champu

Something I've said before and I'll say again, at the risk of being a Monday morning quarterback... People (and news aticles) are fast-forwarding to the point where the cops have their weapons drawn, are yelling orders, and anything other than perfect compliance means you're dead. And then they are concluding, "well yeah he turned around with what could easily be mistaken as a weapon, of course the cops did the right thing." But can the police be doing more to avoid getting themselves into situations where shooting the person because they turn around too quickly or something is a justified response?

Again, you're equating that which meets all mandates and that which is adequate, and that's complete nonsense. Well no...the are equal. By definition. Adequate coverage is defined as coverage that meets the mandated minimum. The mandates forced modification of approximately 105 million policies in ways that make those policies worse for most of those policy holders*. In some cases a little bit worse (maybe the premiums go up a bit) in some cases a lot worse (maybe the deductibles double.) *Searching yields sparse results but conservatively referencing an article on hemophilia.org less than 0.03% of people are affected by lifetime limits. So for somewhere between a three sigma to four sigma person, they're coverage was entirely adequate in terms of not being a burden on society and their coverage now serves them worse. You're well within your rights to think the ACA is great, but some people are getting screwed, and it is not necessarily through any fault of their own.

Again, you're equating that which meets all mandates and that which is adequate, and that's complete nonsense.

It did not. You're absolutely correct. I should have said ACA included measures that attempted to head off sharp rate increases, but with no guarentees, and nothing that said they couldn't just make their coverage worse in non-mandated aspects.

You're playing very fast and loose with the term "inadequate." According to the department of health and human services 105 million people including 89 percent of people who had individually purchased coverage had what you are calling "inadequate" insurance because it didn't meet the ACA standard of having no lifetime limit. That means that all of those plans had to change. 105 million peoples' plans changed in at least that way over the last few years and I would estimate that in 0% of those cases that was the only thing that changed. You and I have plans that didn't change much. The increase in the cost of mine was non-trivial, but has been spread out over the last three years and my employer ate most of it so it doesn't affect me that much. You sound like you're in the same boat. Good for us. For the 10 million people out there that had "inadequate" individual plans, life is a box of chocolates. They have exactly zero negotiating power with their insurance companies over what ways their plans are modified. The ACA imposed limits to prevent insurance companies from jacking up premiums as a result of the mandated changes, so guess what knob they turn to so that they come out ahead? Deductibles. Just because you don't believe the ACA could possibly be a screw job for anyone doesn't make it so.

Yeah, I read the AP version of the article since my last post... Sounds like a shitty situation. Reminds me a bit of the guy who was rummaging around for something in his car and was shot when he got up and turned towards the officers.

It's hard to tell scale from the photo and I can't make out the end of the barrel (it looks like it just stops at the gas block which would be weird) but otherwise yeah, I think that's close enough to be of concern, if... ...the circumstances under which the cops saw the kid gave them reason to believe he was a danger to someone. The article just says, "They were patrolling, saw him with what they mistook for a weapon, told him to drop it and (presumably after he didn't drop it with the level of urgency they desired) shot him." Were they answering a complaint call? Was the kid playing with his friends outside his house?

If four if them had fallen down while running away in a panic it could have qualified as a mass school shooting... ...so close.

This one, I think. Wendy P. That's what I thought people were referring to, but USA Today is saying it was a stabbing. Most of the articles I've seen don't say one way or the other (but the tribune link conspicuously refers to it as a shooting in the url of the story.) *shrugs* oh well, no one cares anymore.

In other news, "Criminal steals car". I guess that means we should ban cars to prevent it from happening again. ***How do we want to measure this? 1:1? 1. Already been done. A recent report just stated that studies have shown that AT LEAST as many have been saved as have been killed. 2. I tend to measure using if the "solution" takes rights away from people who did nothing wrong. I'm still trying to figure out what incident people are referring to when they talk about a second kid shooting a teacher this week.

You mean like the US military with more substantial spending for less benefit? You mean like Social Security? Government spending programs grow like cancer, especially when there are profits to be made. I agree, and when they are direct-to-individual programs like social security, college subsidies, public pensions, and ACA subsidies they become inoperable. Military spending can at least be reeled in after a period of spending too much, the 90s are proof of that.

What story are you referring to?

Remember that young Biff has the almanac, so to speak, so anything that happens or doesn't happen now will be or will have been due to or in spite of the ACA passing depending on whether you love it in principle or hate it fundamentally. And since the DeLorean got run over by a train, we'll never be able to settle the ensuing arguments.

I got Colorado... I could see that.

Conflating all government roles/actions/responsibilites furthers no discussions whatsoever... and you'e not even being clever about it.

