patrick.net

And your problem is??

Dan8267 says

So I call upon all young adults to throw themselves into the fire. To sacrifice themselves upon the altar for generation with the luckiest birth dates. For that is the only purpose their lives serve.

The tragedy of child sacrifice is advocated by both major parties. The Republican method is religious repression, for example Republican "family values" include abusing and even disowning their own children if the kids turn out to be gay. (Muslims take it even further, murdering their own daughters for "honor.") Obamacare is the Democratic method, dressed as compassion in the same way faith healing is.

One point you sometimes miss though, it isn't purely a generational issue. Most people who take reasonably good care of themselves can expect low medical costs to the end, when the nursing home vultures attack, and that isn't even covered by Obamacare. The vast majority of Obamacare goes to chronic conditions caused by (a) smoking, (b) drinking too much alcohol, (c) eating too much, and/or (d) exercising too little. The consequences start appearing in the 40-70 age bracket. A typical 55yo non-smoker of normal weight, who isn't an alcoholic, and walks a reasonable amount, can expect medical expenses near zero. His morbidly obese alcoholic sedentary contemporary can expect massive expenses. So, while the Obamacare cost shifting occurs primarily between generations as you have described, it also occurs within generations, requiring people who take care of their own health to pay for the consequences of their contemporaries' unhealthy decisions. The real beneficiaries are the revenue recipients - ill health is its own punishment, and most current spending goes towards making people die more slowly and expensively rather than restoring them to good health.

The pretext that anyone can get hit by a bus is true, but emergencies where there is a chance of saving the patient account for less than 10% of total spending, in fact nearer to 1%. The vast majority of spending is on pointless interventions or chronic "care" for self-inflicted conditions.

The pretext that anyone can get hit by a bus is true, but emergencies where there is a chance saving the patient account for less than 10% of total spending, in fact nearer to 1%

Isn't this why motor vehicle operators are required to carry auto insurance? Because of the potentiality that they may cause bodily injury, to someone else?

It's the Oldfart game, don't cry son, you'll get to play someday you'll see...

I used to work really hard, gunning for retirement, I gave up on that dream. I'm still frugal and all, I don't live it up like many others, it's been years since I lost the debt, the money just keeps piling up, but it will never be enough, and that's ok. I see my pals older than me running to try to keep up and retire, why bother, your good health is literally worth millions of dollars these days. And, lol, according to WHO, the health care system in the U.S. is as bad as it gets for developed nations.

curious2 says

The tragedy of child sacrifice is advocated by both major parties.

Good points.

curious2 says

The vast majority of Obamacare goes to chronic conditions caused by (a) smoking, (b) drinking too much alcohol, (c) eating too much, and/or (d) exercising too little.

Also true. Unfortunately, any kind of socialization of the costs of medical expenses is going to suffer from this defect. With ages, you can use brackets to eliminate the problem. Through exams you could also bracket body fat rates. However, bracketing smokers, heavy alcohol users, and lack of exercise isn't as enforceable unless the deficiency is so extreme that it is obvious.

In any case, there's a difference between the purpose of insurance, which is to spread risk, and the purpose of getting young people to pay more than their fair share under the ACA, which is wealth transference from the less wealthy to the more.

CaptainShuddup says

It's the Oldfart game, don't cry son, you'll get to play someday you'll see...

Unless of course, I die young like most of the good.

http://www.NJBoHa3GArA

Dan8267 says

CaptainShuddup says

It's the Oldfart game, don't cry son, you'll get to play someday you'll see...

Unless of course, I die young like most of the good.

Here's the German version ;)
http://www.0p59I9dgCGo

I don't know, it works for me.

"Youth Break With President Over Health Care in Harvard Poll
***
More than half of those 18 to 29 years old say they disapprove of Obamacare and half expect it will increase their health-care costs, a survey by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics shows.
***
The survey found 41 percent approval for Obama, a number that drops to 34 percent when the younger Americans are asked to rate the job he is doing on health care."

The problem with this argument is that we're still living off the accomplishments of the the WWII generation!

There really haven't been any major technological breakthroughs or world realignments since then.

