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That is very true. However what's not accounted for in that statistic is voter turnout:

http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/voting/cb09-110.html
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1209/racial-ethnic-voters-presidential-election

So not only did the vote change from approx 90% to 97% democrat, but the turnout among the population increased by 5% (2 million) as well. The African American vote as a proportion of the overall vote increase by 1.1 percentage points. As a result, in 2004 the D vote was 88% * 11% = 9.7%, while in 2008 it was 97% * 12.1% = 11.7%. So overall, the African Americans gave Obama by 2 percentage points vs Kerry, which is pretty comparable to the amount of discrimination found in this survey (especially if you adjust for the population sizes of white/black!)

How much it _actually_ influenced the election, or course, is anybody's guess: How did turnout change amongst demographics are results were reported, how did race map to the electoral college, etc.
FYI, North Carolina (15 electors) and Indiana (12) were determined by .33% and ~1.05% respectively, while Florida(27) and Ohio(20) were 2.82% and 4.59%.

Teachers are not the enemy and it makes me sad to see an anti-education screed on Slashdot.

Let's deconstruct your post.

First off, "officials" -- also known as "teachers" and "local school board members" -- hate the No Child Left Behind Act because it is an unfunded standards-based mandate for additional instruction. The second standards rear their ugly heads in classrooms you start seeing rote learning, AKA "teaching for the test." No one benefits from rote learning. Not even the businesses that depend on the school system to turn out creative and innovative thinkers with a broad knowledge base to draw on. And while it may be responsible for an increase in test scores, students suffer in ways standardize tests can't measure.

Second, school spending. I don't know where you're getting your numbers from, so I'll have to improvise. The federal goverment's per-pupil spending (you may find how influential federal money really is enlightening from a big-picture perspective) has barely kept pace with inflation, and that's without going into all the ways the feds twist the arms of desperately underfunded local school districts with laws like NCLB, which cuts funding to the underperforming schools that need it the most (in the name of "competitiveness"). If you really want to know how much is getting spent per-pupil you should take a look at the detailed breakdown from the Census Bureau (warning, PDF). And yes, salaries are the biggest number in the list. Because the most important resource in education is PEOPLE.

We also need to talk about per-pupil spending in general, where the fundamental inequality inherent in education funding is most readily apparent. You can't just say that one area's per-pupil funding level is adequate for another's thanks to things like cost-of-living and property values. Most schools are funded at a local level, which opens you up to all kinds of funding issues brought on by things like population density and the economy. You know who was hurt the most by the recent foreclosure crisis? Here's a hint, it wasn't the homeowners, it was the school districts that depend on their property taxes.

You know what else bothers me? That all the amounts discussed in the above links are counted in the millions of dollars per year. We blow billions of dollars a week in Afghanistan and Iraq. It really shows you where the nation's priorities lie.

Completely correct, but this would do even less to solve the problem in China. China has had a problem with a lack of unique full names for quite some time. According to this, there's 100,000 people named Wang Tao. I imagine that at least a few of them are in similar fields. There's a pretty simple explanation. Basically, the 100 most common surnames are used by 85% of the population. There's only between 3000-4000 surnames currently being used at all. Compare that to the United States, which has well over 100,000 surnames in common use.

True- thank you for the informative links. To complete the picture in the US, here's the US Census data about surnames from the 2000 census.

We created?

Yes you (not you as you, but you as your past government) did. You force-spread your culture among us, and it's nothing to do with a single currency. The words are business and finance. But since we thought that going to war to sell LuckyStrike wasn't an option, we failed to comply and now have to re-educate ourselves into human beings, which is though since MTV airs here too...

In the US we're doing just peachy.

yeah, sure... 50 millions people just in your lovely country DO HAVE to just eat peaches, because they can't afford to live like you do... but they're "resolving themsleves": in a few years, they'll be dead, and with a little luck, since they can't afford your very well thought medical system, they won't have children. Easy. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2009/pov09fig04.pdf

My state does that as does the US federal government. My personal favorite is:
The MN DNR data deli

There are others as well:
Federal GIS data
MN legislature GIS resource
MN DOT
Minnesota MetroGIS
2011 US Tiger data set
USGS data
National Atlas
This data is all freely available and you can go do what you want with it. Granted you need some program that can parse and display shapefiles but those aren't too hard to come by as there are some very capable open source ones available.

Yep, and the imports outstrip that. For the three months to March good and services imports averaged $233 gigabucks and exports averaged $183.1. With China in March imports outstripped exports by $21.7 gigabucks. That said, secret-squirrel-shit, ITAR restricted or bespoke components for military equipment are unlikely to be imported, even from allies.

Source: FT900: U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services

According to this: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-much-monthly-bandwidth-doe-136401
Netflix is 3.6gb for an hd movie, and 500-700mb for a SD movie.

Also, I do think it is "per user". The article says there are 245 million internet users, using 25.7gb ea. There are only 115million households in the US.. so there must be more than one user @ 25.7gb in the average household.

If you take 311m people, subtract those under 5 and over 65, you get around 245million.. so again, I would say it's 25.7gb per person.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

In the US, apparently slightly less than half of all marriages are "fake" (i.e., end in divorce) already. And I understand there are numerous "degrees" you can buy on-line for a nominal fee. (Not to mention degrees that are awarded by "respectable" institutions without representing actual academic achievement.)

