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Armand Hammer?

Why would he? Bill Gates is much more wealthy than Armand Hammer was. And Bill Gates has donated more money than Armand Hammer was worth. One thing lacking is all the medals Hammer was awarded, however the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation could bring Gates more. The only other is all the friends Hammer had, all the people he knew, however the foundation could help there too.

Both had or have oil interests, Hammer with Oxy and the Gates Foundation is invested in the Italian petroleum giant Eni.

Falcon

You're calling media relations a "PR department"? You're comparing a small group of people who put out press releases with the massive industry-funded disinformation campaign which organizes massive denier conferences and offers prizes to scientists who can publish papers that support their position. Please, get serious here.

You know, not all PR departments are nothing but lying conspirators out to twist and hide the truth. Most company PR departments do nothing but put out a little press release with some boosterism and self-congratulating -- just like university PR departments do. A lot of crappy science journalism gets its start with a boiled-down press release that proclaims that the university's researchers have released a study proving some fact when the study in truth doesn't say much of anything conclusive.

For example, look at the story that was recently on Slashdot about HFCS causing obesity in rats. Several respectable science journalists have taken the time to look at the study more closely and concluded that it was deeply flawed and didn't prove much of anything. (1 2 3)

So where did the wide-eyed, "Big News!" take on the study come from? Why from Princeton's press release. This sort of things happens all the time in headline-grabbing areas of science, like global warming, nutrition, anthropology / humanoid evolution, cosmology, etc. Universities know that donations and grants come to those institutions that make the biggest splash, and they are more than willing to trump up the importance of a study that isn't as powerful as the headlines might make it out to be. Just like all those massive industry campaigns you decry as so different, lazy newspapers pick up the PR piece and publish it almost verbatim as news.

The problem of self-promoting PR compounded by a lack of journalistic integrity and diligence is just as prevalent in science as in industry. You want to know where the whole "eggs are good for you, eggs are bad for you" debate comes from? It comes from press releases overstating the importance of a particular study before it's faced years of peer review and double-checking. And this sort of irresponsible bragging is a large part of why the public is so skeptical about science actually knowing anything.

Another analysis of this from the LA Times:
A not-so-convincing case that high fructose corn syrup is worse for you than sugar

I take personally your accusations about health care. As a young person I had to drop my health coverage because I can not afford it. I rarely go to the doctor; I have been once in the last 3 years so I could get an allergy medication that is now over the counter. Yet despite having good health My policy price kept going up and up and almost every month when I paid it I would get a notice that premiums were increasing and that they were no longer covering x, y, or z. The coverage continued to decline and the prices kept going up until I couldn't afford it anymore. Now I put what I can afford in a savings account in case I have a health problem, but unfortunately if I were to have a major accident right now I would go bankrupt form medical bills and if I end up with a chronic condition I will die from it as I cannot afford medicine or treatment. I am an independent contractor, so I don't get health care through my job, so even if I kept the plan and somehow managed to pay the premium I would likely be dropped if I actually got sick as it is a common practice to do so in the health care industry. I'm glad your health care plan is so great - keep it. But I want coverage too, and if I don't get coverage from somewhere it will be your tax dollars paying for my emergency room visit, so what do you have to lose in this battle?

Mods: My apologies for going a little off topic here - I already killed the karma bonus.

No, it's an argument for the idiocy revolving around abstinence only education.

Here we have a big proponent of it - and I rather doubt that particular stance happened AFTER her daughter got knocked up. So either she (Sarah) didn't feel it was important enough to teach her daughter, OR she tried to teach it to her daughter and failed - quite misserably.

Alright, to be fair, it turns out she's not abstinence only, but abstinence + contraceptions - at least in 2006.

The problem with abstinence only education is that it's inherently dangerous. Biologically humans are sexually mature in their early teens. Essentially once we've hit puberty, we are able to procreate. To make an analogy, nature is handing out assault rifles and live ammo by the truckload to teenagers, and abstinence only education is essentially telling these teens they're not old enough to know what it is, so instead of telling them how to safely use the weapon, how to disassemble and reassemble it, clean it, put the safety on it, we're simply going to say 'don't touch it'. The only difference is, that you're not quite as likely to die, if you accidentally shoot yourself in the face.

The other problem is - where the hell are these kids supposed to learn about sex? Porn? I'm pretty sure if that's the way forward, you'll be facing a huge problem with the lack of children in 15 to 20 years, when these kids fail to bring children into the world, because they think sperm is supposed to be rubbed into the woman's tits (appologies to Dara O'Brien).