I think the news article may have been updated or something, or maybe you didn't read it correctly but he didn't shoot the teacher and then drop the gun and run away with the rest of the class, he shot the teacher and everyone else ran away. He fired a few more times, apparently hit two other people non-critically, and then shot himself. Pretty much the entire chain of responses between you and billvon has made no sense.

Recently, California fiddled around with its law regarding storage of firearms a bit. As it was, it's a felony for you if a minor gets their hands on your "loaded" firearm without permission and kills someone or severely injures someone with it. (I guess you trade this offense for accessory to murder if your kid asks, "Hey Dad, can I use your gun to shoot my history teacher? He's a real prick." and you say, "Sure thing son!") Also, it was a misdemeanor for you if a minor gets their hands on your "loaded" firearm without permission and it results in a minor injury or the kid leaves the property and gets caught with it. What they changed was, they made a new type of criminal storage where if you store a firearm in a way that a "reasonable person" feels a minor could get to it, it's a misdemeanor whether or not a minor gets to it. This new addition is pretty worthless at keeping firearms out of the hands of unsupervised kids unless you are keen to part with the 4th amendment, but I guess it gives prosecutors one more thing to let people plea down to when police show up somewhere and can't collect enough evidence to make a case for some other crime they suspected was going on. Anyway, goofy update aside, I sincerely hope that if it turns out the kid swiped the gun from his parents that this is the kind of thing people are talking about when they bring up gun control in relation to this shooting. So, I figured I'd toss it out there.

Claiming there is no fat to cut is just another way to defend your spending lifestyle. People who run up credit cards to live without cutting the cable bill and still eating out do that. (not saying you personally do that, but it is what happens). We need to make spending cuts. Claiming we can't is just pouring more coal into the burners of the Titanic. You guys seem to be in violent agreement. His point is that having cable/high-speed internet or going out to eat isn't "useless fat" it's simply something you learn to live without if it means running up the creidt card. If it was "useless fat" you'd get rid of it regardless of how you were doing financially. Similarly, if you approach the federal budget with an "I'm gonna cut the fat" attitude, that means every cut you try to make is going to result in someone flying out of the woodwork with all sorts of justification as to why their program isn't "useless fat," rinse, repeat, and you've gotten nowhere. In contrast, if you approach the federal budget with a "Hey, some of this stuff is great, if we were made of money, but we're not so it has to go" attitude, then you set the correct tone for the discussion. If it sounds stupid and like it's a silly distinction, that's because it is, and that's how politics works.

Here in CO, there are two cities which are also counties: Denver and Broomfield. So the words "city" and "county" are interchangeable when speaking about either of them. Gotcha, I know "Denver" is a cluster of cities, but didn't know how the counties were arranged. Thanks.

By the way, when we keep saying, "the city" do we really mean, "the county" on account of this being an employee of the sheriff's office? Otherwise I agree, the lawyer may have screwed this guy, which would explain why he got on the news and bad mouthed the city so quickly. Hell, it's only 40 grand, let the lawyer pay the judgement, then everyone wins .

The headline is a bit misleading. It should say something more like "Denver washes it's hands of wrongful force judgement against deputy sheriff." Almost the same thing, but sets a bit of a different precedent. The part of me that remembers where the money comes from to pay public settlements/judgements of this type is kinda glad about this, but the rest of me just thinks, "Sorry Denver, you gave him a badge and a timecard to punch, and as long as he was wearing the badge and on the clock you don't get to say that you had nothing to do with his actions." Are they going to claim that as soon as a LEO does something that wouldn't have been authorized he instantly is transformed into not-a-cop? (thus losing all powers/privileges/protections/duties cops have?) How is the person the cop is "interacting with" supposed to know when this happens and their rights suddenly change in the middle of an incident?

But there's a sub-species of morons that frequent SC-type sites and blogs, who generally can barely string two sensible sentences together, and just barf the word "liberal" out, in any context. When I see the words "libtards" and "conservatards" trotted out in the same online argument, it gives me a sort of twisted sense of hope that there may be a foundation upon which agreements can be built, it's just that we haven't been looking in the right places. But then a couple days ago I saw the term "rethuglikkkan$" in the comments section of a news article and I just wept a single tear.

Heh. You called cable news channels "news."

That article and the topic it was about are both completely asinine.

^^^ Fair, but not a significant amount to take up the slack. This sounds very much like an "everything's already been invented" kind of argument. One of the few types of social programs I think we need to focus on is a more robust infrastructure of flexible trade schools. Like sixth month-ish certificate programs that can be retooled as time goes on and certain crafts become more and less relevent. The moral of the story when you talk about robot economic takeovers is that high school doesn't cut it anymore at making people employable and not everyone wants to, can afford to, or would do well to get a college degree.