SteveLAnderson

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.

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.

TL;DR - the writer dismisses common lisp because he can't be bothered to learn emacs.

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.

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.

I agree with your assessment of the legislation.

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.

"American governments are not capable of running efficient programs" - that's simply false, and your statement about government employees is insulting.

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.

DSSSL was amazing. Mr. Clark did some truly outstand work, and I benefited from using it with SGML and FrameMaker back in the day.

It was hard to learn, though, and the documentation wasn't good.

On the one hand a detailed report and the other a bunch of random quotes.

I think I'll trust Brookings.

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.

Anybody that thinks $1.1T is a "small piddling decrease" must be a truly wealthy person. Can you spare the government that pittance? We'd all benefit from it.