Slashdot Mirror

I'm asking for evidence on your claim "he indoctrinated them according to a particular ideological playbook."

Here and here.

Poverty is a tricky issue. Ask the government of literally any red state except for Texas. Their economies are all garbage and their state's packed full of poverty.

Using correlations between state level political choices and poverty to try to make arguments about causation is utterly silly. Try again.

Oh geez, this is embarrassing for you https://www.factcheck.org/2017... [factcheck.org] . We gained a lot of jobs under him. Maybe you are the type to just make things up.

No, you're simply the type not to understand statistics. Let's take the first number: "The economy gained a net 11.6 million jobs." Sounds good, doesn't it? Except that the US population grew by about 20 million people during Obama's presidency, so this is below what was needed simply to keep the labor participation rate the same.

Yup, it's really looking like you're the type to make shit up. Medicare costs us less than $11,000 per user ( https://www.kff.org/medicare/s... [kff.org] , https://www.healthaffairs.org/... [healthaffairs.org] ) and currently covers about 15% of the population ( https://assets.aarp.org/rgcent... [aarp.org] ). Per American that comes out to 1,600 per person so no it does not cost more per American than any socialized system. In fact, it's not even close.

The Medicare budget is $1055 billion and the Medicaid budget is $579 billion. There are 326 million Americans. When you do the math, you get $5000/American.

Well I don't think being "fully privatized" would get us healthcare coverage for our poorest as we're already pretty privatized and can't do that but we can certainly agree Obama Care isn't great.

You're right: I was imprecise. We have a fully privatized system, albeit a corrupt one. What I meant was that our two realistic alternatives are a fully nationalized system (like the UK and France) or a minimally regulated free market system. And a minimally regulated free market system would lower costs so much that even the poorest Americans could afford it.

"I'm not sure what exactly you are asking.

I'm asking for evidence on your claim "he indoctrinated them according to a particular ideological playbook.". Clearly you're an intelligent person who wouldn't just make shit up because your ideology says you should not like something, right?

"Are you asking for evidence of "he's one in a long line of people who use the poor and the desperate to lift themselves into political office with no ability or intention to actually help them"?"

Poverty is a tricky issue. Ask the government of literally any red state except for Texas. Their economies are all garbage and their state's packed full of poverty. Meanwhile encouraging people to participate in our Democratic process is about as American as you can get and doing so with the people least likely to participate even more so.

"We're not debating whose fault it was, we're simply debating whether the statement that Obama created a lot of jobs is a reasonable assessment of his presidency, and it is not."

Oh geez, this is embarrassing for you https://www.factcheck.org/2017... . We gained a lot of jobs under him. Maybe you are the type to just make things up.

"We already have a massive system of socialized medicine, called Medicare/Medicaid. It already spends more per American (again not per patient but per American) than many European systems of socialized medicine. So the problem is not that we lack sufficient funding for socialized medicine, the problem is that the system of socialized medicine we have is horrendously inefficient and overpriced. And Obama did nothing, zero, zip to fix that."

Yup, it's really looking like you're the type to make shit up. Medicare costs us less than $11,000 per user ( https://www.kff.org/medicare/s... , https://www.healthaffairs.org/... ) and currently covers about 15% of the population ( https://assets.aarp.org/rgcent... ). Per American that comes out to 1,600 per person so no it does not cost more per American than any socialized system. In fact, it's not even close.

Even if we ignore your ridiculous claim of per American and look at per user it's actually pretty impressive how low that $11,000 is given that by design medicare exclusively serves our highest cost demographics.

"There clearly is. And there are three ways in which Obama could have addressed that problem: he could have fully privatized our system, he could have imposed a mixed system with strict cost controls, or he could have implemented a nationalized public system like the UK and France. All three of these can be made to work cost-effectively, given the right regulations. Obama did none of those."

Well I don't think being "fully privatized" would get us healthcare coverage for our poorest as we're already pretty privatized and can't do that but we can certainly agree Obama Care isn't great.

Did you know that 40% of people in Ontario who required medical care have gone to the US for treatment?

Can you cite where that came from? I'm trying to look and the closest I found was that back in 2008, a survey found 43% of Ontarians would *consider* traveling for faster care for "certain services" (though I can't find what services exactly)

https://www.thestar.com/life/h...

Next, I'm not saying I believe every word, but it's easy to find a WaPo article trying to debunk Trump's remarks on how poor the Canadian system is. One part of the article also took shots at a study by the Fraser Institute that they estimate about 50k Canadians travel abroad for care, noting that 50k isn't a lot out of a population of 35 million.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Of course, if we take the Fraser report at face value, there could be even more Canadians than the 50k number going south (since the Fraser study could only investigate patients who sought care through their doctors, not those who arranged it privately themselves)

But digging further, I found another article posted on AARP.org, some non-partisan organization.

http://www.aarp.org/politics-s...

Some of the talking points in this last article I recall are featured on the Healthcare Triage youtube channel. Not working for that channel, but I like their videos.

