So now Lennar is going to put "Alexa" in all their new homes.

That's ridiculous folks.

Look, I have ready-to-go, right now, the software interface necessary (including an app to control it all which is working, but still a bit rough in appearance) that gives you full control and monitoring of your home but does not give anything away to the cloud.

It's your damned house folks, not Amazon's, not Google's, and not Apple's.

HomeDaemon-MCP requires no outside connection at all, other than for you to control it.  It runs over SSL and talks to only you.  It's a master-slave system, so if you want a second controller in the garage or a rainproof box out near the pool or sprinkler gear (or both), that's fine -- they all work together.

It speaks standard Z-wave for thermostats, switches, motion detectors, energy management, locks and more.  It does passive security as you define it (e.g. "arm yourself 1 hour after the garage is closed if no movement is seen inside during that time), or pretty much anything else you want.

The homeowner can modify the event list in a nearly-indefinite fashion to what they want.

You can see and control it all from any web browser or an Android app (which I am about 90% done with functionality wise, and ~60-70% done appearance wise.)

It supports any number of users each with a separate set of defined permissions that allows for control over what a given user can see, change or both.

The builder or third-party installer who wants this can buy it wholesale from me, own it, and have a unique and entirely private advantage.  While you could probably teach Alexa how to do this (I'm sure I could write a "skill" to do so easily) you'd be nuts to do it because then authentication information has to be in he cloud somewhere and if' it's in there some jackass can steal it.

Don't buy a house with a "cloud" implementation of something like this and don't, for God's sake, install it either in an existing house.  You are literally giving away when you're home and the keys to your castle to an unknown set of people and that assumes nobody ever breaks into Amazon's, or whoever else's "cloud" gear.

That will happen, and when it does you're going to get robbed at best and home-invaded at worst since it becomes trivial for a bad guy to know everything they want to about when you're home and when you're not along with where you are in the house and if you're sleeping, for example.

No, No and NO!

Yes, this technology is cool, it saves energy and it's damned convenient.

It both saves money and adds tremendous convenience but you must never, ever link that to any sort of "cloud" or third-party environment.  Ever, if you give a damn about privacy and security in your house.

Instead if you're one of these firms in that space get ahold of me today (look to the right) and let's have a conversation.  You can own the real deal with only the homeowner having the data and access right here, right now, today.

No kidding, and if you buy it lock, stock and barrel you own it and your competitors do not.

It's really quite-simple folks.

Yes, it's 20 minutes.  Watch it.  Distribute it.  Then enforce it.

If companies want to back those who advocate for and declare they will commit millions of murders they need to be put out of business -- lawfully, through irrevocable boycotts.  Those who support or work for any organization or firm that lend support to those advocating for millions of murders need to become unemployed -- and permanently unemployable.  No exceptions, no ifs, no ands and no buts.

There are those who say that there's a "cold civil war" going on right now culturally.  Well, maybe.  But the people on the left are not arguing for a "cold" civil war -- they are advocating, supporting and declaring intent to commit mass-murder, in America, on the scale of Rwanda -- or even Nazi Germany.

If someone tells you repeatedly and to your face that they intend to murder you what is your response? Do you actually associate with and buy products from those who state they are willing and intend to commit millions of murders to achieve a political goal?

That's what all those who support banning or registering any sort of firearm in America are actually stating.  It is a fact that some percentage of Americans believe the words of the 2nd Amendment mean what they say: shall not be infringed.  We can have whatever debate you wish on what percentage of Americans believe this but I am absolutely certain of one thing: It's not zero.  If that figure is even 0.1% of the American population then a demand to ban any gun is a declaration of intent to murder 300,000 Americans to get what you want.  If it's 1% then that number is 3.3 million murders.  And if it's 3%? Then there are 10 million people who everyone that supports such a ban is stating they intend to murder simply because those individuals believe that the Constitution is not a dead letter and means exactly what it says.

Not a single one of the people arguing for "gun bans" or "gun registration" wants to actually reduce gun violence.  It is an outrageous fraud to claim you're "against gun violence" when the actual position you are taking is that you're willing to murder millions of Americans to obtain a political goal.

