The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jacob Davies:

And someone needs to explain to that company owner that if you aren't paying third parties for contractually-agreed-upon benefits, you aren't making payroll. You are busted. You need to lay people off so they can get new jobs or declare bankruptcy.

The company owner is probably consoling himself that he "made a difficult choice", which is a load of crap; he made someone else's difficult choice for them, without asking, and blew it.

#35: "The NHS is excellent and wonderful and employs my sister"

Same here. I mean, including the sister. I'm assuming it's not the same sister.

Meanwhile, I've spent 10 years in the US, 5 on a PPO plan and 5 years with Kaiser Permanente. KP is proof positive that a low-cost single-payer system can work just fine in the US, even when it has to compete for doctors with private practices that might be more lucrative. It's not perfect but it's well-organized, integrated, and there's never any uncertainty about whether a test or procedure is going to be covered.

Americans have so much anxiety over healthcare that could be so easily dissipated. I am at a loss for why people would oppose this unless they have a personal financial interest in the current system.

I knew (don't know anymore) someone who made a decent living writing and then editing for one of those "thin affiliate sites". It's basically barely-rewritten material culled from other sites, especially Wikipedia but also commercial information sites, dumped into templates, then linked internally in a semi-meaningful way. The money comes from ads or affiliate links or both.

She didn't seem to think it was, you know, soul-corrupting evil. I'm not sure what I think.

I like this a lot, as a "just good enough" solution to a common problem that already has a lot of "far too good" and extremely expensive solutions.

Those problems are often the hardest to solve because even noticing that there is a problem is very difficult because it's so common (requiring a novel conception, and people making the natural assumption that if there was a simple solution it would already exist) and because when they look into solving it they find a highly-engineered solution, which leads them to assume that a highly-engineered solution is required, since surely the smart person who made the highly engineered solution would've thought of a simpler one.

Well, no.

Making a complex solution by cobbling together other components and overengineering are almost always easier and faster than thinking of a novel simple solution, which is why people make them. See also: almost all software ever made. Also, it's easier to make money that way, so once you have an expensive, complex solution that you can sell, you lack incentives to find a simpler one as long as nobody else is doing so. You especially lack incentives to say "Well, you don't need my $10,000 machine, you can buy a $10 box of crayons."

"Having the sense to THINK for a moment and realize that "GLBT" doesn't automatically equal PORN would have helped."

It would have. It didn't happen. Do you believe that was there was malicious intent in that omission?

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