So, a cynical view might be that everything else is LESS fake than your wedding and graduation. The difference is that we overtly acknowledge that the other things are fake.

Some relevant data here (per pupil spending):
US average - $10499
Alabama - $8870
California - $9657
Mississippi - $8075

You'd be surprised, but California is really not spending a lot on their kids either. The places that are spending a lot:
DC - $16408
New Jersey - $16271
New York - $18126
Alaska - $15552
Vermont - $15175

Source: US Census.

I don't see any evidence that life expectancy is still increasing, or if it is, it looks like it's up against an asymptote of about 80 for women and about 78 for men.

and I find it extremely perverse that some people regard increasing life expectancy as a problem

I don't expect life expectancy to be much different in 30 years than it is today. Maybe for minorities. Eventually, their health may catch up with that of white people.

And the demographic apocalypse you're predicting just isn't as bad as you think. If you look at the age of the population at http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/age/age_sex_2010.html you will see that up to the age of about 54, there are about the same number of people in each age cohort. Although birth rates surged and then fell off in the 60s, the reduced birth rates were made up for by immigration which allowed the population to come into a more stable condition.

By the time people born in 1960 reach retirement, their retirement age will be 67 years, not the current 65. That moves a whole lot of people into the "still working" category. That will reduce the number of people drawing on Social Security by about 10% and increase the number paying in slightly.

Right now, there are about 4 people of age 20-65 for every person over 65. After 2027, the relevant ages will be 20-67 vs. over 67. The ratio will peak dip to 3.0 and remain there for a long time. So it's worse than the current situation but not as bad as you suggest. Also, there will be somewhat more jobs in the old-age related industries, medical care, senior assistance, etc. Those jobs will attract more people into the work force and somewhat help the working to retired ratio.

It may be almost 5.5 times the population density of California as a whole state, but consider the following, there are 8.8 Million people in NJ but compare with the actually populated portions of CA:

Los Angeles County: 9.8 M people, 2400 per square mile
Orange County: 3 M people, 3800 per square mile
San Francisco County: 0.8 M people, 17200 per square mile!
Alameda County: 1.5 M people, 2000 per square mile.
Santa Clara County: 1.8 M people, 1400 per square mile

Total population of those counties: > 16M people

and that doesn't even consider the portions of those counties that are parks etc (especially significant for Alameda I think)

So the majority of people in California live in a region that is more dense than NJ, and the total number of people involved is close to double the entire population of NJ.

http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=DEC_10_SF1_GCTPH1.US05PR&prodType=table

So you think the average US household struggling to make ends meet with $50,000 per year should pay 25% of their income in taxes, but Apple computer should pay less than 10% on $34,000,000,000?

BULLSHIT. Use a real tax calculator. married couple, no kids earns 50,000 would pay about 9% tax rate.
http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/tax-planning/1040-form-tax-calculator.aspx

And from the NYT article:
"In Apple’s last annual disclosure, the company listed its worldwide taxes — which includes cash taxes paid as well as deferred taxes and other charges — at $8.3 billion, an effective tax rate of almost a quarter of profits. "

So you think the average US household struggling to make ends meet with $50,000 per year should pay 25% of their income in taxes, but Apple computer should pay less than 10% on $34,000,000,000?

Fair point, however, you then directly use the opposite assumption in your statement: "[The US tax rate] is for example only a few percentage point lower than Canada even through Canada has tax funded universal health coverage." So you too are comparing apples to orange by your own accounting.

That being said while Canada provides universal health care with their taxes they do it at a very low cost relative to even similar service in the US. That is Canada provides the same coverage for less. While the US collects less in taxes+health insurance, but only marginally by your assertion, while only providing health care to 84% of citizens at an average rate of 16% of GDP. While other countries are spending money providing universal health care, excellent public education, improved infrastructure, etc. the US is spending money on wars without end, a huge military industrial complex, and providing some of the least efficient health care in 1st worth nations. Our private sector does not provide an efficient solution to non-market driven problems e.g. health care, military. What is baffling to me is why anyone would think it would.

All of the decisions made about our child are discussed at length in a rational manner. We always come to a resolution, and the average outcome shows that we are each "right" about half of the time. I suspect many people who are under 40, have a family, and live in a large urban centre may share that experience as gender-based roles have transformed in recent decades. Respecting your position, single-income households where the father is working must by necessity favour the mother in decisions regarding children. The opposite should be true for single-income households where the mother is working. In those cases "daddy knows best".

In 2010 11% of single income households had a stay-at-home dad.
In 1976, it was 1%.

Those numbers are for Canada, but I think in the USA the number is closer to 16% though the way the statistics were collected makes it hard to compare. I could only find one survey for the UK indicating 6% stay at home with the kids, but I'm not sure how representative that data is.

I think maybe you had your kids in the 70's? The times, they are a changin'.

You can see and calculate the numbers for yourself:

1) Number of black males between 10 and 45 in 2009: 20,991,000 (NOTE: PDF)

2) Total population of the US in 2009: 307,007,000 (from previous link. Also, see here (NOTE: PDF))

3) FBI UCR 2010 data: Crime arrest rates by race.

4) FBI UCR 2010 data: Murderer offense rates

5) Race of offender versus race of victim (table)

Black males in the age 10 to 45 demographic make up about 6.7% of the population. I'm assuming the vast majority of crimes identified has having black offenders is going to be in that age group.