That this declaration has not resulting in an immediate shooting war -- a civil war on our own soil -- is simply because with the exception of the criminally insane a simple declaration of intent to murder millions doesn't contain enough credibility for people to take it seriously.

It is a grave error to believe that this will continue beyond the point that the first people are actually murdered in furtherance of that declaration of intent.  It is a further grave error, and one that can easily lead to an actual civil war with millions of Americans lying dead on both sides of the debate, for you to fail to point this fact out every time you hear such a phrase as "common sense" gun restrictions and take corrective action to demand that those who have and do adopt such positions declare their true intent in public -- that is, to force them to publicly admit their intention to murder all who disagree while accepting the social, economic and political consequences of doing so.

I know delusions and feels are more "today" than facts, but there's a problem with pandering to them or worse, indulging in them: They are antithetical to professional and personal success over the intermediate and longer term.

So let's talk about facts when it comes to these "Enough" protests.

• No firearm has ever injured or killed someone since the dawn of time.  A firearm is an inanimate object, as is a car or truck, an axe, a BIC lighter, a gallon of gasoline, a pool or a baseball bat.  It is thus incapable of action, and "injure" or "kill" are actions.
  
  
• All intentional injuries and killings are committed by animate things.  In the context in question we are dealing with humans, since nobody is talking about being mauled by bears or mountain lions, or otherwise taken by wildlife.
  
  
• Since we are talking about intentional and unjustified acts we also are inherently adding the aspect of animus to the discussion; for obvious reasons nobody intentionally kills or severely injures someone they like at the moment of the act.
  
  
• There are approximately 100 murders (dead people, not acts) committed each year while utilizing as an inanimate tool the entire class of "evil firearms" that are sought to be restricted or banned.  For context there are approximately 13,000 intentional homicides in which the predominate tool used is a firearm (the rest of so-called "gun violence" are suicides) and virtually all of them involve tools in the category of handguns.
  
  
• Incidentally, since I did bring it up, there are about 200 fatal animal attacks on humans yearly in the United States and another 100 due to accidental events, usually from riding or being pulled by an animal (usually a horse.)  That is, it's twice as likely you'll be intentionally killed (e.g. by bite, goring, etc) by an animal in the US as shot by someone with an "evil black rifle" and approximately the same odds due to accident with an animal you were riding or as a passenger in a thing being pulled by same.
  
  
• To put math to that every three days the number of people murdered in a year through the employment of the tool sought to be banned are murdered using a different, but related tool.  In other words you are approximately one hundred thirty times more likely to be murdered by someone using the tool known collectively as a "handgun" rather than one known collectively as an "evil-looking black rifle."
  
  
• In virtually every such instance in which an "evil black rifle" was used in recent memory the person responsible was known to law enforcement at a federal, state or local level, and frequently at all of the above, to be dangerously unstable or to have committed felony criminal acts for which they had either served a sentence or were not prosecuted.
  
  
• It is a fact that a person who is in prison cannot kill someone who is not in said prison as that act would be a physical impossibility due to lack of concurrent location.
  
  
• It is also a fact that despite it being a severe felony involving life in prison as a punishment to run drugs into this nation and between its states in large quantities thousands of people do so every single day and we catch an inconsequential percentage of them despite spending billions every year in pursuit of same.  We thus know, factually, that it is impossible to actually prevent the importation, movement and sale of dangerous narcotics -- which are also an inanimate object, as are firearms.
  
  
• We also know, factually, that a ridiculously large percentage of the violent crimes, including murder, committed while using the tools collectively known as "firearms" are committed by persons involved in said drug trade, many of whom are not citizens or legal immigrants.
  
  
• In addition the Bureau of Justice Statistics has run studies on so-called "assault rifles"; they found that a mere 1% of the criminal use of firearms involve these tools.

So here's what we have.

17 people were murdered by a nutjob in Florida.  A couple of weeks later another nutjob murdered a young boy and tried to kill many others, severely injuring them.

