Obamacare isn't really good for anyone except the self-employed and underemployed. The bottom-of-the-barrel unsubsidized O-care option in CA for a family is about $650/mo.
Obamacare has also been a huge benefit to people with pre-existing health conditions. It's also been a huge benefit to the many uninsured who were picked up in the Medicaid expansion.
The private plans for the self-employed/underemployed do suck though. Eventually the country needs to dump the foolishness of employer-based private insurance into some more mature, rational, and responsible approach to universal healthcare, but for now it's sadly the best we could manage.
It's interesting when someone from Switzerland claims the moral high ground about a country's past wrongs. Switzerland has a colorful history of Nazi collaboration and laundering of stolen treasure by the 3rd Reich.
Is that an unfair characterization of you as a modern Swiss person? Yes.
Just like comparing 1960s America to the present day. The U.S. may not live up to the ideals that are plastered over it's monuments, but it's certainly not contributing to your demise (whatever that means).
> Just leave. Go to ...
Spoken like a true Swiss. No, we all don't have the spare funds or network of employers to travel to a different country at will. Not to mention, SV is the epicenter of venture capital in software, not Zurich. Who are the VCs who would fund a startup's relocation to Zurich?
> contributing to a government
You can be forgiven for this, but U.S. citizens are perpetually bound to pay taxes even when residing abroad. The first $90k is forgiven, but the next must be taxed. Oh, and the state (e.g. California) doesn't play by these rules; it takes the full amount.
The US will tax you after the first $90k, but you can deduct your foreign paid taxes, so this is only a problem if you live in Singapore, Hong Kong, or Switzerland where the income tax rate is lower (housing deductions can help after this point, though).
California is crazy in how they handle overseas expats.
The Swiss provided a service to the Jews in Germany and helped hide their money from the nazis. Unfortunately most of their customers were killed... If I lived in a country with a corrupt or evil government I would try to move my money to Switzerland too, but the u.s. Is making it increasingly difficult to conduct finance anonymously.
Based on your other comments... I'm not sure if you're aware of the rest of the world. ETH is on par with MIT and EPFL is high up there as well. There is a good start up community here in Zurich, but it's true that VC isn't as advanced here - it's still mostly angel investors. Google has a big office here and it seems to be adding to the enovironment.
But I'm not sure if Silicon Valley is a good goal. I've live and worked there for startups and two big mainstream companies and have no desire to go back that desperate life.
The Swiss provided a service to the Jews in Germany and helped hide their money from the nazis. Unfortunately most of their customers were killed...
Oh lordy, that is the understatement of year!
"Documents recently uncovered in former East German archives suggest that in 1944, SS Chief and German Interior Minister Heinrich Himmler sent a special train loaded with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold, jewelry and art objects to Switzerland for deposit in the vaults of Swiss banks."[1]
tptacek, maybe the USG as a whole controls some RSA keys, but the more interesting parts, such as NSA, wouldn't be able to get access to them without setting off some red flags. Not to mention, the USG isn't a monolith; NIST recently rejected Dual EC_DRBG. Employees at NIST publicly criticized the NSA's (alleged, but almost completely likely) decision to backdoor Dual EC_DRBG.
Like you said, for attribution purposes the NSA had to get its keys elsewhere. I'm asserting that it's not just attribution that's on their mind.
Attribution back to NSA isn't the big problem. Operations is the problem.
You can't forge certificates without associating them with some specific CA.
If you forge a certificate for a pinned site, you risk detection.
If HPKP is widely deployed, every site could have that risk.
Unless you've popped all the CAs, the browser vendors can respond to detected forged certificates by curtailing the compromised CA. Meaning the NSA has to compromise another CA to continue their activities.
There aren't unlimited CAs to work with.
Stipulate that NSA doesn't care if attacks are attributed to them. Certificate surveillance is still an operational problem for them.
I also appreciate how the public unquestioningly believes that the Mars rover was in fact really on Mars. Especially, if one is to ask "qui bono", the answer that you'll get is that the administration is trying to direct attention from its police surveillance of Someone1234. I'm not saying that the Mars rover landing was faked, I'm just asking questions.
The culture of different government agencies varies widely. US-CERT is run by Carnegie Mellon University. US-CERT, incidentally is far older than the relatively new DHS. US-CERT, Mitre, and the rest are all about transparency and don't have motivation to hold onto really effective exploits.
However, if NSA discovers a ground-breaking exploit, and it's deemed low-risk to US systems, they'll probably keep it. But they certainly wouldn't disclose it to US-CERT or Mitre. Not to mention, since US-CERT and Mitre aren't in the intelligence community, they don't have a mechanism to keep information like that undisclosed.
I can't believe you put me in the position of defending Comcast from cheap shots.
The open wifi requires you to log in with credentials that are linked to a credit card and name. So any weird activity would be correlated to that login. Of course someone could use a stolen credit card, but at a minimum, "bad" traffic would be correlated to that account, not the open wifi that Comcast is allowing to take up your bandwidth.
Having an open wi-fi shouldn't be a crime, especially when meshnets will become increasingly more popular in the future. I don't think running a relay should be either, however, I'm also of the opinion that this is bad design from the Tor Project. Torrents are good design. They force everyone who downloads to also upload. Tor should force everyone who uses the browser to also be a relay.
Yes, I know what you're going to say - "but then a lot less people will be willing to use it!". Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it becomes something that's just "normal" and you don't think about it, just like seeding torrents. Then if it's something people don't think about, and it makes running Tor "more acceptable", I think even more people will use it.
Currently we're in the situation where potentially a large percentage of the relays are run by NSA/FBI. If millions of people would be relays, then that would either be much harder for them to pull off, or much more expensive. Either way, a better outcome.
Bittorrent is just a good example of the "defaults matter" guideline.
By the way, I don't think relays are the problem. Exit nodes are, and you can't force everyone to run one, since it would literally lead to detentions and even prison sentences.
