For the love of god, be sensible - sell half on Monday and put it back into a traditional retirement investment. You'll still do well if BTC goes up. There is no reason to put 100% of your retirement funds into any single asset.
I do see where you're coming from. Maybe if I said I don't believe it's a _new_ wealth transfer? 30% of the population is not going without care today - they are getting ER care for non-emergent reasons or they're covered by Medicaid or the VA. The Medicaid/VA is a direct cost and the ER visits are indirect via increased costs.
Unless we want to decide as a country to not subsidized healthcare for those that can't afford it and to allow hospitals to refuse treatment without upfront payment... then let's be honest about what's happening there, too. The money comes from somewhere, it's every bit as much of a wealth transfer.
The subsidies are to poor people. The poor people get medical care anyway, at ERs, where hospitals cannot refuse them. Or they forgo the care until mundane problems become chronic or acute problems (and they end up in the ER). ERs happen to be the most expensive means of providing heath care. So, to answer the first part of your question, the subsidies exist so that people who cannot afford heath insurance via the exchanges can still have health insurance. And the reasoning behind it is to reduce health care costs that emerge from lack of access to care.
I know less about the age rating bands. Off the top of my head, it's to smooth costs over a lifetime. So it's a wealth transfer from your young self to your old self, if you have typical health care costs over your lifetime: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361028/
I'm a safe driver. Why should I have to pay for auto insurance? It's a wealth transfer to bad drivers.
... And actually, I completely reject your characterization of it as a wealth transfer. It's insurance. You have no idea if you're going to need it. You may be in a car accident and badly break your legs, and require corrective surgery and rehab. You may get pneumonia or a bad MERSA infection. If you haven't saved up a few hundred thousand dollars and you show up at an ER, then the wealth transfer is to you when the hospital eats the cost and passes it along to properly insured people. That's not even going chemo/surgery should you develop cancer, god forbid.
A gap in coverage is not as much a problem any more, thanks to the ACA.
edit: Hey downvoter, let me educate you - the worst thing about a coverage gap used to be the potential to have an illness classified as a preexisting condition, and then to never be able to get private insurance coverage again. The ACA prohibits that practice by insurers as of next year. Here, I even dug up a pre-ACA article on the practice for you, served up on a silver platter: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/17/business/fi-revoke17
edit 2: You know what, prospective downvoters can kiss my butt. Sorry that you don't like the health care reform law. It may be a total mess, but it's no worse that it was before. The only people that are pissed off are healthy, young people (hello, HN) that are paying next to nothing for individual coverage that is garbage. Get sick or old and then tell me how bad the ACA is.
"Vegan diets do not result in heart disease. Many studies have shown that vegetarians seem to have a lower risk of obesity, coronary heart disease (which causes heart attack), high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus and some forms of cancer." (http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/GettingHealthy/NutritionCenter...). There are plenty of other of legitimate articles if you look for them.
You may have some kind of soy allergy. Your gas and breast experience is neither universal nor typical.
I won't question your unusually strong feelings towards PETA, but please don't confuse what they do with animal welfare. Also, your bad feelings towards your father will do you no good in life, and you should try to get on decent terms with him before he dies (considering his advanced heart disease).
What a pile of first world problems. I suspect a lot fewer guys will quit sugar and lose weight instead of quitting soy after reading this. And diabetes makes soy estrogen mimicking hormones look like kids' play when it comes to erectile dysfunction.
A guy in his 50s or 60s (well past when the boys are pumping out huge amounts of testosterone) drinking _3 quarts_ of soy milk per day is not exactly typical.
Yes, it is, because the person with $1 and no access to credit was just made up for the purpose of convoluting a point about wealth inequality in America.
Somehow this idea always comes from libertarian quarters, too(please, no 'no true scotsmen responses' replies about how nobody but a single mute hermit living on a mountaintop in South Dakota is a _real_ libertarian).
This seems like an incredibly market distorting policy. Social welfare programs provide hard floors on quality of life: you don't have food? food stamps. you don't have medical care? medicaid. Some people live longer than they financially planned? universal old-age poverty insurance (social security).
This has all the feel of letting the more financially/business-sophisticated citizens go hunting on one of those hunting ranches with borderline tame 'game'.
None of that matters. They can read what they're posting and filter out personal information. Who cares what the detractors think, it's the right thing to do.
"Two wrongs don't make a right"
EDIT: people understand that Stratfor is a small publishing company, right? They sell subscriptions to a security-focused newsletter of debatable influence. They have no operational capability.
C, Java, Bash, Javascript, one out of {Perl,Python,Ruby}, and perhaps a functional language like Lisp or Clojure. Each one will make your understanding of programming more comprehensive.
What Java offers is that it's actually a pretty idealistic language in its approach to OOP, to the point that it irritates the hell out of most of us with all the necessary boilerplate. Practically speaking, too, there are a lot of Java jobs (and probably will be for a while) and it's not very idiomatic so there's a lot of overlap w/ other languages, vs say, Prolog.
Also, by "know" I mean, have written a non-"hello world" application but not necessarily having expertise in it.