The first used as his tool a firearm -- specifically, a black rifle.

The second used a knife.

In both cases the inanimate object used as a tool to commit the assaults was incapable of thought, animus or action because it is an inanimate object.

There are in fact thousands of inanimate objects that can be used to assault or murder other humans and many of them are at least as lethal as a firearm if not more-so.

Last year a religious nutjob rented a truck and intentionally ran over people in NY City, killing 8 and severely injuring nearly a dozen more.  He stopped only because he was a poor driver and rammed a bus.  This is not unique; in Europe there have been a spate of these attacks of late and some have been extraordinarily deadly -- in fact there were eight of them in 2017 alone.  This is dramatically higher than the number of school mass-shootings in the United States over the same period of time.

In 1920 someone (the perpetrator was never caught) pulled a carriage full of dynamite and scrap iron to greatly enhance the shrapnel effect up in front of JP Morgan (the bank) in NY City and blew it up.  That killed 38 people, but that wasn't anywhere near the worst attack in the last 100 years.

About 20 years ago a nutjob got 38 people drunk on spiked vodka (with phenobarabital) and then suffocated them with plastic bags.  There is much debate over whether most of the dead killed themselves via that mechanism or "had help."  Note that the tools used (booze, a severe sedative and plastic bags) did not involve any commonly associated with violent homicides.

Not long after the 1920 JP Morgan explosion an even worse mass murder occurred in Michigan.  The perpetrator killed his wife, set his farm on fire and then blew up a school at which he worked as a volunteer.  Most of the murdered were first and second graders and then as the coup-de-grace when the firemen showed up to try to put out what was left of the school he drove his truck into the middle of the rescuers and blew that up with him inside.  The death toll was 44 and again, not one firearm or knife was used.

Of course there's also McVeigh who drove a rental truck full of hand-made explosive that killed over 150 and injured nearly 700 more.

Note however, that the above cited examples are, with the exception of the comet worshippers, used a tool of destruction normally thought of as illegal and ruinous (e.g. explosives.)  This is intentionally deceptive however for these accounts easily found in the media and other references intentionally omit dozens of other mass-murder incidents that didn't use as a tool such things, including one of the worst ever recorded and not in the distant past either.

Specifically, one of the worst mass-murders ever recorded in US history occurred in 1990.  The tool used was gasoline -- about a dollar's worth, to be precise, which the assailant placed at the base of a staircase that was the only way out of a nightclub and set it on fire.

Nearly everyone inside died; on a percentage-of-dead-people .vs. those present basis this was quite-arguably the worst incident of mass-killing in United States history.  The total was 87 dead.

Nor is this the only time that has happened.  In Montreal, in 1972 three people were ejected from a bar for being excessively intoxicated, returned and did essentially the same thing, killing 37 out of roughly 200 present.

Why have I gone through all of this in such excruciating detail?

First, because there are several million of the so-called "evil rifles" in civilian ownership in the United States today.  About 100 people lose their lives to someone using one of them as the tool of their extinction a year, a rate of some 0.0033%.  This is statistically indistinguishable from zero in terms of the rate of abuse.

Approximately 3,500 people drown in non-boating related accidents annually.  To put a rate of risk on that it is more than 35 times more likely you will die by drowning than by being shot with a scary-looking black rifle and every one of those deaths is an accident.  In ten days the total number of people killed a year using such tools die from drowning, most of them children.  Yet nobody requires a license to build or erect and maintain a pool, which is where virtually all such deaths occur, and nobody is blaming pools as they are inanimate objects -- as are firearms.  Instead we (correctly) blame the adults for their inattention and failure to supervise said children who are in and around pools and die as a result.

Further, the murder and non-negligent manslaughter (that is, intentional homicide) rate has fallen from 6.8 per 100,000 in 1997 to 5.3 in 2016, a drop of about 25%.  Since the early 1990s, in short, it's down by roughly half.  This occurred despite a skyrocketing number of firearms sold in the United States which includes a couple of million "scary black rifles."