So, one can peruse this data and come to own's own conclusions. The reason I looked for these numbers is that I had a sneaking suspicion that there was some discrepancy - large discrepancies - in the offense rates for the various races. I find racists - those who are simply irritated by those in different groups - to be reprehensible. But then I found myself wondering about the demographics of criminality based on what I was seeing from my perspective of the world. And what I found reinforced my suspicions (that black male youth is committing crimes at significantly larger percentages than their percentage of the population) instead of dispelling them.

So what now? I think the attitude should be that as a society, we need to understand what causes these discrepancies, for everyone's sake, but especially for black youth's sake. Are the factors exogenous or endogenous? What kinds of interventions can be carried out to reduce these numbers?

Ignoring these numbers in the interest of politeness is not going to make them go away.

You can see and calculate the numbers for yourself:

1) Number of black males between 10 and 45 in 2009: 20,991,000 (NOTE: PDF)

2) Total population of the US in 2009: 307,007,000 (from previous link. Also, see here (NOTE: PDF))

3) FBI UCR 2010 data: Crime arrest rates by race.

4) FBI UCR 2010 data: Murderer offense rates

5) Race of offender versus race of victim (table)

Black males in the age 10 to 45 demographic make up about 6.7% of the population. I'm assuming the vast majority of crimes identified has having black offenders is going to be in that age group.

So, one can peruse this data and come to own's own conclusions. The reason I looked for these numbers is that I had a sneaking suspicion that there was some discrepancy - large discrepancies - in the offense rates for the various races. I find racists - those who are simply irritated by those in different groups - to be reprehensible. But then I found myself wondering about the demographics of criminality based on what I was seeing from my perspective of the world. And what I found reinforced my suspicions (that black male youth is committing crimes at significantly larger percentages than their percentage of the population) instead of dispelling them.

So what now? I think the attitude should be that as a society, we need to understand what causes these discrepancies, for everyone's sake, but especially for black youth's sake. Are the factors exogenous or endogenous? What kinds of interventions can be carried out to reduce these numbers?

Ignoring these numbers in the interest of politeness is not going to make them go away.

LOL human death back then, as now, was a bathtub distribution, like electronics parts. So most people died as little kids or elderly. Back then pretty much all preemies died as a general rule, for example, unlike now. All the "average" means is the ratio of how many died as a baby vs died as an old man. I'd guess that means about two kids died young for every 8 or so that died elderly, which seems to fit in with actual genealogical data I have on my ancestors...

The "real story" (in quotes because even pages of and pages of this stuff is still merely a summary of the real sources) can be read at

http://www.census.gov/history/www/reference/genealogy/the_72_year_rule.html

The exact number 72 was selected because in 1952 they wanted to give away the 1880 census information. Essentially declassify it by transfer from the BC to the NA. I think you can see the math there, 1952 - 72 = 1880 The exact 72 year range has stuck since then.

The legal BS behind the general range of "more than 70 years" was selected, as you'll read at the link above, because the census officers had to / have to take an oath to never release the data. Assuming someone lied on their application and got hired anyway at 10 (unlikely), and assuming that even in extenuating circumstances there are no govt employees of any sort over the age of 82 (unlikely), that means waiting 72 years means the oath takers successfully did their duty and while it was in their power, blah blah blah, they never released the data. Essentially its your usual govt corruption. Technically according to the rule of the law the folks who gathered your 2010 census data will Never permit the release of the 2010 census data .... Never ... of course they'll be dead or retired eventually at which point it'll be released anyway in 2082, assuming the country doesn't self destruct first, at which time the oath takers will all be dead or retired.

Its legal bullshit because if you're convicted of a crime by a judge, just because a judge dies or retires doesn't mean you're a free man. Another example would be the priest who married me and my wife about a dozen years ago by the process of signing the marriage license recently died... that does not automagically make us single. Also from my military experience the death of a guy who classified a document doesn't automagically free that document.

If someone invents an immortality treatment, we'll have to come up with some new legal technicality bullshit. But for now 72 years works and is the tradition.

Why did they need to waste money on a sting operation? Correction: why did they need to wast MORE money...? And granted the U.S. trades with China, but why the fuck would they source military parts from a country that is openly antagonistic if not outright aggressive to one of their allies, namely Taiwan? Or who backs North Korea all the way. Or who supports Iran getting nuclear capability. Don't they remember that Chinese fighter planes aggressively caused a mid air collision and forced an American navy surveillance plane to land in China a few years ago while it was flying over international waters above the the South China Sea?

What kind of bug fuck retarded moron in the military logistics department had them order parts for sophisticated military equipment from China anyway? America has an almost $300,000,000,000 per year trade deficit (that's THREE HUNDRED BILLION dollars) with China and they are spending Tax Payers Money buying military parts from there? If the government is going to spend hard earned tax dollars, they might as well buy from American companies who operate factories in America. Or does "Buy American" mean buying from companies who outsource jobs to China? Someone in the purchasing department at the pentagon needs a fucking kick in the balls and a slap up side the head. Gah! The country deserves what they get when they do this.

Well, raw income data does not seem to bear the same conclusion, from the US Census:

Married opposite-sex couples report the highest average household income (nearly $100,000), while the same-sex couple household income is around $86,000, which is higher than the unmarried opposite-sex partners with only an average household income of $51,275.

Now of course it is difficult to get an exact fix as there are bound to be generational differences in how "out" people are(older people tend to earn more as a trend) and of course this data is a bit US-centric, but overall it does look like married couples earn more, though the gap seems to be closing.