Trolololol.
You must be lost, friend, here, let me redirect you back to where you belong: http://www.4chan.net/b

Sorry. Never been there. But thanks for ASSuming.

I'm more likely to visit

http://www.aarp.org/

But not really that, either. Just the right and group...

What Training Helps Older Programmers Most?

Overall decline in health is, what threatens aging professionals the most — not ignorance of the exciting new technology of the week. Learning a particular tool has never been especially valuable — education is supposed to teach you one thing, primarily: how to learn new things on your own. If you are a developer already, you must've mastered that long ago.

So, strength training and regular walks and/or yoga (while still legal).

Aaron Carroll, who now writes a column for the New York Times, has written about this.

http://www.aarp.org/politics-s...
5 Myths About Canada’s Health Care System
The truth may surprise you about international health care
by: Aaron E. Carroll, M.D., M.S.
AARP
April 16, 2012
Myth #1: Canadians are flocking to the United States to get medical care.
Study in Health Affairs, Phantoms In The Snow: Canadians’ Use Of Health Care Services In The United States. Ambulatory care facilities near the border saw 65yo, and 1,500 were >85. In the U.S., most hip replacements are paid by Medicare, a single-payer system.
Myth #4: Canada has long wait times because it has a single-payer system.
Longer wait times are the result of a decision to save money and be fiscally conservative.
Myth #5: Canada rations health care; the United States doesn’t.
The U.S. rations by ability to pay. Adults in the U.S. are more likely to go without care because of costs. 42% were not confident they could afford care if they were seriously ill.

http://content.healthaffairs.o...
Phantoms In The Snow: Canadians’ Use Of Health Care Services In The United States
Steven J. Katz, et al.
doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.21.3.19 Health Aff May 2002 vol. 21 no. 3 19-31
Abstract. To examine the extent to which Canadian residents seek medical care across the border, we collected data about Canadians’ use of services from ambulatory care facilities and hospitals located in Michigan, New York State, and Washington State during 1994–1998. We also collected information from several Canadian sources, including the 1996 National Population Health Survey, the provincial Ministries of Health, and the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association. Results from these sources do not support the widespread perception that Canadian residents seek care extensively in the United States. Indeed, the numbers found are so small as to be barely detectible relative to the use of care by Canadians at home.

Sorry, you're incorrect in both accounts.
You're going to cite advice from a site who's sole goal is to sell you more credit cards?
Credit cards are always, and forever will be a scam. If you have the cash, use the cash. If you don't, you shouldn't be buying it.
For some real info... follow this link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
What should be most interesting to you is that "Credit Cards" weren't even a "Thing" until the Supreme Court struck down predatory lending laws in the 1970s... Let me restate that... Preditory lending laws prevented credit cards from being legal.

Mortgage rates have nothing to do with why you shouldn't pay off your home loan. Your home loan is your single biggest tax deduction, and unless congress changes things, will remain so for the rest of your life. The higher the interest rate on the loan, the larger the deduction so the as long as the interest rate is competitive with the market it's still a good thing. If you can get a better rate from another bank you should, and if rates country wide are terrible, you should probobly pay it down quite a bit... bot not totally pay it off.

  And I want to be clear here, I'm talking about a first home... if you own 2nd and 3rd homes that's different... The deduction you get from that loan in enormous. More importantly, when you retire and start collecting on your 401k, that 401k is going to get taxed! And now that you're retired and paid off your loan, you'll have no deduction at all! While you're drawing on your 401k you need to be using your home loan deduction to reduce that tax burden. You should plan to have that loan paid off around the time the 401k runs out... then you switch to your Roth IRA which you've already payed the taxes on. If you plan correctly, you shouldn't be paying taxes after your homes paid off.

But yes, perhaps I should have been more detailed... That's why I said you should go take a class. Don't listen to me, don't listen to anyone on slashdot or even your friends. Get educated, figure it out for yourself. There is so much mis-information on these topics you can only really trust someone that you're paying (a true fiduciary under contract or a professor.)
For more info on other reasons you should wait to pay off your home-loan, see this: http://www.aarp.org/money/inve...

You sure you didn't cancel your membership to the AARP?

This was posted in the proceedings of the Geological Society of America, Not the American Academy for the Advance of Science (AAAS).

* For those of you fine Slashdotters not of the American persuasion, the AARP used to be called the American Association of Retired Persons, likely to differentiate itself from the AAA, the American Automobile Association. Now it appears to be just called AARP.

Spend more time fact checking and less time trying to prove people wrong:

The first link in the article blurb above is to a headline on the AAAS website, which publishes the journal Science.

You sure you didn't cancel your membership to the AARP?

This was posted in the proceedings of the Geological Society of America, Not the American Academy for the Advance of Science (AAAS).