Bullshit. Thousands of people every year die because they leave it too late to get symptoms checked out, or are dumped by their insurance company.

The car insurance analogy is like comparing apples and oranges.

No, it is not. The assertion was that it unconstitutional for the government to require anyone to enter into a contract as a reason why this bill is ill-conceived. I gave a clear and accurate counter-example. All you did was throw up a bunch of red herrings to try to confuse the issue. In the case of health coverage I am sure the end game will be to adopt something like a tax credit which you will only get if you have health coverage.

Massachusetts has had this exact system in place for years and has had NO constitutionality issues.

If you are diagnosed with a disease like cancer, time is your #1 enemy, and oftentimes it is how long it takes to get a CT scan or see an oncologist that makes the difference between life and death.

This survival rate thing is total baloney. The US runs more screens so it detects the disease earlier. So obviously if you detect the disease before it progresses much the n-year survival rate will be better even if you do no treatment what-so-ever.

This article discusses the issue and why it is mortality rates, not survival rates that count:

http://mdcarroll.com/2009/09/23/survival-rates-versus-mortality-rates/

I'm going to have to call you on that one. Maybe you can point out another country that has a better medical system, since they are so numerous and all. Be nice if you provided a link.

That is a cream puff. Here are over 30 examples.

http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html

And people in the U.S. are overweight, eat fast food all day long, sit on their asses and smoke like chimneys. But like the aforementioned google link, people's medical care is better here.

Actually US smoking rates are about average compared to the rest of the world.

The real question is, if the U.S. is so far behind in medical care/technology why aren't any rich American's traveling to foreign countries for treatment?

How about people living in America today who have to travel abroad for treatment because they cannot get coverage or pay for the treatment here? It does no good to have great care if it is unavailable to you. According to this article 750,000 Americans traveled abroad to get care last year.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/nov/02/business/fi-cover2

I bet that's a MUCH higher number than rich people who came to the US to get care. Who is our health care system supposed to be serving anyway? Rich foreigners or the typical American?

The idea that rich foreigners travel to the US to get care when we have 30 millions that are uninsured is morally repugnant to me, and should be to you as well. It is one of the best arguments that the current system is BROKEN.

If there is quite a bit of evidence, I'm sure it wouldn't trouble you too much to find a single example, much less a list of examples so egregious that we should sack everyone in charge and put the government in charge. I challenge you to find an entity in the U.S. more inefficient than the government.

The US government's level of efficiency is a common whipping boy when it comes to the question of whether or not government run health care is a good idea. But the fact is that most EVERY OTHER developed nation on Earth manages to run a government controlled health care system for a far lower percentage of GDP and 30+ of them with better results (at least according to the WHO study I provided a link to). You assertion is now reduced to the idea the US government is the least efficient of any developed nation. That is patently ridiculous. In fact we have one of the lowest national tax rates despite having a military bu

If you find this concept quaint then why are vinyl sales slowly rising?

Hipsters.

I practice internal medicine near Los Angeles (http://drgagne.com). It's clear to any physician currently in practice that the health care system is broken and falling apart rapidly. If reform fails to pass, unless you work for a Fortune 500 firm, you will almost certainly lose your insurance within the next few years. Opponents of reform are using FUD to scare you, but almost all of their claims are lies. For example, there NEVER were any "death panels." Here are some great descriptions of what's in the bill and what's not: 1. Quick summary from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/health-care-reconciliation/ 2. Nice graphic of how much it costs and why it lowers the deficit: http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-031910-sc_health_care_costs-g,0,6098627.graphic 3. Fabulous answers to "twenty questions" about what's REALLY in the bill: http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-oe-kmiecweb19-2010mar19,0,6451390.story ---Jim Gagne, MD---

I practice internal medicine near Los Angeles (http://drgagne.com). It's clear to any physician currently in practice that the health care system is broken and falling apart rapidly. If reform fails to pass, unless you work for a Fortune 500 firm, you will almost certainly lose your insurance within the next few years. Opponents of reform are using FUD to scare you, but almost all of their claims are lies. For example, there NEVER were any "death panels." Here are some great descriptions of what's in the bill and what's not: 1. Quick summary from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/health-care-reconciliation/ 2. Nice graphic of how much it costs and why it lowers the deficit: http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-031910-sc_health_care_costs-g,0,6098627.graphic 3. Fabulous answers to "twenty questions" about what's REALLY in the bill: http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-oe-kmiecweb19-2010mar19,0,6451390.story ---Jim Gagne, MD---

If you find this concept quaint then why are vinyl sales slowly rising?

