertion to an even more extreme place, and suggests they don't function as labels at all.
I don't have an ability to exhaustively test all words against this assertion. Nor do I have the kind of access memory to draw one if it exists. Sorry.
I guess my question or confusion is that if there exists no readily accessible, easily identifiable example of a noun which does actually serve as something more than "a useful label, agreed to out of convenience", then the critique appears to be stating a vacuous truth, because there are no entities for whom the critique would not apply.
My point was more that we have words for things that don't exist, whose map gets mistaken for territory.
Many of them appear very much like fundamental parts of reality, making appearance an untrustworthy instrument. Reversing cause and effect between reference and referent is something almost everyone does, no one notices, and is the source of endless confusion. We should strive to not confuse our model of the world with the world itself. Consciousness exists in our model of the world as much as red does.
This is rhetorically slippery, and feels like it is restating the thing that I asked to be demonstrated when I asked for example of the opposite. It feels like begging the question.
In either case, the central thing that I was saying is that critiquing an article because it makes a claim about a specific word which also applies to an entire class of words makes that critique feel less informative. What I mean is that if there were an article that said "The Sun is not red" and the response was that redness is a concept of human minds, then I don't know if I would feel informed. If the comment is just limited to point that out, I guess I wanted to point out the limitation.
A standardized unit of measure is almost definitionally a label of convenience, what? Why was there no concept of a meter until the 1790s? It was determined by a council of people, does that sound like a truth of the universe?
A label is distinct from a definition. Contrast that with "tall" or "short", which are entirely context dependent and used entirely for convenience.
Words like "just", "free", "fast", "fuzzy" fall into the second category. Perhaps "conscious" too.
The difference is the presence of a strict definition that depends upon a physical absolute. I can point to a metre. Suggesting that it's nothing more than a label is idiotic.
This is being intentionally obtuse and you know it.
A meter is the same anywhere in the universe. If it's not, it's not a meter.
The defintion of "fat" changes based on any 3 people in the room. A handful of people would struggle to form a consensus on if all people, dogs, mice, worms, and/or bacteria are conscious.
If you take the strategy that you will create a definition, create a label for that definition, and then say that any deviations from the defintion that was chosen makes usage of the label incorrect, then yes, it's the same everywhere in the universe -- according to fiat, and I don't believe that that negates that it is a label, just that validity of usage of the label derives from the perceived authority of the labeller. God didn't come down from on high and say that a meter is the length light travels in 1/299792458th of the time for 9192631770 cycles of radiation of Cesium 133. People in rooms chose that it would be based on the circumference of the Earth with a line passing through Paris, France (how convenient), and if there were an academy in the 1790s that invented the concept of "fat", and "fat" means a BMI exceeding 30, then fat would be true everywhere in the universe too (BMI after all is defined as a ratio of height, measured in meters to weight, measured in kilograms, which are both fundamental SI units), and there would be no ambiguity.
People are still coming up with definitions of consciousness and then those definitions end up being attacked by others who disagree with the foundation of the definition, which is - if you will recall - also what happened with the meter, over the course of centuries, until it was very recently redefined to be "unambiguous", but arbitrary. This was possible because few people had any particular emotional investment in the definition of a meter, and it is probable that consciousness will be eventually defined to mean that only humans can be conscious, which may be dissatisfying but would be true throughout the universe, like a meter. If the question then becomes "what defines a human" and "why a human", then I ask, why 1/299792458 of a second?
A meter is a meter. Over 30 BMI is over 30 BMI. Call those whatever you want, they are objective and measurable.
Concepts like the parent's "fat" example are cultural relatives. Someone can be called "fat" despite actively being proportionally skinnier or having a lower BMI.
But even that has at least a basis in the physical world. A skeleton can't be colloquially fat.
The root problem is that "consciousness" does not even have that. It's metaphysical and has no ability to be measured or observed or confirmed by an outside observer. Because even if it did not exist, the object claiming it would still be claiming it. And objects that do not claim it may in fact have it.
While the top comment may have used poor examples, it feels remarkably uncharitable to actually suggest "what is consciousness" is an equivalent discussion to "how long should a meter be?"
If you define consciousness as "being human", you would just have someone asking a new question - what is "fooblefobble?" Where "fooblefobble" is what we mean when we talk about consciousness today. The question doesn't get answered by being arbitrary in this context, you just necessitate a new word.
They can't rebuild it. Facebook Marketplace is allowing people to buy and sell locally for free with systems for managing fraud that are more robust than Craigslist. How do you rebuild when a way larger company - with a side project of theirs - offers one of your core businesses for free?
eBay has always competed with print and online classifieds. And started the successful Kijiji (in Canada). If what you’re selling is niche enough, local doesn’t work, and has a lot of friction unless it’s something too big to ship.
I like to pay the cheapest price humanly possible but there’s often value in just paying the shipping and online premium. As a seller, it’s easier to put up a posting whenever I feel and stuff it in a box and label it only when I have cash in hand.
+ there’s some geo-arbitrage for sellers: chances are the person willing to pay the most isn’t local to you.
EBay is still more friction than Amazon and eBay commissions are like 16% these days so eBay’s completely lost the giant pie that is mass-manufactured goods.
You know, tariffs and gas prices going up have the effect of raising taxes. When the things you buy and the gas you buy costs more, you have to pay more in real dollars in sales and gas tax on those items. The tariffs and the gas prices also have the effect of killing industries locally, which might be more impactful nationally than predatory insurance plans that basically only cover going to the doctor's office for checkups. If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.
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