The drop in rapes has also been sizable over the same period (about 18%) and there is exactly one tool known to mankind that makes a 120lb women the near-exact equal of a 300lb 6'2" brute of a man intent on rape.  It is called a gun, and some part of that drop in violent rapes is likely due to all the guns that have been sold, many of whom are owned by said women.

The drop in robberies is even more-impressive -- close to 45%.  There is again one tool that makes a potential robbery victim the equal of the thug attempting same.  It is also called a gun.

IN OTHER WORDS THE FACTS ARE THAT THE CRIME RATE HAS GONE DOWN DRAMATICALLY OVER THE LAST 20-ODD YEARS, CONTINUING A TREND FROM THE 1980s, EVEN AS GUN SALES AND THE NUMBER OF GUNS, INCLUDING BLACK RIFLES THAT LOOK SCARY AND HAVE BIG MAGAZINES HAS RISEN DRAMATICALLY.  THE PERCENTAGE OF SUCH SCARY-LOOKING BLACK RIFLES EVER USED IN A CRIMINAL ACT IS STATISTICALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM ZERO.

These are facts folks, not opinions.

Now let's add on to the facts.

• Most of the nutjobs who choose to shoot up schools -- or commit other acts of mass-murder -- are well known to authorities long before the act is committed.  In the instant two cases -- Parkland the Stabby Muslim NutJob -- this was the case.  It was also the case in the next-most-recent circumstance in Texas.
  
  
• In the cases where the nutjobs are known to authorities in most cases existing law has been violated at a felony level prior to the offense and the authorities intentionally or negligently did not arrest the perpetrator.  This was the case with both Parkland and the recent Stabby Muslim Nutjob.
  
  
• A person in prison cannot commit murder against anyone other than another person in said prison.  Therefore but for the negligence or intentional misconduct of the authorities the offense would not have taken place.
  
  
• A person who has been "Baker Acted" (involuntarily committed for psychiatric reasons) cannot commit murder either during the time of their involuntary confinement.  Therefore to the extent that any such person had presented evidence of behavior justifying such an action and the authorities did not commit said individual we once again have an assault that took place only due to the negligent or intentional conduct of the authorities.
  
  
• The tools used to commit said acts, whether they be gasoline, knives or firearms, all have multiple legal uses and nearly everyone who acquires, owns or uses them do so legally.  A tiny percentage, indistinguishable from zero, of people who buy gasoline legally use it to commit arson.  A tiny percentage, indistinguishable from zero, of people who buy a knife legally use it to commit murder.  And a tiny percentage, statistically indistinguishable from zero (less than 0.001%) of people who own a gun use it to commit murder as well.
  

On the clear weight of the evidence there is no reason whatsoever to ban or restrict any inanimate object on the basis of these assaults.  In EVERY CASE virtually every owner of said devices, whether they be trucks, gasoline, baseball bats, pools or firearms uses them for a purpose other than committing murder.  There is no evidence to suggest that even a single such incident would have been prevented by any form of firearm restriction other than complete confiscation from law-abiding citizens which would likely lead to far greater rates of both property and serious violent crime -- and that assumes you could actually pull it off.

They are, however, many reasons to go after alleged "law enforcement", "mental health" and "other government" persons (including but not limited to school superintendents, principals and others) that have knowingly and intentionally excused, hidden and refused to prosecute felony misconduct either known or suspected by the people who later go on to commit these offenses.

In fact the evidence is that you could have prevented half or more of ALL the documented mass-shooting incidents of the last 20 years, such as in Parkland, had these government officials done their jobs with the information they had in their possession.

In addition there is large body of evidence that many of these shooters were either on or withdrawing from SSRIs, a specific class of drugs known to potentiate violence in young people with bipolar or disassociative disorders.  There is a specific warning in the prescribing information for these drugs related to this and what's worse is that these drugs are known by scientific study to be ineffective for their prescribed condition in persons under the age of 25.  It is a fact that it is almost impossible for anyone other than a psychiatrist or close associate with near-constant and frequent contact with an individual to know they have such a disorder, since during the non-depressed phases they appear to be perfectly fine.  While the risk of producing such an outcome is numerically small if you give these drugs to millions of people without adequate screening you will, statistically, produce some number of these attackers.

