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pyrohornIII

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by pyrohornIII

  1. 19 hours ago, SubliminalHorn said:

    Yeah their argument is that better fuel efficiency increases driving which leads to death and mayhem on the roads. 

    This has been an argument since 08 at least.   Trump says that with worse fuel economy, people will drive less, therefore less wrecks.  That is dumb and has never been the argument.

    What has been argued is we are exchanging fuel efficiency for safety.  Better fuel efficiency relies somewhat on lighter vehicles.  To get lighter and retain strength, they have gone to more brittle, harder alloys.  Crumple zones are being reduced and the ductile materials that normally absorb the shock of a collision are being removed or replaced by more rigid materials.  Therefore the inertial force of the impact is absorbed more by the occupants instead of the vehicle.  

    I do not know if this argument is valid or not.  That was presented to us as part of an extrication class for newer model cars.

     

  2. If you haven't been around any of these Qturds, count your blessings.  I have one who was in on this crap back before even before Trump won the nomination.  The ones I know are really intelligent, but have a huge need to be more right, more prophetic than anyone else.  They look for conspiracies to back.  I think Trump Jr has been working with them all along.  He puts dotard up to doing little things that supposedly send off secret signals, like drinking from certain water bottles, etc.

    Russia has trolled most of them into this, and then told Trump to play along, using Jr as his go between. 

    • Like 1
  3. Check out the Marshall documentary on Prime.  It's only an hour, so that is nice.   So many of these history channel type docs are built with a lot of repetition.  Those cliffhanger type questions right before the commercial break and then the recap right after the break, like we have forgotten all that in the space of 3 or 4 minutes.  That shit stretches a 20 minute story into an hour. 

    This one isn't like that.

  4. Koch-backed study finds ‘Medicare for All’ would save U.S. trillions

    An estimated cost of $32.6 trillion over 10 years is less than the US would spend over the next 10 years under the current system.

     

    Hidden in those lines is the idea that the current system that doesn't cover all Americans is projected to cost us more than a single payer system that would cover everyone. 

     

    https://thinkprogress.org/mercatis-medicare-for-all-study-0a8681353316/

    It is just crazy to think we could have better healthcare across the board for everyone at a lower cost than what we have now. 

    Included in the article is a discussion about how opponents try to use sticker shock to dissuade people from even looking at the list of things this system could provide versus what they are getting now. 

    And I am not saying that this is the answer, but damn, we should be at least talking about it instead of trying to protect a bloated, top heavy,  dysfunctional system.  We are doing the same thing on energy. 

  5. Since we don't have a health care thread, I keep putting stuff here.

    Here's a good article on administrative costs in the US healthcare system. 

    What they don't mention is how many jobs have been created by this boondoggle.  So part of cleaning the system up should take into account how to handle the people who would be displaced. 

    Used to be when we went to the doctor, a nurse would pull our file and everything we had ever seen the doctor about was in there.  The advent of computers added two new layers at least, those who operate the computers, and those who develop and service the software.   Then you still have to have a paper backup, but security rears its head and now you have companies solely in the business of destroying paperwork. 

    Plus back in those simpler days, regular office visits were paid out of pocket, it wasn't usually a hardship for the visit or the meds.  Insurance wasn't a big player on the lower level, it was used more for catastrophe and cancer, big dollar stuff.  Therefore you didn't have all insurance paperwork to deal with.   The amount of administration added to deal with bureaucracy and rules/regulations (each entity has their own unique set) of both private and government systems is staggering.  

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/upshot/costs-health-care-us.html?mc=contentTWdom&ad-keywords=auddevgate

    Spoiler

    The Astonishingly High Administrative Costs of U.S. Health Care

    Hidden from view: The complexity of the system comes with costs that aren’t obvious but that we all pay.

    • Imagemerlin_138291186_8c822b5e-bd0d-4363-b9c7
    Medical records at a health center in Rogersville, Pa., last year. American health administrative costs are largely hidden from view of the public. CreditBrendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

    It takes only a glance at a hospital bill or at the myriad choices you may have for health care coverage to get a sense of the bewildering complexity of health care financing in the United States. That complexity doesn’t just exact a cognitive cost. It also comes with administrative costs that are largely hidden from view but that we all pay.

    Because they’re not directly related to patient care, we rarely think about administrative costs. They’re high.

    A widely cited study published in The New England Journal of Medicine used data from 1999 to estimate that about 30 percent of American health care expenditures were the result of administration, about twice what it is in Canada. If the figures hold today, they mean that out of the average of about $19,000 that U.S. workers and their employers pay for family coverage each year, $5,700 goes toward administrative costs.