You can say that "young people" are owed this or that, but in some sense not really. Each generation since WWII has not fought in a major earth changing war, nor has it created technology that has created orders of magnitude changes in productivity.

John Bailo says

There really haven't been any major technological breakthroughs or world realignments since then.

The Internet.

And you're welcome.

The Internet is the greatest achievement of mankind, far surpassing the pyramids, the Library of Alexandria, the printing press, and the moon landing all together. It creates an enormous amount of wealth and opportunity. And it was created by a few ten thousand developers during the 1990s, including myself, mostly gen X and a few Boomers. Granted, we developers represented the tiniest proportions of our generations, but we accomplished the most magnificent technological advancement ever.

So the problem isn't that our nation cannot or has not achieved any technological breakthroughs. They happen all the time. The problem is that the current crop of owners decided to sell out the country to China so they could cash out all the infrastructure built during the 20th century. Short-term greed destroying long-term prosperity.

John Bailo says

There really haven't been any major technological breakthroughs or world realignments since then.

You can say that "young people" are owed this or that, but in some sense not really. Each generation since WWII has not fought in a major earth changing war, nor has it created technology that has created orders of magnitude changes in productivity.

John, that's just false. Gordon Moore was too young to serve in WWII, and others who founded INTC were younger. Sergey Brin and Larry Page weren't even born. As often as I say Wikipedia is not a source, it is a portal that presents sources and makes them accessible to millions, and it didn't even exist a decade ago. The average person today can find, with only modest effort, information that was inaccessible or did not even exist twenty years ago. The world is transformed, as the recording industry can tell you, but the consequences have not reached certain protected industries. (For example, medical: when the Rx requirement was imposed, a substantial % of Americans were actually illiterate. I don't mean that as an insult, I mean literally they could not read. Now they can, and besides even if they couldn't read they could use voice search. More information is available now, and often more accurate information, than ever before. The issue is separating wheat from chaff, and alas the mandatory dependence on paid pushers does not always help with that.)

At a salary of just over 15k, a person over 19 now qualifies for Medicare.

In CA, at 16K a person qualifies for insurance for $1 a month.

At 20K, $27 a month.

At 30K, $156 a month....capping at $190 with no discounts.

So what percentage of young people are we talking about here? Those who make over 30k and who would prefer to not have health insurance if they had to pay $156-$190 a month.

I really am curious about the percentage of people that includes.

It's been my experience that the young are excited to actually get insurance for the first time since being on their parent's plan....

Well excited might not be the right word. They are mostly excited about taking pictures of their lunch and posting it on Facebook. But yes, going to the doctor when you have pnuemonia is actually kind of cool to them.

jessica says

a person over 19 now qualifies for Medicare.

No, a person has to be over 65 to qualify for Medicare, and there is talk of raising that. There was a proposal to reduce the age to qualify for Medicare, but it was rejected by Democrats. Now, they talk of raising the age, in order to stave off the bankruptcy of the program.

jessica says

So what percentage of young people are we talking about here?

"57% of Millennials disapprove of Obamacare." That matches the general adult population (all ages over 18), where 57% disapprove.

Also, you don't seem to have read any of the actual policies. You cite a subsidized premium, but that's only the start of the cost. You have to ask what do the policies actually cover, and to what extent. People are figuring out that the policies pay mainly the providers with the best connected lobbyists, e.g. PhRMA & AHA, but not others. They might cover part of an in-network hospital's emergency room charges, but try asking about the ambulance, or doctors who work in a hospital as independent contractors, or what happens if you wake up in the ICU - especially if it's out of network. Don't even bother asking about dental, it's not covered.

I understand the point, but I see the boomers situation as due to circumstances beyond their control (i.e., inflation followed by massive drop in interest rates and then globalization). It was the globalization that caused the younger gen to be situated so much worse.

It's not a conspiracy of old against the young.

The fact that this sorry excuse for (more) universal health care, where everyone pays in, starts with now is also just a random circumstance not a planned fucking over of the millennials.

I just don't like the age warfare being added to the class warfare we already have.

I get it that there's an intersection between the two. But there's also a huge number of boomers that have no savings and are unprepared for retirement.
That is, in spite of the fact that they had better opportunities in some ways.