In short between the SSRI and government malfeasance connections you could have prevented nearly all of these attacks.

IF you are interested in actually preventing these attacks it is therefore clear that the only logical changes to make are to (1) hold government agencies and employees fully accountable, including criminally, when they fail to do their jobs through either negligence or intentional inaction and (2) stop prescribing all SSRIs and similar drugs to people under the age of 25 unless they are under institutional (and therefore continual) supervision and able to be segregated from innocent people if the risk of known bad outcomes materializes.

These are facts, not suppositions or guesses.

Now let's tie it together.

When you are hired to work for someone one of the key elements in your success if there is any cognitive process required in your job (that is, you're doing more than sweeping floors) is that you are capable and willing to take in information, evaluate it on a dispassionate, factual basis and from that draw conclusions without concealment, deceit or personal political animus.

This process is utterly essential to the operation of any commercial enterprise.

When I ran MCSNet it was an essential element of every single person's job that worked for me.  Even someone who was hired for the most-base position -- answering the front-desk phone and directing calls -- had as part of their job the utter necessity to take the call, discern what the caller was inquiring about or reporting and processing that information without pre-conceived notion, political animus or deceit and upon that analysis routing the call to the appropriate person or department.

This was, arguably, the least-skilled job description in the company.

The people who were in the customer service department had a higher level of discernment required of them.  Their job involved taking said calls passed to them in a call queue, speaking to the customer, determining exactly what they required in order to either assist them or sell to them a specific product or service and then acting on same.  Again, it was utterly essential that they be both willing and able to process the information they received from said person on the other end of the line without political animus, deceit or pre-conceived notion, acting only within the boundaries of the facts they were able to discern.  If the customer's service was off because they did not pay their bill whether they were Democrat or Republican, believed in gun rights or gay rights was utterly immaterial and to the extent that any non-factual matters intruded into their processing of information they were unemployable.

Those in technical support had an even higher level of discernment, in that they had to understand not just the complaint but also the technology behind it.  A small percentage of our customer base at the time (about 10%, more or less) preferred Macintosh computers, while nearly all of the rest had PCs running Windows (95 and later 98 at the time.)  You were unemployable if your personal or political animus drove you toward being unhappy when a PC user called because you liked Macs, or vice-versa as any expression of that to a customer was likely to result in the customer leaving.  I in fact had to fire someone over exactly this issue.

Those in sales or management positions, which were of course fewer in number, had even less room for such garbage.  For those in sales the accurate assessment of the customer's needs and what products and services we had that fit those needs, along with how to package and sell that combination of products and services, was the only determinant.  If you had a problem with gay people, black people, yellow people, green people (Martians) or gun-owning people then you had no place in my company in a management or sales role because your actions would directly damage either sales or the retention of valuable employees and possibly both.  Even worse, if in management, you might advocate for, bias reviews of, and seek to promote for political or other animated reasons rather than predicated on facts, which did double damage because not only would a less-competent (or incompetent) person get promoted the person passed over would likely quit in response!

Now you snowflakes may not understand any of this, or you may think that if you go work for some big company like Google or Amazon, where their entire culture has some sort of animus or bias, that you'll be immune to this because you're on the right side of it.

I will remind you that this is an extremely stupid position to take, for the simple reason that such firms always eventually get hosed.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but they always do.  IBM had this point of view for a long time and got away with it.  Then they paid for it as others ate their lunch and they nearly went out of business.  Microsoft was severely damaged by the same crap.  Apple nearly went under too.  NEXT, a very-promising firm with a whole bunch of this sort of crap inside it, did fail.  So have literally thousands of other such firms.

While it's certainly possible to win the bet and make enough bank before the destruction happens in your corporate or personal life the odds are against you and in an entrepreneurial environment -- that is, a smaller business where every sale counts the idea that you can inform your decisions in your personal or professional life by completely ignoring facts in favor of political animus is, and ought to be, an absolute and permanent bar on your employment.