    Such costs aren’t all bad. Some are tied up in things we may want, such as creating a quality improvement program. Others are for things we may dislike — for example, figuring out which of our claims to accept or reject or sending us bills. Others are just necessary, like processing payments; hiring and managing doctors and other employees; or maintaining information systems.

    That New England Journal of Medicine study is still the only one on administrative costs that encompasses the entire health system. Many other more recent studies examine important portions of it, however. The story remains the same: Like the overall cost of the U.S. health system, its administrative cost alone is No. 1 in the world.

    Using data from 2010 and 2011, one study, published in Health Affairs, compared hospital administrative costs in the United States with those in seven other places: Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

    At just over 25 percent of total spending on hospital care (or 1.4 percent of total United States economic output), American hospital administrative costs exceed those of all the other places. The Netherlands was second in hospital administrative costs: almost 20 percent of hospital spending and 0.8 percent of that country’s G.D.P.

    At the low end were Canada and Scotland, which both spend about 12 percent of hospital expenditures on administration, or about half a percent of G.D.P.

    Hospitals are not the only source of high administrative spending in the United States. Physician practices also devote a large proportion of revenue to administration. By one estimate, for every 10 physicians providing care, almost seven additional people are engaged in billing-related activities.

     

    It is no surprise then that a majority of American doctors say that generating bills and collecting payments is a major problem. Canadian practices spend only 27 percent of what U.S. ones do on dealing with payers like Medicare or private insurers.

    Another study in Health Affairs surveyed physicians and physician practice administrators about billing tasks. It found that doctors spend about three hours per week dealing with billing-related matters. For each doctor, a further 19 hours per week are spent by medical support workers. And 36 hours per week of administrators’ time is consumed in this way. Added together, this time costs an additional $68,000 per year per physician (in 2006). Because these are administrative costs, that’s above and beyond the cost associated with direct provision of medical care.

    In JAMA, scholars from Harvard and Duke examined the billing-related costs in an academic medical center. Their study essentially followed bills through the system to see how much time different types of medical workers spent in generating and processing them.

    At the low end, such activities accounted for only 3 percent of revenue for surgical procedures, perhaps because surgery is itself so expensive. At the high end, 25 percent of emergency department visit revenue went toward billing costs. Primary care visits were in the middle, with billing functions accounting for 15 percent of revenue, or about $100,000 per year per primary care provider.

    “The extraordinary costs we see are not because of administrative slack or because health care leaders don’t try to economize,” said Kevin Schulman, a co-author of the study and a professor of medicine at Duke. “The high administrative costs are functions of the system’s complexity.”

    Costs related to billing appear to be growing. A literature review by Elsa Pearson, a policy analyst with the Boston University School of Public Health, found that in 2009 they accounted for about 14 percent of total health expenditures. By 2012, the figure was closer to 17 percent.

    One obvious source of complexity of the American health system is its multiplicity of payers. A typical hospital has to contend not just with several public health programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, but also with many private insurers, each with its own set of procedures and forms (whether electronic or paper) for billing and collecting payment. By one estimate, 80 percent of the billing-related costs in the United States are because of contending with this added complexity.

    “One can have choice without costly complexity,” said Barak Richman, a co-author of the JAMA study and a professor of law at Duke. “Switzerland and Germany, for example, have lower administrative costs than the U.S. but exhibit a robust choice of health insurers.”

    An additional source of costs for health care providers is chasing patients for their portion of bills, the part not covered by insurance. With deductibles and co-payments on the rise, more patients are facing cost sharing that they may not be able to pay, possibly leading to rising costs for providers, or the collection agencies they work with, in trying to get them to do so.

    Using data from Athenahealth, the Harvard health economist Michael Chernew computed the proportion of doctors’ bills that were paid by patients. For relatively small bills, those under $75, over 90 percent were paid within a year. For larger ones, over $200, that rate fell to 67 percent.

    “It’s a mistake to think that billing issues only reflect complex interactions between providers and insurers,” Mr. Chernew said. “As patients are required to pay more money out of pocket, providers devote more resources to collecting it.”

    A distinguishing feature of the American health system is that it offers a lot of choice, including among health plans. Because insurers and public programs have not coordinated on a set of standards for pricing, billing and collection — whatever the benefits of choice — one of the consequences is high administrative burden. And that’s another reason for high American health care prices.