One reason gays might be worth a bit more is that they tend to cluster in urban areas as when you only have realistically less than ~5% of the population that would even be theoretically romantically interested in you, you tend to move to places with high concentrations of people, significantly increasing your chances for romantic success.

Listing of states with and without the death penalty
Violent Crime Rankings by state

According to those sources, 15 states do not have the death penaly and 35 do. The avg ranking in the violent crimes tables is 29 for states without and 24 for states with, supporting your claim that violent crime rates are not impacted by the presence of the death penalty. This data does not take into account any differences in application, only if the law exists.

And Massachusetts has mandatory auto insurance, and their traffic fatality rate is even lower.
http://www.census.gov/statab/ranks/rank39.html
I'm not sure that datapoint works for you -- it could be more demographic, size of state, design of roads (there's a scary thought, given the state of road "design" around here). I don't think insurance here is especially cheap, though.

Lying to start a war is treason.

In a democracy, government secrecy is treason. Citizens cannot help run the government if they don't have any way to understand what the government is doing.

There is now an extensive public relations campaign in the U.S. to start a war with Iran, using money from U.S. taxpayers. These are some of the players:

1) Those who control the U.S. government want constant war. War creates numerous opportunities for easy profits that can be hidden from taxpayers.

The U.S. government has a long history of using violence. See the Timeline of United States military operations. See also the Military history of the United States. The Bush and Cheney families had, or have, investments in weapons companies. Those in control hid their involvement.

2) Jews want U.S. taxpayers to pay for Israeli security. A better, cheaper, less self-destructive method would be for Jews to be less arrogant and more caring toward their neighbors. The problems between the Jews and the Arabs have existed for more than 3,300 years. The Jews say that they are the "chosen people" of God. The Jews say that Arabs are descended from an illegitimate child of their tribal founder, Abraham, and a slave girl that he owned. Those ancient problems with relationships will not be solved by guys in Washington who often don't even have a good relationship with their wives.

It would be foolish to think that statement is anti-Jew. A war with Iran will likely mean further troubles for Israel because it is likely to escalate the violence in the area. I'm not the only person who thinks that. See the 60 Minutes episode, The Spymaster: Meir Dagan on Iran's threat. Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes interviewer, does her disgusting "Oh wow, oh wow!" routine, but there is useful information. (The 60 Minutes program needs better editing.)

Quote: "You have said publicly that bombing Iran now is the stupidest idea you've ever heard. That's a direct quote." -- Lesley Stahl, quoting ex-chief of Mossad Meir Dagan. Mossad is an Israeli government agency that rivals the U.S. government for secret violence, as Jeremiah Cornelius said in the parent comment.

There are only 5,874,300 Jews in Israel. There are approximately 5,275,000 Jews in the United States. In some ways, the U.S. is as much of a Jewish country as Israel. It is amazing how much power that small group of 1.7% of has over U.S. government policy. The population of the U.S. is 313 million.

To many people, the idea of 6 million Jews encouraging violence against 1.6 billion Muslims is self-destructive.

It is a mistake to think that all Israeli Jews agree with Israeli or even Jewish policies. For example: Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews 'harass' 8-year-old girl over dress. Quote: "... 50 people involved in the abuse of an 8-year-old." Also see Israel braced for protests against treatment of women after girl, 8, is spat on by Jewish extremists.

3) The nuclear power industry w

I prefer to ask them "which god". :) There are thousands of active religions world wide, and more "gods" than that. There are plenty of older religions, which are not actively followed.

    If you ask a conservative who "god" is, they will most likely describe the Christian "god". Propose it as I did, and they will be confused, as in their mind there is only "one god", and yes, your statement of zero-tolerance applies perfectly.

    Florida just passed a bill allowing prayer in school, which is in direct violation of federal law and the US constitution. In other actions, they have defined non-secular activity as allowing those of "other" faiths to lead prayers before events (city council, school board, and county commission meetings specifically). All of the "other" faiths were Christian faiths of other denominations. Those of other faiths were explicitly excluded from such events.

    There is some tolerance for other Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). According to the 2008 US Census, there were over 680,000 who identified their religion as "Pagan" or "Wiccan". There were over 34 million who identified as no religion (Atheist, Agnostic, Humanist, "No religion", and "Other no religion". Over 11 million refused to answer the question. That does not account for error in the tabulations cause by social pressures. Plenty of people who believe other than the local norm will claim the local norm rather than risk being identified as believing otherwise.

    Citations:

www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/population/religion.html

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0075.pdf [PDF]

I prefer to ask them "which god". :) There are thousands of active religions world wide, and more "gods" than that. There are plenty of older religions, which are not actively followed.

    If you ask a conservative who "god" is, they will most likely describe the Christian "god". Propose it as I did, and they will be confused, as in their mind there is only "one god", and yes, your statement of zero-tolerance applies perfectly.

    Florida just passed a bill allowing prayer in school, which is in direct violation of federal law and the US constitution. In other actions, they have defined non-secular activity as allowing those of "other" faiths to lead prayers before events (city council, school board, and county commission meetings specifically). All of the "other" faiths were Christian faiths of other denominations. Those of other faiths were explicitly excluded from such events.

