2019 ACA Plan Up 12.4% From Last Year
Just got the new ACA insurance quotes for 2019. 12.4% increase from last year.
4.38x more money and zero better options. There is nothing affordable about these plans.
My real monthly rates:
| 2014 | $148 | |
| 2015 | $321 | |
| 2016 | $365 | |
| 2017 | $419 | Bronze Plan |
| 2018 | $574 | Bronze Plan |
| 2019 | $645 | Bronze Plan |
Thank you former President Obama and all our representatives. Nice job.
I have ZERO medical issues, besides being slightly overweight and wearing glasses. Vision and dental are NOT included in these plans.
ZERO medications besides the very occasional Sudafed for sniffles.
Your Computer is Impacting Foreign Elections
The BBC is reporting that internet connectivity with Burma (Myanmar) has been effectively shut down in advance of the first elections held there in 20 years.
Only 200 PCs Needed
If the BBC report is true, it would only take 200 relatively low speed internet connected PCs to take the country of Burma off line. Let me explain. In the BBC story about Burma, it is stated the entire country is connected to the internet over a 45Mbps link, that’s a DS3 to the network and telecom people. It isn’t much bandwidth for an entire country.
To take any network or servers off line, all that any attacker needs to do is effectively cause your network to be too busy for user connections to get through. Just like a busy signal on your telephone. Doing that’s isn’t very hard.
Only 15 PCs connected with common home bandwidth could take down the country of Burma. That isn’t many PCs is it. Even the slowest broadband connections have 256 Kbps, which means only 200 PCs are needed with that upstream connectivity to take Burma effectively off line. If a botnet controller wanted to attack an IP and they have 100,000 PCs, that translates to 25 Gbps. Most companies, even with large pipes like a Fortune 100 company has, would be taken off line. 200 PCs is a small number and could be quickly blocked, which is why botnet owners have 100,000 – 5M PCs.
US Space Industry Export Delayed Indian Moon Mission
In this thought provoking article, Indian science writer Pallava Bagla provides a one-sided, trust-everyone description of red tape causing delays with US payloads on the recent Indian moon mission. In the purely scientific world, where there aren’t any political considerations and everyone in the world is good, his arguments make sense. I’d like to live in his world, but you and I don’t.
Pakistan
The US has agreements with countries other than India. Perhaps Pakistan needed assurances that India wouldn’t get any knowledge that could be turned to military use? Getting multiple countries to talk takes time, agreements take longer. Perhaps those assurances for Pakistan could be leveraged for other US desires? If India had heard the details of this, would that have condemned the India/US agreement completely?
US Export Laws
The US is a country with laws. Those laws apply (mostly) to everyone and there are very few times when the President can simply order something to occur. Agencies may be told what the outcome should be, then it is left to those agencies to find a way to get to that desired outcome, legally. I’ve seen that in my time at NASA. Sometimes bad ideas and bad science are forced onto the agency for political reasons. Sometimes the agency loses track of the political issues and jumps ahead for the science aspect, then gets pulled back. The best NASA administrators tend to be very smart scientists with good political skills. The contractors involved simply want to make money first and gain knowledge second.
Military Uses
Many space science inventions have multiple purposes: scientific, commercial and military. Many scientists only see the scientific uses. Commercial secrets also have national boundaries when those secrets have military applications. Almost everything used in space has multiple military applications. It isn’t the decision of a company to determine which secrets can be shared with foreign countries or companies. I’d like to think we (the US government and US companies) have learned from prior mistakes., but without any oversight from outside the directly engaged parties, I fear we will. BTW, I worked at a different Loral subsidiary than the one who lobbied to sell China satellite technology.
I don’t profess to understand US foreign relations with either India or Pakistan and definitely don’t understand the difficult dynamics when all three countries are involved. However, not including those concerns in the article is a disservice to readers. Calling it red tape isn’t accurate.
