US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4762

On August 18 2016 00:52 WolfintheSheep wrote:

By allowing a large flow of immigrants, no less.

On August 18 2016 01:04 Dan HH wrote:

You joke but when Sanders was still in the race I've seen several alt-right articles and hundreds of reddit comments that were dead serious about socialist = nazi because nazi is short for national socialism.

http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/02/12/right-wing-media-smear-sanders-with-historicall/208565

On August 17 2016 22:30 ticklishmusic wrote:


As someone who works in the healthcare industry and pretty closely with some major insurers, this was not unexpected. Different insurers took different approaches to the exchanges - some more thoughtful than others. UHC and Aetna jumped in and thought they use more or less the same model they had for their existing book of business and got burned for it. They did not do a good job recalibrating their risk models, pricing or anything to what everyone knew was going to be a sicker, older population. They figured that they could coast by by-and-large by getting payouts from the risk pools, and they did receive hundreds of millions from those. It's just too bad that they sucked too much.

On the other hand, plans who made the necessary adaptations are doing fine. Anthem/ Blues announced they are making money and they expect margin expansion. One of the very basic things they did was look at Medicare Supplement/ Medicaid groups, which are older and sicker and more similar to the individual exchange population, and design based on that. That means narrower networks, more collaborative care elements and a different mix of plans (ex. HMO vs PPO). These guys also run a much slimmer operation in general.

UHC and Aetna made a lot of mistakes. It's not to say their losses are completely self-inflicted - there are plenty of things on the government's side that could be fixed - but the insurers screwed up. And instead of looking at their losses (which are pretty trivial) as a learning experience and figuring out how to do better, they got scared and pulled out. They cut themselves off from one of the last new markets, just like the pioneer who says "this is too fucking hard" and doesn't go west.

Of course, it's possible that UHC and Aetna are doing this for leveralge to try and get the laws changed more favorably... and maybe they will, but they'll have sacrificed market share to all the folks who stayed in and built a working operation. That UHC and Aetna are goofing to me also shows how big of a problem we have with our healthcare system and how much we needed reform and how much of a kick in the butt the insurers needed.

On August 18 2016 02:17 Evotroid wrote:
Before I would say that Boris Johnson was the Trump of the UK, well, it seems it is two-way :D

On August 18 2016 02:21 mahrgell wrote:

You can say a lot of shit about Johnson, and he also deserves it... But the guy has still actually not done the worst job as mayor of London.
And no matter how you value his performance there: He actually took part and responsibility in the political system, unlike Trump who hasnt ever done shit but talking complete nonsense and now pretends to have any political capabilities.

NPR is making an announcement today that is sure to upset a loyal core of its audience, those who comment online at NPR.org (including those who comment on this blog). As of Aug. 23, online comments, a feature of the site since 2008, will be disabled.

With the change, NPR joins a long list of other news organizations choosing to move conversations about its journalism off its own site and instead rely on social media to pick up the slack. But NPR stands for National Public Radio, so a decision to limit "public" input at NPR.org seems especially jarring.

The decision should not be taken to mean that NPR does not value audience engagement, said Scott Montgomery, managing editor for digital news. "We've been working on audience engagement, user connections, in a variety of ways, for many, many years, certainly going back to even before the internet. It is a part of public media. It's important to us," he told me.

But at this point, he argued, the audience itself has decided for NPR, choosing to engage much more via social media, primarily on Twitter and Facebook, rather than in the NPR.org comments section.

"We've reached the point where we've realized that there are other, better ways to achieve the same kind of community discussion around the issues we raise in our journalism," he said, with money, and spending it efficiently, part of the issue. More than 5 million people each month engage with NPR on Twitter, compared to just a fraction of that number in the NPR.org comments. "In relative terms, as we set priorities, it becomes increasingly clear that the market has spoken. This is where people want to engage with us. So that's what we're going to emphasize," he said.

I did find the numbers quite startling. In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016.

Social media symbols forming noise around woman plugging earsi
Dan Sipple/Getty Images/Ikon Images
When NPR analyzed the number of people who left at least one comment in both June and July, the numbers showed an even more interesting pattern: Just 4,300 users posted about 145 comments apiece, or 67 percent of all NPR.org comments for the two months. More than half of all comments in May, June and July combined came from a mere 2,600 users. The conclusion: NPR's commenting system — which gets more expensive the more comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience.

It's not possible to tell who those commenters are; some users comment anonymously. But there are some clues that indicate those who comment are not wholly representative of the overall NPR audience: They overwhelmingly comment via the desktop (younger users tend to find NPR.org via mobile), and a Google estimate suggested that the commenters were 83 percent male, while overall NPR.org users were just 52 percent male, Montgomery said.

When viewed purely from the perspective of whether the comments were fostering constructive conversations, the change should come as no surprise. The number of complaints to NPR about the current comment system has been growing—complaints that comments were censored by the outside moderators, and that commenters were behaving inappropriately and harassing other commenters.

On August 18 2016 02:51 LegalLord wrote:

mods

On August 18 2016 02:54 Falling wrote:
I have heard those comment sections as being described as Internet Ignorance Aggregators. I am inclined to agree. I have very rarely read anything insightful in the comment sections of news sites. Certainly there are rarely any interesting back and forth exchanges.