    There is some tolerance for other Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). According to the 2008 US Census, there were over 680,000 who identified their religion as "Pagan" or "Wiccan". There were over 34 million who identified as no religion (Atheist, Agnostic, Humanist, "No religion", and "Other no religion". Over 11 million refused to answer the question. That does not account for error in the tabulations cause by social pressures. Plenty of people who believe other than the local norm will claim the local norm rather than risk being identified as believing otherwise.

    Citations:

www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/population/religion.html

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0075.pdf [PDF]

You seem to have the same problem that my partner has, the ability to be real smart consistently and not see the reality of the situation from the street point of view.

Most largest voting group in the US is made up of 44 years old plus (source http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/p20-562.pdf )
that group is also the one, where we knew and or saw 3 mile accident, Chernobyl and other things like Bhopal toxic cloud.
So there is a simple fear that if it's in the backyard it could happen. No tradeoff acceptable

Go figure ... 3 mile accident... Carter went right in and walked about, he took the risk and kept America calm
Chernobyl ... made us think the worst and might have hasten the end of the old U.S.S.R
Bhopal toxic cloud reminded us of just how scary the world was.

Go take a look in your area where you live, I bet there is a line of demarcation that is proof of NIMBY, in upper Miami Florida it's Biscayne blvd. the poor live west of it and the rich live east of it. pure 3 miles + of this type of crap. ( given it's changing, but it's still mentioned by many people over the age of 35. )

the only way Americans will deal with tradeoffs is via education and tolerance.

In a good system the resources are already there, and as far as I know that is pretty much the case in Japan. So the only logical conclusion is: "Philanthropy is a solution to a problem that shouldn't (and in this case doesn't) exist."

The problem with funding like this is that it empties public research into private ownership by making funding the goal of schools. The first and foremost goal of schools is and should be to teach.

In California, we have this terrible system which from the article seems to be on the brink of being exported to Japan.

To put things in perspective, almost 36% of all taxes in California go to education ($49 Billion FY2012-2013 : http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html), and that's not including money from bond initiatives for stem cell research or other earmarks which end up at research universities, and it's not including the costs of education as part of rehabilitation for the mentally ill or incarcerated prisoners, which end up being another $18B (drill down on the numbers on that government site).

If you consider only K-12, there are 9,600 publicly funded schools serving 6.2M students (http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/pn/fb/index.asp); that's a cost of $63,000 per student, working out to ~$4M per school.

And the teachers at the schools in my area are constantly trying to raise funds for books, paper, pencils, and white board markers. At $63,000 per student per year, you'd think they'd buy them a damn box of pencils.

Before you try to claim "that's not a lot per student", realize that the median household income in California is less than that, it's just under $61,000 for the whole family, including all wage earners (U.S. Census : http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html).

I don't know where the hell all this money is going (I'd like an independent audit, please!) but it sure as hell isn't getting to the classrooms, so it has to be disappearing somewhere between the Franchise Tax Board and the classrooms.

As far as higher education is concerned, the colleges around here are canceling classes all over the place. You'd think that the more students they had, the more tuition they'd get, the more classes they'd have, but no, tuition collected is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the almost $10B in taxes paid to them by the state, and they optimize on the basis of revenue instead (hey, why have a student spend 4 years * tuition, when you can cancel a class and have them spend 5 years * tuition instead?). They also optimize it by preferentially admitting out of state students (who have to pay higher tuitions), but that's OK, those students can go to other states themselves, and pay out of state tuition there, instead.

And this is the model school system you are going to hold up for other countries to follow?

Japan: Save yourself before it's too late!

-- Terry

What about Native Americans who lost, well, their ENTIRE CULTURE and GENE POOL.

You apparently aren't an American, otherwise you would know that there are millions of native Americans living in the US with their own distinct culture.

And yes, black people still live in America. They are free, equal members of American society. They were intially freed from the southern slave states in the 1860s. Other slave states soon followed as the Constitution was amended to free them. Laws forcing segregation were struck down in court over time.

As far as Hiroshima goes, there were fewer people lost there than in the fire bombings of other cities. Bombs kill people. Nuclear bombs kill people. Same same.

In fairness though, there is a difference between what happened to people in concentration camps targeted for death. Entire peoples were targeted for extermination by the Nazi's, genocide. There is a special horror to that, and they came all too close to achieving it.

So fuck off and get off your high horse asshole. There is plenty of evil for all, you don't get to whine about your relatives exclusively.

Aren't you sweet? Forget his relatives? I guess you feel the pain of all murdered people, virtually all of which you'll never know? Do you feel the pain of the people the Japanese killed in the Rape of Nanking? What about the American service men who were dissected alive by the Japanese? Or, as it appears, do you mainly reserve special pity for the people killed by Americans, or people in America?

You really should think about starting a web site to flesh out and present your ideas. Might I suggest this as a model that reflects your style?

Why would you move to a state with a higher crime rate? Another homeschool fail?

There are so many things wrong with your brief post, it's hard to know where to start. First, in terms of violent crime commission rate over population, Washington state is in fact worse than Wyoming, per http://www.census.gov/statab/ranks/rank21.html (maybe that's changed over the last few decades, maybe it hasn't). Second, if you had thought things through a little more deeply before posting, you would realize that even if Wyoming had a higher crime rate than Washington, GP's family could have improved their situation by moving to a town or county with a low crime rate. A state-to-state comparison is really meaningless, which observation by itself permits us to classify you as an idiot in this situation. Third, your phrase "another homeschool fail" indicates ignorance of the success rate of homeschooling in general, which tends to eat other modes of education for lunch in comparative studies.