If you walked out of school for your "17 minutes", marched on DC or participate in any such act whether physically or on social media whether now or in the future you have indelibly marked yourself as someone who cannot process facts and from them reach conclusions.

You thus have marked yourself as someone who is unemployable in any job that requires any amount of discernment or factual processing of information in order to be successful and that is virtually every job beyond sweeping floors.

Govern yourself accordingly.

Why did Parkland happen?

Because the law is not enforced; the shooter had been reported multiple times for acts that were plenty to arrest him, have him declared mentally incompetent or both.  He could not have shot up anything if in prison or a mental institution.

Why does medical care cost ten times what it does in other nations?

Because the law is not enforced; it is a felony to attempt to restrain trade, create or maintain monopolies, and price-fix.  The health care industry does all three on a daily basis.  You would not need "health insurance" for anything other than catastrophic events, Medicare and Medicaid would not be bankrupting the government and state and local pensions wouldn't be either if the law was enforced and those engaged in same were rotting in prison cells.

Why do we have an opiod epidemic?

Because the law is not enforced; it is a crime to knowingly divert or ship these drugs for other than legitimate uses, and when you ship enough pills into a town of 1,000 to give every single person there multiple doses a day it is clear they are not being used legitimately.  Yet not one pill manufacturing executive has faced indictment for what is clearly criminal behavior.

Why did an illegal invader shoot a young woman in California?

Because the law is not enforced.  He had been deported before, we let him come back in and California in particular gave him sanctuary.  In fact every single illegal invader here committed a criminal act as their first act on our soil.  Were the law to be enforced none of these crimes would have occurred.  There is an existing system to stop 90%+ of illegal invader employment, E-Verify.  Our government has refused to demand that all employers use it, under penalty of imprisonment.

Why did a man shoot 26 people in a Church in Texas?

Because the law is not enforced.  He had been court-martialed for assaulting his wife and child in New Mexico and served a 12 month sentence for same, plus a "bad conduct" discharge.  Under the Lautenberg Amendment this disqualified him from buying or owning firearms and yet nobody in the military went to prison for failing to enter his conviction into the system.

There is no law you can pass that will address any sort of violence nor any other sort of criminal conduct if it is not enforced.

There are over 50,000 gun laws alone on the books between federal, state and local legislation.  Nearly all of them, other than those directly dealing with the interstate trade in firearms, are blatantly unconstitutional.  Yet not only do we keep wanting to pass more laws we won't enforce the ones we already have, specifically when it comes to violent individuals that have been repeatedly reported or even those who have served criminal sentences.

At the same time you're robbed out of more than three trillion a year by the medical system for the exact same reason.  Laws that have existed for more than 100 years are routinely ignored by these companies because there is no risk to them in doing so.  At no time does anyone ever go to prison for outrageous violations of these laws.

A number of years ago a drug company was criminally prosecuted for off-label marketing of certain drugs to teens and children, for which there was no evidence of safety or efficacy.  It was later shown that they actually tampered with a scientific study to try to cover that up.  The scientific facts are that these drugs not only don't work in young people they actually make the risk of suicide go up instead of down and there is a small but non-zero risk of them causing homicidal rage attacks.  These drugs are implicated in many school and other "rage style" attacks, most of which are perpetrated by young people and in fact there is a warning in the prescribing information on these drugs related to this risk.  Yet not one person has gone to prison for the activities of those drug companies or for prescribing them to kids which arguably has resulted in virtually all mass-shootings of this type and what's worse is that we still allow doctors to hand these damn pills out like fucking candy to children, adolescents and young adults despite knowing they are both ineffective and unsafe.

Who's responsible for all this?

You are.  We all are.  Instead of taking the pop-up spokesman of the day out behind the woodshed when some tragedy happens and refusing to play along with that political game we fawn over them while "supporting" politicians and other "important" people who speechify and demand new laws and "action."

We never demand that the people responsible for their negligent or intentional inaction, or even worse, their complicit and blatantly illegal conduct before the fact that allows these events to occur or even potentiates them go straight to prison.