* For those of you fine Slashdotters not of the American persuasion, the AARP used to be called the American Association of Retired Persons, likely to differentiate itself from the AAA, the American Automobile Association. Now it appears to be just called AARP.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/03/middle-class-really-three-decade-slump

http://www.businessinsider.com/decline-of-theus-middle-class-2013-10

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/labor/news/2013/09/17/74363/latest-census-data-underscore-how-important-unions-are-for-the-middle-class/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/14/college-costs-median-income_n_3443806.html

http://www.aarp.org/research/ppi/security/impacts-of-rising-healthcare-costs-AARP-ppi-sec.html

I think quoting a single statistic without anything else to compare it to is disingenuous. More people surely are enrolling in college now than they were in my parents' generation. My parents, going to a state school, essentially carried no debt when they finished, and had good middle class jobs waiting for them. It was more likely in my parents' generation that one could be middle class all the way through to retirement without a college degree, as well.

The price of a college education has risen at a rate entirely inconsistent with median income. That's not just for Harvard or MIT - that's for all American college education.

Similarly, health costs have gone up without regard to income levels. Likewise real estate anywhere where jobs exist. Likewise daycare, or elder care. Pensions that were commonplace a generation ago are nearly extinct now, and vilified by a large segment of the population.

Sure, people can afford to have computers and DVD players and game consoles that didn't exist a generation ago, but the essentials of a middle-class life are getting more and more expensive relative to a middle-class income.

Just sounds to me like in this case it was not an emergency, and the doctor had poor communication skills. That happens everywhere, and isn't the system's fault. If you have a hangnail and ask your doctor what is the worst case, the worst case is that it gets infected and you die.

http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/government-elections/info-03-2012/myths-canada-health-care.html

Why do Canadians often come to the States for treatment?

The number of Canadians who receive any health care in the United States for care is vanishingly small. In a country of 30 million people, it is relatively easy to find a few who do so, and who can offer a sound bite for a newscast or an anecdote for a blogger. The fraction of Canadians who receive medical care in U.S. hospitals and clinics appears to be around the 0.5% mark.--of whom roughly 4 out of 5 do so because they happened to fall ill while visiting the United States, and not because they travelled there to receive medical services.

For certain urgent care services, communities close to the Canada-U.S. border can and do make arrangements to share facilities. (If someone has an urgent need for specialized cardiac or neurological care, you want to go to the nearest major hospital, not just the nearest one on your side of the border. Patients flow in both directions under these agreements; there are regular transfers from northern Washington state to Vancouver hospitals.)

Why does the Elderly death rate in Britain start climbing, late in the summer, and start going down again after the new Fiscal Year starts ??

Because high temperatures combined with substantial swings in temperature - typical late-summer weather, and likely exacerbated by climate change - are physically stressful. The same pattern is observed in the United States.

For that matter, why are so many doctors from Single-payer countries practicing in the States, instead ???

I don't have all the data at my fingertips, but in every year since 2004, there has been a small net migration of doctors out of the United States and in to Canada. Further, doctors practicing in Canada (and in the UK) report being significantly more satisfied in their jobs that their colleagues in the United States.

As a dedicated vegan I doubt he eats a lot of either of those.

Well, he *said* he was a dedicated vegan, but later admitted he still eats eggs and fish, (reference buried in the middle of page 3) making him a pescetarian. As a pescatarian myself, (I have sushi once a week and an omlett once a week) I feel it would be dishonest to call myself a "dedicated vegan", even though I haven't eaten animal flesh (exception: fish) since the 1970's. (On the other hand, I don't make a living in politics.) It's like being a little bit pregnant, or having quit smoking, except for a cigarette after meals.

I don't see people flying from around the world to get medical care in the UK, Canada, or other places where the government pays.

Sarah Palin apparently did:

“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn't that ironic?”

I do see them flying from around the world to get medical care at the Mayo, at Mass General, at Johns Hopkins, at Sloan Kettering, at MD Anderson, at the Cleveland Clinic, at Dana-Farber, at, well you get the idea. Nationalized, rationed healthcare is no problem while you are healthy. But when you get sick (and sooner or later you will), you face things like this:

This is mostly myth:

The most comprehensive study I’ve seen on this topic — it employed three different methodologies, all with solid rationales behind them — was published in the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs.

The authors of the study started by surveying 136 ambulatory care facilities near the U.S.-Canada border in Michigan, New York and Washington. It makes sense that Canadians crossing the border for care would favor places close by, right? It turns out, however, that about 80 percent of such facilities saw, on average, fewer than one Canadian per month; about 40 percent had seen none in the preceding year.

Oh and old people routinely go to both Canada and Mexico to get cheaper drugs. Either way, what you "see" is hardly scientific evidence.

... if you used the same password for scribd as you do you for your email account, you need to change the password on your email account immediately.

If you use the same password for scribd and your email account AND you're reading this comment, you're probably lost.

Here, friend. Maybe you'd feel more comfortable here, or maybe here or even here. (after changing your passwords, of course)

Here's an article that attempts to justify the cost:

http://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-05-2011/hearing-aids-cost.html

Overall cost — $3,600

Costs for the manufacturer:

Materials — $360

Research — $1,080

Other retailer costs:

Rent/overhead — $450

Testing/diagnostic machines — $288

Licenses/insurance — $108

Salaries — $540

Marketing — $270

Continuing education/training — $180

Potential profit for the retailer (pretax) — $324

Approximate product cost for retailer — $1,440

I don't know how accurate it is, but I can believe that the actual parts cost of a hearing aid is around $350.?