Full disclosure -- I was homeschooled K-12 as well, and am just getting started homeschooling my own kids. It's not for everybody, but when you do it right, it rocks.

It would appear that if the yanks are going to do "scaled tariffs", they should do one against European Union instead of picking nations from EU.

Thanks for the links. It seems that the report does NOT "exclude broad categories of welfare spending" as claimed by our Anonymous Coward above. In fact they simply apply the spending data as they receive it from the Census Bureau. (PDF page 47 or report page 21) However, they do add to the Census Bureau's tax receipts figures the FY 2004 deficit in proportion to the figures from the Census Bureau. This seems to be a reasonable assumption even though future taxes are nearly guaranteed to be distributed differently in the future.

Below is the explanation from the report FY 2004 Tax Foundation report:

Each year the Census Bureau releases the Consolidated Federal Funds Report, which estimates the amount of federal spending in each state and territory during the prior fiscal year. The latest report allocates approximately 92 percent of total FY 2004 federal spending. The 8 percent not allocated includes net inter est outlays, foreign aid, and other outlays that are not allocable to the states. For the purposes of this report, the Tax Foundation uses this census data as is.

In the calculation of spending-to-tax ratios, however, an adjustment must be made to bring federal tax collections and federal spending into alignment. Therefore, a deficit is treated as an unfunded tax liability in the current year, allocated in the same fashion as the federal tax burden. Similarly, the model assumes that a surplus is used to pay down the federal debt to domestic capital holders.

I didn't notice anything wrong regarding the methodology or data sources that the Census Bureau used. It doesn't appear that the that the Census Bureau are including amounts for military personnel stationed overseas. So, there is a bit of argument to be had about such outlays being distributed evenly per capital across the USA (or something similar). Also amounts reported for military wages reflect the place of employment(duty station) rather than home residence. but this doesn't seem like it would move the numbers in a meaningful way if the methodology were changed. Total federal expenditures are broken into five categories: retirement and disability, other direct payments, grants to state and local governments, procurement, salaries and wages,and other. All of this information is disclosed or summarized in the FY 2004 Tax Foundation report.

Unless I'm missing something, it seems that ALL categories of welfare spending are included. Our Anonymous Coward above is either misinformed, making up "facts", or has information that can shed light on the discrepancy claimed but is choosing not to share. My bet is on misinformed.

FYI - It looks like you have the dates 2009 and 2006 on the wrong links. The dates are also inconsistent. The Fiscal Year 2004 data was in the report released in 2006. The Fiscal Year 2009 data was in the report released in 2011. Also the FY 2009 report was only on Local and State Tax burdens relative to income, i.e., no expenditures were considered.

That says "federal spending". Does that include Social Security payments? Welfare? Medicaid?

Given that the Tax Foundation report got the federal expenditures data from the Census Bureau's 2005 Consolidated Federal Funds Report. Said report includes Social Security payments; see Table 2. Table 3 doesn't explicitly call out, for example, programs such as Temporary Assistance to Need Families and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (which are what I think most people really mean when they say "welfare"), but the "ESTIMATES FOR SUBSTATE DISTRIBUTIONS" secton does mention them, along with Medical Assistance (Medicaid). So the answer to your question appears to be "yes".

Per person in that state?

Figure 5 has per-capita figures, although they're not broken down into Social Security, "welfare", Medicaid, etc.. In any case, it's not as if the Tax Foundation did something stooopid such as doing tax receipts from the states per-capita and not doing federal spending per-capita, so it's not as if "per-capita in the state" matters here - revenues and expenditures both go up with more people.

I think the numbers would dramatically shift if that were included...

I think (with the Census Bureau's report as backing) that they already are included, and therefore that the numbers would not shift one iota if they were included....

3. On the whole, California takes in far more in federal benefits than it pays in federal tax. Unlike your analysis, which excludes broad categories of welfare spending, I look at gross flows of funds.

OK, so which broad categories of welfare spending did the Census Bureau exclude in the 2005 Consolidated Federal Funds Report (2005 because that's the year for the Tax Foundation's press release and their report)?

I.e., give us citations and methodology for your gross-flows-of-funds analysis, plz.

California sees less return on federal dollars than is taken in taxes. (Who's the parasite, again?)

You sure about that? Hint: look at all the Federal expenditures in California, including welfare.

OK, let's look at, say, the 2006 report from the Tax Foundation. What it says about Federal expenditures is

Federal Expenditures Each year the Census Bureau releases the Consolidated Federal Funds Report, which estimates the amount of federal spending in each state and territory during the prior fiscal year. The latest report allocates approximately 92 percent of total FY 2005 federal spending. The 8 percent not allocated includes net interest outlays, foreign aid, and other outlays that are not allocable to the states. For the purposes of this report, the Tax Foundation uses this census data as is.

In the calculation of spending-to-tax ratios, however, an adjustment must be made to bring federal tax collections and federal spending into alignment. Therefore, a deficit is treated as an unfunded tax liability in the current year, allocated in the same fashion as the federal tax burden. Similarly, the model assumes that a surplus is used to pay down the federal debt to domestic capital holders.

The 2010 Consolidated Federal Funds Report does mention Temporary Aid to Needy Families and several other programs that I guess are what you're referring to when you say "welfare".