Probably for the same reason that young people prefer MP3s to higher quality music. People grow up listening to music in a certain way and the cracks and pops of vinyls, much in the same way as the sizzle sounds of MP3s, are what the listener expects to hear in the music. Because they expect to hear it, the music doesn't sound "right" when they hear high quality recordings without it. So now that baby boomers are reaching retirement age, they look back at what they loved when they are younger and buy old vinyls.

If you find this concept quaint then why are vinyl sales slowly rising?

Because the dynamic range of vinyl albums can't be compressed as much as they are on a CD resulting in better sounding music?

Uh, that may be true, but it would also require that the overprocessed, overmodulated, autotuned, beatbox crap they're calling "music" these days be worth a shit to press onto vinyl. In most cases, vinyl is nothing more than turd polish.

If you find this concept quaint then why are vinyl sales slowly rising?
 

Because the dynamic range of vinyl albums can't be compressed as much as they are on a CD resulting in better sounding music?

I remember CDs. They made such pretty coffee coasters after I burned all their music to my MP3 player.

I believe the correct verb you're looking for is 'ripped.' But before you go on about how 'quaint' CDs are, keep in mind how nice it is to own something physical. You have, as a physical object, evidence of your licensing of personal enjoyment of that media. I do buy $5 albums on Amazon MP3 but I feel almost like I somehow receive less rights or a watered down licensing of that album as opposed to if I had purchased the album. If you find this concept quaint then why are vinyl sales slowly rising?

My favorite form of purchasing these albums is vinyl + lossless digital download. A lot of the indie record labels are adopting this method and you pay a $1 or $2 premium on the CD or vinyl album in order to have the music now with the physical artifact shipped to you later. I purchased my Cloud Cult albums in this manner and also She and Him. Instant gratification and I don't even have to take the album out of its wrapper. Don't expect the major labels or even Amazon to warm up to this idea though ... it's far too empowering for the consumer.

"a strategy which, as far as I know, we do not currently employ: assassination squads."
Yeah, we quit doing that long ago.
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/21/nation/na-cia-blackwater21

You might also note that the supreme court decided that it also applies to non real people: corporations.

Really? Then why does the FBI deploy overseas?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fbi

"More than 50 international offices called "legal attachés" are in U.S. embassies worldwide."

http://www.fbi.gov/libref/factsfigure/counterterrorism.htm

"The FBI quickly deployed over 100 Agents from the Counterterrorism Division, the Laboratory, and various field offices to Aden."

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/28/nation/na-fbi28

Sure, they won't arrest overseas, they'll get a foreign government to take them into custody and then hand them over, but it remains that the FBI runs around the world arresting folks.

Well, since most of them were appointed by George Bush and Bill Clinton, my guess would be these corporations and these corporations.

Assuming of course that piracy equals a loss. Which is not proven.
Getting your software pirated means more people know about and use your product.

According to Bill Gates: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9

This is similar in principle to the Kanzius machine -- same idea, dope the cancer with some kind of radiation-sensitive material, then blast it. Kanzius wanted to use radio waves, but didn't know how to dope the cancer, but his oncologist knew a researcher at MD Anderson Cancer Center who was treating Nobel Laureate Rick Smalley -- one of the inventors of C-60, aka Buckminsterfullerene. Turns out that's a pretty good radiation target!

Sounds like these guys are on to the same basic concept with lasers and gold. Targeted doping of cancer cells seems like a very promising concept.

In the US, that's true. In Israel, the ultra-orthodox have Government subsidies.

True, but the wives are also bringing in supplemental income, at least in all the families I know of overseas where the husband is learning.

I actually agree with you and the article and everything else. I'm not a fan of the kollel system by any stretch of the imagination, I think it's wreaked all sorts of havoc on orthodox Jewish culture (mostly by brainwashing a few generations into believing this is the best path for everyone and anyone), I've got quite a few friends who've been burned or burned out by it, and I currently am very averse to marrying into it. (I'm an orthodox female.)

Quicktime today is h.264 video with AAC audio (Sorensen is gone).

h.264 is a licensed technology owned by MPEG LA. While it did go free for a few more years for usage, it was set to lose that until about a month ago and is still a licensed technology that can be used to lock.

iTMS files are AAC audio and fairplay is gone. Fairplay was easy to remove by yourself and Apple documented how to do so.