     
     

    Austin Frakt is director of the Partnered Evidence-Based Policy Resource Center at the V.A. Boston Healthcare System; associate professor with Boston University’s School of Public Health; and adjunct associate professor with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He blogs at The Incidental Economist. @afrakt

     

  6. 19 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

    So he has an entire agency devoted to classifying/regulating firearms.

    And instead he runs to a private lobbyist group whose contributing companies don’t want individuals making their own firearms. 

    As a gun owner and eventual 3D-printer owner, I know he’s gonna fuck this up.

    But it’s gonna make the gun-owning Trumpkins squirm.

    The ATF didn't make any contributions to his campaign or inauguration, therefore what good are they? 

    You'd think with all the talk about NRA/Russia collaboration he would let this rest a while.  But no, more shiny objects.

    Trump loves to kick the sleeping dog. 

     

  7. Hackers break into voting machines within 2 hours at Defcon

    Spoiler

    Hackers from around the world had the rare opportunity to crack election-style voting machines this weekend in Las Vegas -- and they didn't disappoint.

    After nearly an hour and a half, Carsten Schürmann, an associate professor with IT-University of Copenhagen, successfully cracked into a voting machine at Las Vegas' Defcon convention on Friday night, CNET reports.

    Schürmann penetrated Advanced Voting Solutions' 2000 WinVote machine through its Wi-Fi system. Using a Windows XP exploit from 2003, he was able to remotely access the machine, CNET reports.

    Voting technology was thrust into the political spotlight when election systems in several states were targeted by Russian cyber attacks. The convention purchased more than 30 voting machines for the event, although, organizers didn't specify how many models those units represented.

    "The exposure of those devices to the people who do bug bounties or actually look at these kind of devices has been fairly limited," Brian Knopf, director of security researcher for Neustar, told CNET. "And so Defcon is a great opportunity for those of us who hack hardware and firmware to look to these kind of devices and really answer that question, 'Are they hackable?'"

    rts19ona.jpg

    A hacker tries to access and alter data from an electronic poll book in a Voting Machine Hacking Village during the Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. on July 29, 2017.

    Reuters

    Synack, a San Francisco security platform, discovered serious flaws with the WinVote machine months ahead of this weekend's convention. The team simply plugged in a mouse and keyboard and bypassed the voting software by clicking "control-alt-delete."

    "It's really just a matter of plugging your USB drive in for five seconds and the thing's completely compromised at that point," Synack co-founder Jay Kaplan told CNET. "To the point where you can get remote access. It's very simple."

    The Synack team also cracked the machine from a mobile application by installing a remote desktop program to it. In one case study, Synack found a Virginia poll worker hacked the machine to play Minesweeper.

    A hacker, who only identified himself as "Oyster," tried to crack a Diebold voting machine after another team had compromised it.

    "I hope that we find a load of vulnerabilities in these just so we can open it up to the public to see how serious the problem is," he told CNET.

    Hackers at the convention hope their finding will lead to lasting changes in voting machine technology.

    Anne-Marie Hwang, a Synack intern, told CNET that changing votes can be as simple as updating a Microsoft Excel document.

    "Hacking it is good because it's able to inform politicians and people in Congress about what they should do with voting machines," Hwang said. "If no one ever hacked them, we might be still using things like this."

     

  8. 2 hours ago, Leanderman said:

    True teachers of what game? At FSU he played "Will the defendant please rise", with his players.

    If we thought that game was strong in florida, wait a few years for what's about to transpire on around the tackle box.  I predict that blank championship trophy will be for the Fulmer Cup, annually. 

    • Like 1
  9. 3 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

     

    The article he was bullied to take down was a report on a second Playboy Model that Dotard was banging and AMI paid out to cover up.

    He should call Avenati.  This thing is about to go class action, apparently.  \

     

  10. 29 minutes ago, M12BH said:

    So hi.  Some of y'all may remember me as Macallan12's Better Half from Shaggy and the Other-Site-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named.  I'm really sickened by all this shit and I"m volunteering for the Beto campaign.  My husband (Yes, that would be Macallan 12) and I are hosting Phone Banking for Beto most Tuesday and Thursday evenings at our home in August.  If any of y'all want to participate, please message me and I'll give you the information.  We live near 360/2222 in Austin, and I know some of y'all <cough Brisket, JimmyJazz/cough> are practically neighbors so please join us if you can.  We will feed you and, um, "drink" you.  So yeah.  DO it.  

    And if you don't live in Austin and want to help or attend an event, check out this interactive map for events coming up near you.

    https://map.betofortexas.com/?source=web_homepage_navbar

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