Again, which of his positions do you find extreme?

Well, here's a couple:
1. Return to a gold standard. The vast majority of economists consider the gold standard to be a really really bad idea, because it leaves the government basically unable to mitigate the effects of economic crises.

2. Eliminating all social insurance programs, including Social Security. Public support for Social Security is somewhere between 65-85% (e.g. Wall Street Journal, AARP, neither exactly Democratic party shills).

You would help your argument if you actually knew what the law said. If your income is so low that you normally don't pay taxes anyway ($0 qualifies here, btw), then you will be exempt from the mandate "penalty".

I know it is a challenge to many people who let their emotions run their lives instead of reason, but learn how the law actually works before condemning it.

AARP Bulletin - Health Care Reform Explained:

Who is exempted from the requirement?

The exceptions to the rule include people without coverage for less than 90 days, American Indians, people in prison and Americans living outside the United States. Others who are exempt include people who don’t file taxes because their income is too low and those for whom the least expensive plan costs more than 8 percent of their income in 2014. The secretary of Health and Human Services also has authority to grant exemptions if buying insurance violates an individual’s religious beliefs or would pose an economic hardship. Criteria for the religious exemption has not yet been established, and a Treasury spokeswoman said no religious groups have received exemptions.

Statistically, fahrbot's situation is an exception to an overwhelming rule: there are many more older men in relationships (and certainly in marriages; check the stats) with younger women than there are older women in relationships with younger men.

Do you have those stats? CNN says in Older women and younger men: Can it Work? that a "2003 study by AARP revealed that 34 percent of all women over 40 in the survey were dating younger men, and 35 percent preferred it to dating older men." AARP has Cougars and Their Cubs as well as a number of other articles on cougars. Now those two articles were the first 2 results for statistics dating old young.

Falcon

Statistically, fahrbot's situation is an exception to an overwhelming rule: there are many more older men in relationships (and certainly in marriages; check the stats) with younger women than there are older women in relationships with younger men.

Do you have those stats? CNN says in Older women and younger men: Can it Work? that a "2003 study by AARP revealed that 34 percent of all women over 40 in the survey were dating younger men, and 35 percent preferred it to dating older men." AARP has Cougars and Their Cubs as well as a number of other articles on cougars. Now those two articles were the first 2 results for statistics dating old young.

Falcon

If you are still using floppies, you could always use your AARP card to move the slider....http://www.aarp.org/

The AARP regularly has hams calling in weather info, assisting in areas with poor cell phone signals and traffic issues.

Are you sure you don't mean AARL instead of AARP? AARP is a senior citizens' group.

I've been watching commercials from the AARP Divided we Fail campaign http://www.aarp.org/issues/dividedwefail/ for more than a year now, and I really have to commend them to trying to elevate the health care argument above partisan politics, and paint it as an issue for all, not just for one ideology. In fact it is an issue that hits everyone except the ultra-wealthy, so should be a big part of the national dialog.

Personally I think that the GOP stance would be to do nothing (let the market keep doing whatever it wants, no matter who dies) so I do firmly believe that a democratic candidate would do far better than the republican that started us down this path some 30 years ago (that's Nixon, BTW).

Not to mention all the Tennessee Tuxedo fans, who are not going to be happy about it either.

Sorry, wrong site - You want AARP, not Slashdot.

Easy mistake, no doubt you arrived here from a misspelled Google search for "ARPA". ;-)

Your taxes already do pay for research - through NIH grants, tax breaks for pharmaceutical companies, and then after the drug is almost fully developed the government often gives the patent to an industry 'partner' to bring to market. A good example is AZT, the first ever anti-HIV medicine. The lion's share of the cost for developing AZT was paid by our tax dollars. Then Glaxo-Wellcome stepped in for the last bit and viola, they have an exclusive right to sell a life saving drug for whatever the market will bear.

From Physicians for a National Health Program's website: "15. Taxpayers pay for most research costs, and many clinical trials as well. In 2000, for example, industry spent 18% of its $13 billion for R&D on basic research, or $2.3 billion in gross costs (National Science Foundation 2003). All of that money was subsidized by taxpayers through deductions and tax credits. Taxpayers also paid for all $18 billion in NIH funds, as well as for R&D funds in the Department of Defense and other public budgets. Most of that money went for basic research to discover breakthrough drugs, and public money also supports more than 5000 clinical trials (Bassand, Martin, Ryden et al. 2002). Taxpayer contributions are similar in more recent years, only larger." http://www.pnhp.org/news/2004/february/will_lower_drug_pric.php

So they paid 2.3 billion (tax subsidized), and we kicked in 18 billion. Then they get to charge us for access to the drugs for which we paid 95% of the basic research costs.