Just take the Aussie strategy, and make it the same for all, about 3600/year.

Then take the Aussie strategy, and set minimum wages for industries.
e.g. people at McD's make 15/hour in NSW. I suspect this helps lower turnover.

Then cut the tip out of the equation. You get more money via salary, and not via tips.

Then cut the fee and additional taxes crap out of the prices, aka hotel prices per night include all taxes.

Then add a Value added tax. Collect those taxes along the way.

Dan8267 says

The Internet.

The Internet is just a telephone system, based on text.

Doing more of it is not an order of magnitude change.

curious2 says

Gordon Moore was too young to serve in WWII, and others who founded INTC were younger.

A silicon chip transistor is faster. But it does the same job as a vacuum tube.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page weren't even born.

Boolean search was in use in libraries for two decades before Google (or Alta Vista or Yahoo) as DIALOG.

Google and Intel made improvements on technology, but did not create order of magnitude changes.

John Bailo says

A silicon chip transistor is faster. But it does the same job as a vacuum tube.

Silicon chips are orders of magnitude faster, smaller, cheaper, and more reliable than vacuum tubes.

I remember doing Boolean searches in the library, the printed Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, the card catalogs, inter-library loans for materials not available locally, etc. Google is orders of magnitude faster and more convenient, and if you don't like Google, there are competitors, e.g. DuckDuckGo. Information retrieval that used to take days can be done in seconds now, without even leaving my desk; that is transformational change.

But, I will concede one point. Average vocabularies have reportedly shrunk, and sufficing behavior seems to have enabled people to devote less time to learning and more time to angry avians or birdbrained consumerians or similar chaff.

jessica says

It's been my experience that the young are excited to actually get insurance for the first time since being on their parent's plan..

Everything I've read online including the article linked in the original post says that young adults are very reluctant to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The Millennials are the most educated generation in history. They understand that the principle of "sign up the young to pay for the old" means that the young are being taken advantaged of and forced to pay way more than their fair share, and that's a lousy deal.

I believe more Millennials would sign up if age brackets were enforced and part of the law. Health insurance should be dirt cheap for the young. And any "transfer of wealth" mechanism should be independent of the insurance mechanism. Heck, we already have a mechanism designed explicitly for transferring wealth from the rich to the needy; it's called the graduated income tax. We should fix that rather than pervert health insurance.

jessica says

At a salary of just over 15k, a person over 19 now qualifies for Medicare.

In CA, at 16K a person qualifies for insurance for $1 a month.

At 20K, $27 a month.

At 30K, $156 a month....capping at $190 with no discounts.

They are making 30 to 40k and are whining that it is not completely free.

John Bailo says

Dan8267 says

The Internet.

The Internet is just a telephone system, based on text.

Doing more of it is not an order of magnitude change.

Like Microsoft and Apple, you missed the point and the boat. As a result, both companies lost a decade of incredible profits as they had to catch up, and both face severe competition from younger companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

The publishing industry, especially newspapers, are another great example of this.

Here's a good illustration of what the point you're missing. Please listen to it carefully. It's full of wisdom.
http://www.ImaH51F4HBw

Simple solution, put all the Boomers out of our collective misery, take their assets. Who needs Death Panels, this is America land of DIY!

FortWayne says

They are making 30 to 40k and are whining that it is not completely free.

Actually, they are whining that the whole system is set up to screw them over. Funny how people don't like getting taken advantage of.

And if it weren't for other people trying to take advantage of the young adults, no one would be upset that the young adults aren't signing up for the ACA. Hence my original post.

curious2 says

Silicon chips are orders of magnitude faster, smaller, cheaper, and more reliable than vacuum tubes.

The point is orders of magnitude change in human society and understanding.

For example, a dual core Intel is orders of magnitude faster than an IBM XT's chip. But so what? They essentially do the same thing. Much in the way that a 4 cylinder car engine and a 12 cylinder car engine do the same thing.

Dan8267 says

Here's a good illustration of what the point you're missing. Please listen to it carefully. It's full of wisdom.

I've read many of his books, and yes, I am following along the lines of his thoughts about obsolescence.