You spend more on average for public schools than most of the union, but have little to show for it compared to many other states with equivalent wealth production capacity.

Errr, no we don't. Per capita, California is somewhere in the middle. New York spends almost twice what we do. Don't forget that California is the most populous state in the nation by a long shot, and the figure isn't going down.

There is no political will to actually clean up your state's problems with spending too much money.

Some of that is because spending was voted in through Propositions, via California's direct-democracy system. Basically, if it collects enough signatures, a special interest group can get a spending measure on the California ballot that requires X amount of public funds to be set aside for Y purpose, and the public gets to vote on it, basically doing an end-run around their own elected representatives. If it's passed, the legislature has a hell of a time getting it off the books, because "it's what the people want." This has happened many times over the years, and the result is that a lot of otherwise sensible-sounding budget decisions are effectively off the table.

"4,143,077 Texans live in poverty. 1,655,085 of them are children. http://www.census.gov/"

Yeah but they are here illegally.

Wikipedia cites 1.3 billion

The margin of error in the US census is 0.009%.

Even allowing for China to have a margin of error a hundred times that of America's, you're looking at a maximum inaccuracy of ~12 million people, not 300.

Uhh... a few things. First of all, no one is cherry picking products. The OP made a humorous comment, and you decided to use it as a launching point for a little speech about how much better off we all are today.

Secondly, we're talking about the price of an American game in USD on an American website. It stands to reason that we would therefore use the price of gas in the US, not Australia - and believe me, it was ~$1/gallon in '97. That was right when I was starting to drive, so I remember it well.

It also stands to reason that we would use wage growth from the US, not Australia. In the US, the median income has been staying flat for decades, or even going down a bit, since we're currently busy being robbed blind by the 1%. Here's a source for you, showing median income in inflation adjusted dollars declining by $2000 between 2000 and 2009.

Not really. Such a move is naturally accompanied by a drastic reduction in regulation, with red tape being the largest impediment to most new businesses.

"Limited liability" covers more than just liability to suits by regulatory bodies or plaintiffs citing regulations in their suits. I might be less likely to want to invest in a small start-up if it means that if the startup goes bankrupt, and the creditors can't satisfy their claims from the assets of the startup, I might lose not only my investment but part of whatever else gets awarded to the creditors.

Further, most companies in the US are not incorporated, but are sole proprietorships. Something like 90%, as I recall.

Is a sole proprietorship a "company" or just a "business"? The entry in Black's Law Dictionary for "company" says a "company" is "A society or association of persons, in considerable number, interested in a common object, and uniting themselves for the prosecution of some’commercial or industrial undertaking, or other legitimate business.", so a sole proprietorship wouldn't be a "company".

As for the number, Table 744, "Number of Tax Returns, Receipts, and Net Income by Type of Business: 1990 to 2008" of the 2012 Statistical Abstract of the United States (I guess that's "2012" as in "put out in 2012", as it's a bit hard to get useful statistics about 2012 as a whole by January 4, 2012) has, for 2008, 22,614,000 tax receipts from non-farm proprietorships, 3,146,000 receipts from partnerships, and 5,847,000 receipts from corporations (the numbers are given in thousands of returns, and are "estimates based on sample of unaudited tax returns", so no silly-ass comments about the ",000" in the numbers, please), so it's more like 72%

In any case, I suspect your local dry-cleaner shop didn't buy its dry-cleaning equipment from a sole proprietorship, so, whilst most businesses might be sole proprietorships, most businesses any of us either deal with directly or are dealt with by other businesses with which we deal (ad whatever the translation for "transitive closure" to Latin is) might well be limited-liability entities of some sort.

Perhaps in a world with no limited-liability entities there would still be the equivalents of Apple and Google and of all the other entities that built the equipment that they use and the infrastructure that they use and so on, but I would not be tempted to assume that.

And very, very, few people don't fly because of the TSA. serious, it MIGHT be 500 hundred people per year, maybe.

That sounds like a hard statistic.

Also, more people flew this year then last year.

That's probably true, but the statistics aren't available yet from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, so you can't prove it.

I can, however, prove that the population is larger this year than last year, by about 2 million. I can also demonstrate that the population has increased from 281.5 million in 2000 to about 311 million this year, over a 10% increase. There has been no commensurate increase in airline passengers. So your entire point is demonstrably false.

The American government spends so much money that even if every single income tax payer was paying 100% of their income in tax, there would still be a deficit. Most of that deficit is military spending.

2010 Federal Spending: $3.46 Trillion
2010 Federal Tax Recipts: $2.16 Trillion
2010 DoD, Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid spending: ~$700-$800 billion apiece
(Sourced from Wikipedia, so take with the usual Wiki grain of salt.)

2010 US Per Capita Income: ~$40k
2010 US Population: ~300 Million
2010 US Income Tax receipts: $900 Billion
(Sourced from here, here, and here, respectively.

Putting on our big boy hats and doing some math, here are some interesting facts we can get from those statistics. First, defense spending is one of only three major pillars of our deficit, and it's project to expand at a far slower rate than Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid. Second, taxpayers rake in ~$12 Trillion in income but only pay $900 Billion currently, so we could easily run a surplus by raising taxes. Third, people with no knowledge of orders of magnitude should not spew FUD that will further confuse a public that has little knowledge of how much money comes into and goes out of government coffers.

With our current population of 6bil, we are consuming about 1.4 Earths of water/food/energy. We are quickly depleting what we have. I don't think doubling the population is such a good idea.