Though you may say that PNHP is a bunch of hippies, so if you prefer a more grandfatherly source the AARP do a decent job too: http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/prescription/double_taxation.html

Of course that is the reason that while you may not trust the government, they could be a much better steward of medical research than market forces. Market based R&D is inherently morally corrupt. It can't be otherwise. If its not obvious because of the fact that more R&D is spent developing drugs to give octogenarians a hard-on and a full head of hair than to offer effective treatment for malaria that kills millions each year in the developing world, MSF gives a great summary of the reasons that market based R&D is wrong: http://www.accessmed-msf.org/main/medical-innovation/introduction-to-medical-innovation/what-is-wrong-with-r-d-today/

Though I do agree with you that at present I don't trust the government. Not that they do bad research... the NIH and the researchers they fund are amazing. But I don't trust the corrupt system that gives the breakthrough drugs that the government develops into the hands of private industry so that they can extort millions of Americans for the price that the 'market will bear' for drugs they may need to survive.

Nintendo has tapped a broader demographic of casual gamers, but what can they buy? Most of the games out now (at retail, and VC) are still catering to the hardcore...

Are you kidding? Wii Sports, Wii Play, Wario Ware, Sonic, etc.

Perhaps we have a differnent definition of 'Casual', so let me clarify mine. Think AARP . Sonic, doesn't come under the radar at all. Wario Ware may get played, but would have to be introduced. It's nothing that they would pick up on their own (Same with Rayman). Here's my real life example. I'm a gamer, and I love the Wii (got one at launch). My (retired) parents saw a commercial for it and my mom (who loved tennis, but now has bad knees) said 'I'd like to try tennis' and I brought it over to their house for Thanksgiving. They loved it. They are as non-gamer as can be, (the hardly even play solitaire, or anything on the computer) but they really enjoyed Tennis, Bowling and Golf. They enjoyed it so much that I got them one for Christmas.

So far they have 3 games WiiSports, WiiPlay, and of all the games that have been released in the last 6 months, the only one that really interested either one of them was Tiger Woods. My dad golfs, so he picked that up. It's a game he knows, with a Brand he's familiar with. What's next? Dunno. WiiMusic?, WiiFitness? Both Q4. Big Brain Academy MAY work, but Brain Age (IMHO) would be better. Ironically, the VC's selection is worse.

A quick glace at all the VC games available , The most 'Casual friendly' game on the list (Pacman) isn't even out in the US yet. Where is SuDoKu? or Crossword Puzzle games? Of the Afore mentioned VC list, what games would you recommend? Keep in mind they don't have (and likely will never have) Gamecube, or 'Classic' controllers.

As the author of this program I want to reply to a couple of comments in this thread.

First regarding the issue of free-file: AARP will free file for you no matter what your age or income level. At least this is how it has been presented to me by volunteers for the organization. This is noted on the TaxGeek website.

Second, regarding the coding of the US income tax forms, I agree that the tax code ought to be in computer code perhaps even written into the fillable PDF forms the IRS provides. This would be the most concise way to do it to ensure no mistakes are made. However, H&R Block, TurboTax and others feel that this is the government competing against private industry, and therefore, it won't happen.

Regarding this last point, I suspect that when TaxGeek actually becomes competitive with "real" tax programs, we will start having issues with the big companies who will feel that it is unfair that someone is providing software to the public for free (nevermind that it isn't the government). Imagine that our near term idea-list is completed. Specifically that we completely finish the 1040, can write to pdf using XUL-Javascript, and create an interview frontend. Should this happen, TaxGeek becomes platform independent and usable by a wider audience. Presuming that we have thousands of ./ers sending bug reports, TaxGeek may even be more reliable than some commercial products. (I know, in my dreams...)

Finally, regarding liability please see the following IRS publications:

* "Revenue Ruling 85-189: Return preparers; sale of computer program. A person who prepares a computer program and sells it to a taxpayer to use in preparing the tax-payer's income tax return may be an income tax return preparer." Internal Revenue Cumulative Bulletin, volume 1985-2, p. 341.
* "IRS announces that companies who sell return preparation computer software and programs may be considered return preparers subject to penalties." I.R.S. News Release, IR-86-92 (May 6, 1986).

I assume that in India, the manual labor required to count all the paper ballots is cheaper than it would be in the U.S.

Cheaper than free? While I can't speak knowledgeably about the entire U.S. of A (polling issues are handled on a state-by-state basis), I do know that most (if not all) of the poll workers in this country are there on a volunteer basis. Maybe some of 'em are paid a stipend or something ... I dunno ... but I doubt that would make hand-counting any more expensive than buying and maintaining those damned machines. Arguably, it might even be less expensive in the long run.

At any rate, none of the arguments I've seen in favor of touch-screen voting have anything directly to do with the bottom line. Usually it's voter-privacy issues for people with disabilities (who would otherwise need to rely on a "volunteer" to correctly read and mark their votes for them), and language issues for "English-challenged" citizens (who wouldn't be able to read or understand the ballot). The National Federation For The Blind, for instance, has been in and out of bed with Diebold for years over the issue of ballot accessibility.

