I lead a small group of people twice a week in mindfulness practice. I agree wholeheartedly with what this article is saying. Mindfulness has been sold as the latest snake oil, a cure for all ills. It is not, and it should not be taught that way. Mindfulness is the benefit of practice, not the salve for our wounds.
Yes. Mindfulness is not about just being present during pleasurable moments. A lot of the value, to me, is being present when my mind or expectations conflict with the world around us. That leads to an examination of ourselves, insight, and ultimately growth. This is very different than the withdrawl into feel good moments, which is what is often sold to us.
If by technical documentation you mean a readme page, or a few internal pages, then either are fine, as are AsciiDoc, org, etc. There's no huge advantage or disadvantage to any of them; use the one that is easiest for you to write in without having to look up cheatsheets.
A lightweight markup language is designed to for the user to quickly write something, and most of them have been designed with the goal of having programmers document their work without having to learn a complicated tool. If you need to write extensions for a lightweight markup language, you're using it wrong.
For anything more than that, I'd use something designed for technical documentation (DITA and DocBook come to mind).
Lightweight markup languages seem easy, and, in the beginning they are, but over time, as revisions pile up and more people work on it and you find you have more requirements than you thought you had, they become a huge hassle. You spend more time fiddling than writing. There's a reason professional writers tend to use richer tools - they make their jobs easier and they make the result better.
The question the article is asking isn't matched by the headline, or the conclusion. The points raised in the article come down to this idea - if we, as a society, want to make sure everyone has access to health care, then we need to decide how to handle the limited resources available. That's true whether you think of health care as a right or not.
Classic example of what's bad about modern web site design. 1.5MB of javascript and misc overhead with a spinner over a blank page to load < 1KB of text and 5 small thumbnails.
This site is worth a look. It's as beautiful as it has been for over a decade (through a couple of designs at least). Still JS heavy, but loads in less than a second for me.
"American governments are not capable of running efficient programs" - that's simply false, and your statement about government employees is insulting.
Insulting to whom? While it's a generalization, it's pretty much accurate in the entirety of my personal and professional experience. Some good competent folks work for the government, but they are drowned out to the point of absurdity by the masses of folks doing enough to not get fired. Which generally means showing up on time and not doing something the other bored employees in the office can complain to your manager about.
I have pretty extensive experience with it at both local and state levels, with some experience on the Federal side. There are certain agencies and careers that seem to still attract decent folks, but they seem exceedingly rare.
It was insulting to every person that works in the government, and especially to those people you mention that are "good competent folks".
If your only experience with government employees is asking them to provide service to you, then all you can comment on is how effective they were at doing that job. You cannot know what their general competence level is, nor can you know how they'd do outside of government employ, because you don't know what their job actually entails. I'll give you a hint, though - it's a lot more then helping you.
Even if you've worked for a government agency, which sounds unlikely based on your most recent post, you've only seen a tiny sliver of government employees. You can talk about the competence of that tiny sliver if you care to, but not all government employees.
Look, I get it, it's easy to complain about government workers. It's like complaining that all used car salesmen and mechanics are crooks. Using it in an attempt to prove a point though, is foolish, and that's exactly what you did.
Well ... you're strictly right, but just like the idiotic provision that forced Congress to give up their employer sponsored insurance and use the exchange instead was forced by the GOP, so to were these provisions dropped due to GOP pressure.
You see, the GOP continually promised, on one hand, to tie the ACA up in legislative hurdles so it couldn't pass, or, on the other hand, vote for it if it met their requirements.
So, foolishly it turned out, the Democrats played ball with the GOP. In the end, the GOP still did everything they could to block it and voted against it en masse.
I think the error was that the Democrats believed the GOP would vote for the bill if they changed it enough. It was naive.
Um, no. Those provisions were the Democrats negotiating with themselves. At the time the Democrats had the votes to force the issue regardless of the Republican opposition.
It was people like Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, and Max Baucus that played a rotating merry-go-round of scapegoats that the Democratic Party used to trump up reasons why they couldn't support more progressive reforms in the healthcare legislation.
Also, it wasn't Republicans that put a WellPoint Executive Lobbyist (Elizabeth Fowler) in charge of writing large portions of the actual legislation and acting as the liaison between the White House and the Senate.
In the end we got a big pageant and self-aggrandizing back-patting session from the Democrats who called it the greatest Democratic legislative accomplishment since the Civil Rights Act... which is ironic considering that the ACA is almost the spitting image of Republican Bob Dole's Heritage Foundation sourced (and AHIP sponsored) reform plan from just a few election cycles prior.
So... the greatest Democratic policy achievement in at least a generation was to pass a Republican policy proposal. Well played Democrats. Well played.
It's true that Sen. Lieberman, in coordination with Sen. Snowe, threatened a filibuster. At the time, Sen. Lieberman was an independent, not a Democrat. So, it was an independent and a Republican.
I know that's splitting hairs, but these are valid hairs to split.
He caucused with the Democrats and was only an Independent because he got primaried out of his seat by Ned Lamont, so to stay on the general ticket he switched to being an Independent.
While we're splitting hairs.
Anyway, HN is a place I relish usually being devoid of pointless political conversation, so I'm just going to drop it now and go back to reading about Zippers in Erlang.
A Republican policy proposal that wasn't passed back when it was proposed. Just because the Republicans proposed this first doesn't mean it's a bad idea. We're all human beings and we all have a lot of common ground. Not everything a Republican proposes is automatically hated by Democrats, and not everything a Democrat proposes should be automatically hated by Republicans (I say "should be" because lately the Republican party does seem to reflexively hate everything Democrats propose, even if it was originally a Republican idea like the ACA).
California's population in 2013 was 38.4 million. According to the map, 2 Californians per million were affected by firearm violence that led to death, so that'd be about 77 people killed by firearms.
1,225 was the number of firearm homicides recorded in 2013, according to that publication. 1,699 was the number of homicides where a weapon was "known".
But yeah, still totally off, AFAICT. I also wonder where she got the supposed 2016 data, given that 2016 hasn't happened yet.
Other interesting tidbits from that PDF: almost as many people were killed with ropes, as with rifles. About half as many were killed with knives and blunt objects as were with handguns. Hardly epidemic, if you ask me. Considering how much more convenient it is to kill somebody with a firearm, you wonder why it's not really that much more popular.
Interesting quotations you included - where did they come from? I didn't find them in the report you cited. The following is from the conclusion of the Brookings report you cited,
"The evidence suggests that the program did indeed incentivize the sale of more fuel efficient vehicles by pulling sales forward from the near-term future. This resulted in a small and short-lived increase in production, GDP, and job creation. However, the implied cost per job created was much higher than alternative fiscal stimulus policies.
...
The CARS program led to a slight improvement in fuel economy and some reduction in carbon emissions. The cost per ton of carbon dioxide reduced from the program suggests that the program was not a cost-effective way to reduce emissions, although was more cost effective than some other environmental policies, such as the tax subsidy for electric vehicles or the tax credit for ethanol."
They aren't saying it was great, but they are not saying it was a failure or that it harmed the industry.
Those quotes have details behind them. Such as that sales where mostly all shifted in from the future, less cars where sold overall (hurting the industry), the fuel economy savings resulted in mere single-digit days of gasoline saved over the lifetime of the vehicles sold, and a bunch of other not so great things.
Either way, the Brookings report ends with this quote - "In the event of a future economic recession, we would not recommend repeating the CARS program."