One - there are ~7 billion humans living on Earth at the moment. 7+ if you ask UN instead of USA.
Two - are you REALLY trying to say that we are spending 140% of available resources of the planet?

Here's a fun experiment. Get a bag of chips or some other easily obtainable prepackaged food item.
Now try eating 140% of the contents of that single packet of food.

Can != Should

If these past decades since the world has been introduced to the Internet has taught us anything it is that Can == You better bloody believe it will happen.

As for doubling the population...
We are the only creatures on this planet who work on solving the problems of our ENTIRE RACE.
Regardless if you believe in "two heads are better than one" or in "the spark of genius" - more people is the solution for both.
Every additional billion humans means we acquire 20 million more geniuses.
Not to mention everyone else in the "above average" 25% (~1.75 billion at the moment) or EVERYONE when the problem actually requires physical instead of mental labor.

Just imagine what we could do with all those brains and all those brains and all those bodies!
The problems we could solve and fix.

You will find that the imports/exports from America to Germany and South Korea are about equal.

Not even close. Exports to Germany in 2011 total about $ 40 billion, imports from Germany in 2011 are about $ 80 billion. The ratio is up from about 3:4 (imports : exports) from the early 90s to the 1:2 it is today (see http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4280.html)

In fact, if you exclude China and Oil, America has no trade deficit.

Wrong again: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/top/dst/2011/10/deficit.html

And I agree that China has not been running around the world, but that is about to change. Not only have the invaded India [...]

China invading India? Are you talking about the Sino-Indian war in the early 60s? Where's the connection to post-industialized China?

But the real issue is their military build-up.

Soon they will be invading countries left and right, start kidnapping and killing random people from all around the world, from "allied" and "enemy" countries alike, imprison them without any rule of law and torturing them. These bastards.

I suspect that we will finally pass a broad set of tariffs against Chinese goods. That will be to prevent your dumping them on America

Right, protectionsim will save you.

You will find that the imports/exports from America to Germany and South Korea are about equal.

Not even close. Exports to Germany in 2011 total about $ 40 billion, imports from Germany in 2011 are about $ 80 billion. The ratio is up from about 3:4 (imports : exports) from the early 90s to the 1:2 it is today (see http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4280.html)

In fact, if you exclude China and Oil, America has no trade deficit.

Wrong again: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/top/dst/2011/10/deficit.html

And I agree that China has not been running around the world, but that is about to change. Not only have the invaded India [...]

China invading India? Are you talking about the Sino-Indian war in the early 60s? Where's the connection to post-industialized China?

But the real issue is their military build-up.

Soon they will be invading countries left and right, start kidnapping and killing random people from all around the world, from "allied" and "enemy" countries alike, imprison them without any rule of law and torturing them. These bastards.

I suspect that we will finally pass a broad set of tariffs against Chinese goods. That will be to prevent your dumping them on America

Right, protectionsim will save you.

How many cars have you driven 24/6 for 60 years? Hell, few airplanes are in the air after 30 years.

On top of that, 0.4% of all cars get in accidents every year. Every year more people die in the US from traffic accidents then in every nuclear power incident ever.

Sources:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States#Total_number_of_vehicles

If you're going to correct my approximated numbers... you might as well do it right :P

In 2010, the population was:
308 745 538
http://2010.census.gov/2010census/popmap/

The numbers for 2011 are there and they are higher. but they are projected right now, so I stuck with the 2010 numbers.

In terms of jobs, automation is what is 'killing us'. It is not the cure. I don't ever suggest we should stop automation. Only that there is less productive work to be done and we need to start understanding how that affects work distribution, work loads, equality, economic growth...

Are there really people out there that decide whether to hire or fire based on their personal income tax?

Doctors, dentists, sole proprietorships, partnerships, you know, about 81.5% of all business filers in 2008 per the US Census.

I've been wondering when they'd make that work.

In retail areas, street numbers tend not to be too prominent. It may be necessary to read business signs and use that data to disambiguate addresses. This would help to clean up the phony-business problem in Google Places. An alternative is to use real estate records, as the USC Geocoder does for some areas, to get a solid lock on address vs. physical position. But that data is only available for some areas. There are also the Census Bureau's TIGER/LINE files, but they're US only and not complete for the entire US.

Outside the US, this is likely to be more useful. If you have a few street numbers and a few business signs per block, you can infer the rest reasonably accurately.

Not only have deaths dropped, but accidents have dropped as well. So no, auto safety features fail to explain the drop. mva stats

So we're banning smoking in cars, manual transmissions, and the handicapped now?

I think that's the mentality that's missing from this whole argument. A risk / benefit analysis. I think LaHood said that 3000 people a year die due to distracted driving. Out of 300 million. Or around 1 in 100,000 .

Not quite, 300 million people aren't distracted driving, 300 million people aren't even driving.

Lemme take some real ballpark guesstimates here. Maybe 200 million driving on a regular basis, and if 20% of those drive distracted on a regular basis (total guess) about 40 million

Now from here every year there's about 11 million accidents (~5%), ~35000 fatalities (~3.5% of accidents).

So if about 10% of accidents are from distracted driving (actually sounds pretty low). Being in that 40 million group means you have about a 1/40 chance of an accident per year, and a 1/10000 chance of a fatality.

Sure it's not horrible odds, but my cost/benefit still suggests I'd want to minimize distractions.