The first engine uses several principles. The sonic crushing boom from compressed liquid air entering a steam-filled cylinder creates a condition called sonofusion. The supercold liquid air droplets causes the steam-expanded H2O molecules to collapse into single-molecule (individual) ice crystals. That collapse is so hard & fast it's like black holes collapsing ahead of the expanding liquid air faster than the liquid air is expanding. Overall, inside the cylinder is transformed into a sudden VACUUM that scrams the h^ell out of the way of the instantaneous KA-WHOOM from the liquid air going from 4,361 psi to Full Expansion in an Instant of Time (time-exponential magnification of horsepower). hahaha

I don't think it gets much more efficient than that.

Then there's the engine I made this year. It isn't built yet but I released it on November 14, 2005, to show others the principle involved >
http://www.newpath4.com/millenialdawnpowerandlight secure21.htm

It doesn't use any fuel at all. Essentially, I reversed E=mc2 to mc2=E. The difference is explained on that page. This engine equation -unlike Einstein's- creates what I call "Controlled Devastation". It will power homes, laptops, electric cars, refrigerators and other appliances, heat your water for coffee and a shower.

Maybe I can balance any other Americans you referred to. Should you desire to read my entire story of invention on this 2nd engine, I made a series of posts on AARP's Message boards here:
http://community.aarp.org/n/mb/message.asp?webtag= rp-health&msg=5751.1&ctx=1
You may find it a long read but there's a lot that had to be covered, plus there is a surprise ending as to the one person I give lots of credit to for helping me have the idea.

Regarding your points

* Companies can't "forbid" fraternization. What they can do is decide they will no longer employ you should you fraternize. You retain your Constitutional rights to sleep with the blonde in the next cubicle. But there is no Constitutional right to work for Company X.

* At-will Clauses are, generally speaking, legal. It is entirely possible for your employer to announce to out of the blue that your services will no longer be required. However, if you are a member of a protected class (disabled, minority, over 40, etc.) or you were fired for performing an act permissible as a matter of public policy (attending a political rally, filing a worker's comp claim), you may have grounds to challenge the termination. But every state has different laws in this respect. I suppose it's possible, even, that some courts have deemed anti-fraternization rules as against public policy.

FYI, the "Rape of Nanking" is a term popularized by Iris Chiang, whose poorly researched and referenced book is really a mockery of historical journalism. Nasty stuff happened at Nanking, but lets not blow the Nanking Massacre (actually the Fourth Nanking Massacre - essentially every time the city had been conquered in its history, the defenders melted into the civilian population and the conquerors metted out revenge on the people for it).

First off, Chiang's reference to Japan as "complicit in the holocaust" is way off. As Rabbi and author Hillel Levine (and former visiting professor in China) wrote in "In Search of Sugihara", the Japanese Consul-General in Lithuania issued visas to over 6,000 Jews fleeing from the Nazis. Lt. Gen Higuchi Kiichiro supported the first conference of Jewish communities in the Far East in 1937, and later aided Jews who had fled to Manchuria (and is mentione in JNF's Golden Book). Col. Yasue Senko did similar. As a body, the Japanese government was unwilling to do anything to interfere with their ally, but had a stated opposition to participation ("Outline of Measures Toward Jewish Peoples", 1938).

Anyways, back to Nanking. The city fell on Dec. 13, 1937, to Japanese forces under the command of Gen. Matsui. In his diary, he wrote at the time that he ordered that anyone who looted or starting a fire, even accidentally, would be punished; he also sought to eradicate the "disdain" for the Chinese among many of his men, who had been fighting them for so long. In the same entry, he wrote "I could only feel sadness and responsibility today, which has been overwhelmingly piercing my heart. This is caused by the Army's misbehaviors after the fall of Nanking and failure to proceed with the autonomous government and other political plans."

He caused conflict with his division commanders when he propose that the memorial for the Japanese war dead also honor the Chinese war dead; they compromised by holding a separate service. After Matsui returned to Japan, he erected a statue of Kannon (the Goddess of Mercy) on Izuyama in 1940, to deify both the Japanese *and* Chinese soldiers.

His Buddhist confessor wrote, after Matsui's death, that ""I am ashamed of the Nanking Incident," said Matsui according to Hanayama.

The statue of Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, erected by Matsui.

"After the memorial service, I gathered up everybody and warned them with tears of anger. Both Prince Asaka and Lieutenant General Yanagawa were there. [I told them] we came all the way to stand on the majesty of the Emperor, but the dignity [of the Imperial Army] was lost at a stroke through the brutal acts of the soldiers. But then everyone laughed. To my displeasure, a certain division commander even uttered, 'of course.'" By all accounts, he was a true "unified asia" believer who saw the Chinese not as enemies, but as future allies and friends whom he wanted to unify against Western intrusion, but was unable to control his war-weary men when it mattered.