(In fact, I entitled my 1994 essay "The Global Village and You", http://www.questia.com/library/1P3-5819744/the-global-village-and-you-give-something-in-return )

For example, he consider the the missions of NASA to be "Newtonian" and hence backward looking.

And so too we see this in all our technologies. Just doing more of something is not creating an order of magnitude change.

I continue to maintain that post-WWII generations have not come up with anything really that does that, and hence are not entitled to big income gains.

John Bailo says

For example, a dual core Intel is orders of magnitude faster than an IBM XT's chip. But so what? They essentially do the same thing.

One chip can render video and make video editing practical (due to the MMX and XXM instructions) and so make things like YouTube and ChatRoulette possible. This changes everything from culture to the way people interact, date, debate, and meet people.

An order of magnitude faster doesn't mean doing the same things faster; it means doing things that you could not practically do before. And if everyone else can also do these things now, then new communities and new interactions can be created. For example, various persons across the world worked together to produce a performance of What a Wonderful World. That's something that could not have happened before the Internet. It could not have happened with the phone systems of the 1980s.

Dan8267 says

This changes everything from culture to the way people interact, date, debate, and meet people.

Usenet -- a pure text social media network -- established computer mediated social interaction long before PCs were even widely available.

And again, these are not major productivity increases...the kind that earn a big increase in salary.

Dan8267 says

That's something that could not have happened before the Internet. It could not have happened with the phone systems of the 1980s.

The jump was communications at the speed of light.

Before the telegraph, information moved at the speed of the horse.

After the telegraph it moved at the speed of light.

Can you think of any other change since WWII that is even remotely as big a leap?

John Bailo says

I continue to maintain that post-WWII generations have not come up with anything really that does that, and hence are not entitled to big income gains.

I don't see how one can justify that statement given the enormous advances in just my field:
1. The Internet
2. Computer graphics, sound, and multimedia
3. Software development - Hell, I could go on for hours and hours about how much software development as a field has advanced.
- managed code
- dynamic HTML
- unit testing
- reflection
- LINQ
- software design patterns
- separation of concern
- client/server, 3-tier, n-tier architecture
- declarative languages
- XML-based languages leveraging grammar for extensibility
- Unicode
- the MPEG standard and the concepts behind it (motion vectors, etc.)

John Bailo says

Usenet -- a pure text social media network -- established computer mediated social interaction long before PCs were even widely available.

Ah, but only a few academics use Usenet. Almost everyone uses social media today. That ubiquitousness makes it different.

The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes and edges.

John Bailo says

Can you think of any other change since WWII that is even remotely as big a leap?

Yes, everything I listed in the previous post and much, much more.

New concepts have been created every day over the past 20 years just in the software industry. These concepts have made software far superior to the software between 1940 and 1989 in ways that are unimaginable.

Dan8267 says

They understand that the principle of "sign up the young to pay for the old" means that the young are being taken advantaged of and forced to pay way more than their fair share, and that's a lousy deal.

I believe more Millennials would sign up if age brackets were enforced and part of the law. Health insurance should be dirt cheap for the young. And any "transfer of wealth" mechanism should be independent of the insurance mechanism. Heck, we already have a mechanism designed explicitly for transferring wealth from the rich to the needy; it's called the graduated income tax.

The same argument applies within age groups, but the point of the legislation is to maximize revenue and power. Remember Aesop's fable of the grasshopper and the ant, and consider how it feels to be the ant year after year, decade after decade, and then having to pay for all the grasshoppers. As renters and savers bailed out TBTF banks and deadbeat loanowners, so too the careful and healthy end up paying PhRMA retail for Homefool's SSRIs. If Congress wanted to solve the problem of people worrying that a sudden emergency might bankrupt them, we'd see a plan to deal with true emergencies - either single payer for emergencies or a national health service. If Congress wanted to improve public health, we'd see vaccines distributed freely via the VA, the Post Office, and the private sector. Instead, we see revenue maximization - shifting costs around so that entrenched industry players can continue to overcharge. The federal government bought vaccines against H1N1, but didn't give them to people, it gave them free to re-sellers who overcharged more than the market would bear, so more than 70 million doses expired unused and more than 10,000 Americans died expensively in hospitals. This was at the same time as the enactment of Obamacare. These aren't aberrations, they are the inevitable results of a system operating as designed: maximizing revenue and power.