We also fail to demand that those who rob us out of more than $3 trillion dollars a year collectively, or about one dollar in six that is spent in the economy, go to prison.

Instead, we all play pity party when bad things happen and then mewl out the by-now standard: Please sir, just the tip this time and may I have a stick for my teeth first?

I've been harping on this more-or-less continually since 2011 -- it relates to your personal health and reliance on the health care system in the United States.

Specifically, if you look like you're pregnant and you're not (or can't be) -- let's just make it simple folks; if you stand in the shower, look straight down, and you see gut instead of genitals.....

You can ignore this (again), if you want.  But time's pretty-much up.

Trump's "tax cuts" are going to accelerate the deficit spending trend that Obama (and Bush before him) initiated.  The Fed's machinations over the last 100+ years are utterly irrelevant because all of them are in fact driven by Congress.  The Fed is a creature that operates at the behest of Congress, as a creation of Congress, and every single dollar it has "printed" it has "printed" because Congress spent money it did not have.

In other words, Congress ran a deficit.

The Fed has its share of detractors and I'm among them.  But those who refuse to place responsibility where it belongs are fraud-running jackasses, and while I'm happy to try to educate folks those who refuse to learn and cling to that which is trivially disproved mathematically wind up on my "ignore" list.

The bottom line: It is Congress, which is elected by you, that has destroyed the purchasing power of the currency and enabled all of the fraud and force in our economy today.

Every.
Single.
Bit.

Health care costs have exploded because of fraud, extortion and just plain intentional bloat.  Hiring ratios of 10-30:1 for administrators to doctors and nurses are just a start.  You pay for every one of those people but they never provide a single second of care to a single person.  This crap standing alone is strangling the economy and it's strangling the Federal Government.

Then you add onto it monopolist protections system-wide.  You can't get a price before a procedure and you can't hold someone to a price.  How much you pay has nothing to do with the complexity and everything to do with how you pay (or whether you can.)  The health system is the only form of "business" in which a hospital or physician bills you for fixing their screw-ups -- and if those screw-ups kill or permanently maim you they're "entitled" to bill you for that too.

The entire health system in this country, top to bottom, is a racketeering enterprise on grand scale, it currently consumes one fifth of all money spent in the United States, stealing at least 80% of that, and in many cases produces negative or zero net value while doing so.

The Federal Government knows this.  It also knows that if the Attorney General, Congress or the President puts a stop to it there's a monstrous recession -- in fact, from an economic definition perspective an immediate Depression will result.  It wouldn't last long and we'd be far better off when it was over but the next 12 to 18 months would be nasty and whoever is in office at the time will get blamed -- and lose their jobs.

As a result none of the people in office -- not federal, state or local -- will do it unless the public rises and demands it, making clear that there are three -- and only three -- alternatives: Do it, leave peacefully and be replaced by someone who will, or rest in pieces.

Ultimately the people of any nation have the right to issue such a demand -- but only in concert, as a body politic.  1776 was such a demand and when the answer "nuts!" came back from the British monarchy the colonists reply was "ok, since you insist in pieces it shall be."

No lone person has the right to do it (we call that terrorism) but the people as a body politic always do, provided the alternatives are laid on the table.  That's the very premise on which a representative republic is based.

Well, you won't do it.  Not collectively, or in sufficient numbers.

You'd rather get screwed on-balance.

As a result your only alternative is to not need the medical scam.

Sadly if you do need it and the tipping point comes -- which may be as early as this year, you're going to be severely hosed -- or worse, dead.

There's much more, of course -- autos, "higher" education and other areas of grift and scam (FANG-cough-cough!) but this one you can actually take some level of personal control over and thus to a meaningful degree evade.

I've written many pages on this topic, and unfortunately there are some who have enough bad luck, or have just let things go too long, for whom there is no way out at this point.  There's nothing that can be done if you're in that position.  But if you're not, and most people who are today dependent on the medical scam can make a difference, then you're running out of time -- fast.

Start reading, and start doing.