The photos in the book are just embarassing - at least the ones that have been traced to their sources. One of Chinese heads on the ground was traced to Sato Susumu, who purchased it in a photographer's studio in Huining, where it was labelled "Heads of Bandits Shot To Death in Tieling" (i.e., killed by Manchurian nationalist Zhang Xueliang's men). Another claims to be Japanese soldiers cutting someone's head with a hay cutter, yet the uniforms are clearly Chinese nationalist (Asahi Shinbun later posted a retraction after posting the picture as it was originally claimed). Another is a cropped image of bodies washing up on a beach downstream from clearly war-devastated area, leaving only the pile of bodies in frame. The photo "Comfort Women Being Rounded Up" is actually a picture from a 1937 edition of Asahi Graph, the

There's a radio interview with McDonough here: http://www.aarp.org/fun/radio/pt_radio/sustainable _architecture.html

You may want to listen to it before you go off the deep end. The guy's pretty rational and amazingly farsighted.

http://www.aarp.org/international/agingadvances/un ivdesign/Articles/item803919288.html

If he had secrets he felt he needed to keep hidden I hope he did the work one needs to do to keep them hidden in life as well as in death (if in death you don't have cares, you also don't have embarrassment).

If you have letters, photos, books, or other evidence of your secret life, you do have to work to prevent them from going into your estate at your death. Simply storing letters in a hosted email service, like storing letters in a storage unit, isn't sufficient. You'd have to make special arrangements to keep your post office boxes and safety deposit boxes private after death: the default is that your estate gets distributed, not destroyed. If you have storage that's not under your name, and that only very trusted other people know about, then you might keep it out of your estate. Simply putting letters into a safety deposit box or storage rented under your own name hasn't ever given people pre-death privacy, let alone after-death privacy.

In this case there is no evidence the soldier was trying to keep this address private. I assume he emailed his family from it, because his family members knew it existed. In this case his Yahoo address is like a post office box or a rented office unders one's own name. Offices or mailboxes are private in life, but once you're dead they're part of the estate. Heck, even if you're incapacitated they aren't private. I've had the terrible burden of holding a POA for a severely ill person- for all intents and purposes I was legally that other person. Medical records, bank records, storage units, probably even his Permanent School Record: all legally accessible to me, and again, that was when he was alive. Generally after a death there'll be at least one person with at least as much access to your stuff.

So Yahoo is acting like the exception here, not the rule, in denying his family / the estate access to his items stored at Yahoo. Of course, given how easy it is for the FBI / CIA / NSA to get into Yahoo accounts, why would anyone store anything private there? A physical storage unit would at least require a subpoena (or non-payment) before other people could get inside.

For email privacy that survives into death you'd want an account where you use heavy encryption, never use your real name (emails can always be forwarded) and use onion routers (thanks, EFF) to get to the account. For physical-item privacy you'd need to do the same sort of work. Harsh, but that's life.

As for the soldier's family, they should tell the RIAA / BSA / FBI he was storing music / illegal copies of software / subversive literature there. After a few minutes Interpol should copy the account and shares it with other agencies. Then a FOIA request should get them the emails after a few years.

You can check a few other high (and relatively high) profile sites that run on Zope:

• NASA's Maestro
• AARP
• Boston.com
• Saugus.net
• Many others that don't immediately come to mind...

Zope is also part of Massachusetts' "Open Source Trough" and will quite likely eventually power the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts' site at www.state.ma.us.

But it doesn't have a camera! I thought every audio device had to have a camera? or at least a battery-devouring, expensive color display?

The AARP Winter Nationals!

most people would be hard pressed to find somebody else to (help them) do thier taxes for free

Nope.

Unless you're making plenty enough money to either do or have your taxes done, these guys will prepare your tax return for free.

And if you're low-income and have problems with English, these guys will do your taxes for free.

Heck, go to your closest walk-in IRS office during tax season and an IRS employee will do your taxes for you, for free. Of course, if you've no real need for help (either because you made enough money to easily afford someone to prepare them for you or you are easily able to do your short form yourself) they'll decline to prepare your return. But people with a genuine need and the foresight to make an appointment get helped.

Oooh... it was bugging me, so I looked some more; this isn't from the documentary but I'm pretty sure they're talking about the same place:

http://www.aarp.org/destinations/Articles/a2002-05 -22-destinations_santorini.html

I don't see how you can make the argument that "NAFTA has been bad for... all three countries.... US unemployment hit historic lows throughout most of the 90's

Well, my main point was about Local, State and National sovereignty, that Corporations should not be above the law. What I was basing the "bad for... all three countries" was that supposedly median income went down, and overtime and people working more than one job went up after NAFTA.

So I did some searching on the web trying to find some hard data. This site had some interesting statistics on median income. Adjusted for inflation the income for Men in general: 1994:36,215 1995:36,387 1996:36,439 1997:36,678 and for Women in general: 1994:26,424 1995:26,197 1996:26,400 1997:26,974

So according to that website income did actually increase slightly in the 3 years after NAFTA was implemented.

This site only has data up to 1994 for not very useful in terms of data when discussing NAFTA. However, it does seem to have good explainations of the many issues involved when these issues.

I can't seem to find any sites that document hours of overtime, or people working multiple jobs. (When doing searches all it would come up with was statistics on overtime pay and not hours worked.)