Soylent green is people.

There will be less for everyone.
The future is defined by resource depletion.
Technology is not energy.
Nor does it replace finite minerals.

Dan you really need to get the hell out of Boca Ratton and the West Palm Beach area. You do realize that is where the worlds riches asshole go to live, and retire?

I don't know what Old people you know up there, but believe me.
You wouldn't want to be any of the Old people that I know that don't live up there.

You make it sound like they are all Warren Buffet's evil twin.

Dan8267 says

- unit testing

unit testing = developers idiot light

While it will save you that embarrassing presentation in an iteration, launch, or even just a board members executive software review, where some IT honcho is demonstrating the project's progress and you get the yellow page, because of a data type conversion error, null exception, overflow, or some other broken code error.
It wont or can't, tell you that some knucklehead either mapped the wrong parameter to the stored procedure, or that that the return query was properly constructed to yield the most accurate data. Nor will it tell you how your application will perform when you get slammed by X amount of people at any given time, nor will ever be to tell what number X is, before the whole thing goes to hell.
Unit testing wont tell you, that through out the development cycle, varchar was the appropriate data type for a field, based on their current database. Then three months after launch there's a special need for storing special Unicode characters in that field.
Sometimes proper design patters would dictate that should have been nvarchar from the start, but then sometimes, it's a decision left up the need of that particular tables function, decided based on legacy data. Then there is competency, a unit test will tell you that some fool has mastered the Microsoft's UI, and some fundamentals of class formation and data access, but it can't tell you if their logic and process is meeting the over all requirement of the process that is being written.

Don't even get me started on requirements. Sometimes they are just a blurb in writing but it takes 5 minutes to describe process.

You listed a lot technology that has made a lot of work for a lot of people. But I wouldn't necessarily call them all advances, most of them are. But a few of those are just a convoluted waste of time, resources and money.

Can never beat a tenacious, business savvy, tech stupid, detail oriented and astute QA person. The most annoying sons of bitches ever put on this earth. But I don't think I would be as good as I am today had they not driven me crazy with their petty, anal compulsive nit picking, throughout early on in my career.

Which brings me to my second thing you can't beat. Consciously writing bug free code, in the first place.

Dan8267 says

- unit testing

I get this done at the free clinic

CaptainShuddup says

Dan you really need to get the hell out of Boca Ratton and the West Palm Beach area. You do realize that is where the worlds riches asshole go to live, and retire?

More reason to not want to prolong their lives at the expense of the young.

CaptainShuddup says

unit testing = developers idiot light

Hardly. Unit testing, when done right, is a valuable investment that
1. Demonstrates the use of an API.
2. Ensures that the API is designed well.
3. Prevents regression bugs.
4. With code coverage, increases the chances that you have handled all edge cases.

To poo-poo unit testing is simply foolish. Yes, there are costs associated with unit testing, and unit testing is bad if done wrong, but to say that unit testing is worthless is ridiculous.

Proper use of unit testing saves time in the long-run and ensures a higher level of quality.

Dan8267 says

CaptainShuddup says

unit testing = developers idiot light

Hardly. Unit testing, when done right, is a valuable investment that

1. Demonstrates the use of an API.

2. Ensures that the API is designed well.

3. Prevents regression bugs.

4. With code coverage, increases the chances that you have handled all edge cases.

To poo-poo unit testing is simply foolish. Yes, there are costs associated with unit testing, and unit testing is bad if done wrong, but to say that unit testing is worthless is ridiculous.

Proper use of unit testing saves time in the long-run and ensures a higher level of quality.

Unit testing can be useful if not done by the same developer who writes the code, ideally they should be written by a QA programmer. It is usually a waste of money to let a highly paid principal engineer write unit tests. The reason good developers are paid so much these days is that they basically do the work of four, one is they write code, two is they do most of the QA, three is they are essentially their own project managers (capture business requirements) and four is they have to do the initial operational setup/installation. Oh and five, they sometimes document as well. It's a demanding job though it's good to be high demand ;)