I did come across this interesting site at AARP. It says that between 1989 and 1997 the poverty rate for the general population went up by 0.2% Ah Hah! um... no wait, it isn't statistically significant.

So I guess the gist of it is that I can't really say that NAFTA affected jobs, income and overtimepay. And even if I had found statistics to support my statement, it is not like the economy occures in a bubble where NAFTA is the only change. The dotcom era certainly affected the economy for instance, and that is something that was quite unique. I suppose if I we were able to find statistics that concentraited on jobs affected by trade that would be more telling. (Times like these I wish I had the time to read the WSJ.)

Anyone out there know how to lookup statistics like these?

and the telco should be required to provide dialtone to every house, no matter their ability to pay. But it doesn't work that way.

What part of "Universial Service" don't you understand? The state Universal Service Funds are also used to pay for phone service for those who are too poor to afford phone service. Here's info about it from the AARP. Qualifying low-income people can get their phone service for as little as $3 a month if they don't make a lot of outgoing local calls, and only pay about half the price for the usual unlimited local calling, plus have a working connection to the long distance service of their choice.

The Universal Service Fund is there in all 50 states to assure that everybody who wants phone service can get it. If you can prove you can't afford the going rates, the rates suddenly drop to next to nothing for you. (And you're also likely poor enough to be able to spare that money from whatever other government handouts you're getting.)

Even if you don't pay your bill, the phone company can only block your phone service in restricted ways, and calls to 911 must always be honored. You've gotta work really hard to lose your 911 access...

There are a lot of people living on their own, with phones so they can call/be called by their families, but who do not have the ability to deal with telemarketing calls in a sane/sensible way. I'm not talking about people being jerks, I'm talking about people who mentally are not capable of handling someone trying to coerce them into something over the phone.

I'm sure there are "legitimate" telemarketers out there, but the general tactics are just appalling.

For more information on telemarketing fraud and the elderly, check out AARP's site - Telemarketing Fraud Underreported, and their Off the Hook Study.

There are a lot of people living on their own, with phones so they can call/be called by their families, but who do not have the ability to deal with telemarketing calls in a sane/sensible way. I'm not talking about people being jerks, I'm talking about people who mentally are not capable of handling someone trying to coerce them into something over the phone.

I'm sure there are "legitimate" telemarketers out there, but the general tactics are just appalling.

For more information on telemarketing fraud and the elderly, check out AARP's site - Telemarketing Fraud Underreported, and their Off the Hook Study.

looks pretty normal, but then again, I'm gettin old...

I really don't understand the gap-jawed complaints some people are expressing. Its a fourty dollar device compared to a TWO HUNDRED dollar device. Please, lets not act too surprised.

This all reminds me of the DustBuster craze in the 80s. They all plainly sucked, or failed to suck dirt, yet they sold by the millions. Even the heavy-duty Black & Deckers did little then make an annoying whine and create a weird smell.

Today, the DustBuster market is more or less dead and the ones that have survived are at Target, are a slightly more costly, are larger than the originals, and have tons more sucking power. I'm willing to bet these actually work. It took 20 years but black & decker did it :)

Will it take another 20 years to perfect the Roomba? Its not all raves you know. It easily gets confused when encountering wiring and cramped spaces, you know the traditional shelters of geeks worldwide.

Another thing to consider is the law of diminishing returns. $200 is a lot of money for most people and if this RobotVac works half as well it will undercut the Roomba in marketshare.

Yes, its cheesy and a cheap knock-off but then again so are most components in the PCs people are using to view this message.

There will be huge rush of "fans" letting RMS know that he is now eligible to join the American Associate of Retired Persons and that "retirement" is a Good Thing, Your Work Here is Done Now, etc.:)

he uses the power of the most powerful lobby in the country, composed of people of similarly advanced, uh, stature, and gets them to push for free software.

Come on. Picture it. GNU/Raging Grannies. You know you want to.

I'd cast the 'real problem' in terms of the planning horizon for government solutions. That planning horizon is not much more than the next election.
To minimize fraud, most money has a lifespan of the next fiscal year. Prominent exceptions are things like procurements of nuclear aircraft carriers, where Newport News shipbuilding shant order the first part unless they know that the money will be there to finish it.
Too, there has been a shift from discretionary (pork barrel) spending towards entitlements (Socialist Security [who better to run a Ponzi scheme than your Uncle Sam, eh?], Medicare, etc).
Good news, bad news, who can say?
An unfortunate side effect of our representative democracy is that the dependant majority can legally pick the pockets of the minority through socialist-flavored approaches.
Reform is unlikely when you've got lobbies like the AARP on the scene. The rich, of course, need not pool their cash to purchase political decisions.
Waaah, waaah, waaah. I'd argue that our system is muddling along as designed, faithful to its two design requirements: be stable, and preclude tyrrany.
Are we in greater danger now than in any historical period? Probably not.

Do this:
Go to this URL and set a bookmark to your elected folks and keep their inboxes stuffed with your /. wisdom.