Again, AAC audio is not an open technology, it's a licensed one. The license is quite a easy one to stream and distribute (free), but to use the actual codec itself requires a company to obtain a license. This is why FOSS FAAC and FAAD software projects are only distributed in source code form only to avoid the patent issues. As for Fairplay, it was Apples way of keeping any songs bought from iTunes to only play on iPods. No other MP3 player was able to read the files helping Apple keep a monopoly, and is still being fought under the Apple iPod iTunes Antitrust Litigation Not to mention Fairplay is still being used by Apple. Also couldn't find anything on the Apple.com site on how to remove Fairplay from anything.

iTunes works with anything as long as anything actually knows how to interact with iTunes (the fact Palm doesn't understand how is Palm's failure). Some vendors even get sync functionality (many Motorola devices, following the ROKR partnership), not just the iPod as you say.

iTunes works as long as Apple says it's ok, not if anything actually knows how to interact with iTunes. Palm does know how and kept programming to make it work. It was Apple that kept altering iTunes to purposely break that connection to wall out Palm since they didn't want to jump through Apple's hoops.

What was your point again ? Oh right, outright lies.

No, that was your point to make outright lies.

Wikipedia is reporting the FBIs estimated numbers

The actual numbers are much worse.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/20/local/me-dna20

Among about 65,000 felons, there were 122 pairs that matched at nine of 13 loci. Twenty pairs matched at 10 loci. One matched at 11 and one at 12, though both later proved to belong to relatives.

Or just google: dna "arizona search"

Also realize that for most crime scene samples, it's generally sufficiently degraded that you are only going to get 9 loci out of it. It doesn't matter if you have 13 loci in your database, if the comparison sample only has 9 that can be amplified out using PCR.

-- Terry

Are you sure about those odds?

State crime lab analyst Kathryn Troyer was running tests on Arizona's DNA database when she stumbled across two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles.
The men matched at nine of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to distinguish people.
The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. But the mug shots of the two felons suggested that they were not related: One was black, the other white.

The funny thing about the far right Jews is that most of the guys are in some form of learning program, so the women are often the primary breadwinners. This leads to the average Jewish woman on the far right having more education and job training than her husband.

In the US, that's true. In Israel, the ultra-orthodox have Government subsidies.. There are American Jews who think this is a disaster for Israel. "In Israel today, two-thirds of ultra-Orthodox men spend their days studying the Torah and Talmud and do not participate in the workforce. Their unemployment is subsidized by the state to the tune of about $1.3 billion a year. There is nothing inherent in ultra-Orthodox religious tenets that keeps believers from working: In countries such as Britain and the United States, ultra-Orthodox families do work because they know that they can't depend on outlays from the state. Israel must adopt similar rules if it wants a first-class economy."

Saudi Arabia has dug itself into a similar hole, with a huge number of state-subsidized religious figures, but they have oil money.

Not "may be," "is."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html

It was really SMS that inspired the further direction -- the particular constraint of 140 characters was kind of borrowed. You have a natural constraint with the couriers when you update your location or with IM when you update your status. But SMS allowed this other constraint, where most basic phones are limited to 160 characters before they split the messages. So in order to minimize the hassle and thinking around receiving a message, we wanted to make sure that we were not splitting any messages. So we took 20 characters for the user name, and left 140 for the content. That’s where it all came from.

The Times also helpfully provides a list of all the people who have died in "sudden acceleration" accidents involving Toyotas:

Toyotas, deaths and sudden acceleration

If you look through the list at the ages mentioned, one begins to notice a rather odd pattern: 18, 21, 32, 34, 44, 45, 47, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89

This is a most peculiar bug indeed in that it seems occur primarily when the driver is elderly. Or perhaps, as with previous "sudden acceleration" scares, this will ultimately turn out to be the result of people slamming on the gas when they menat to slam on the brake and then trying to blame the car for their error.

And now, the $0.5 million question: How much money does Gates give to charity?

about this much

"Of course he does. And he also knows (as should you) that the users of that 'guaranteed' health care regularly come to the US to get quality work done rather than wait in line for the rationed health care in 'almost every other country.'"

In other news today, Sarah Palin admits that she used to have sneak over the border into Canada to use their health care system: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/03/sarah-palin-canadian-health-care.html

Here's a bet: The proportion of U.S. residents crossing the border into guaranteed-health-care-countries exceeds the proportion of guaranteed-health-care-country citizens crossing into the U.S.

If you dig a little deeper, you'll find what that "Commission on Professional Competence" GGP's link refers to actually is:

(b) (1) The hearing provided for in this section shall be conducted by a Commission on Professional Competence. One member of the commission shall be selected by the employee, one member shall be selected by the governing board, and one member shall be an administrative law judge of the Office of Administrative Hearings

I don't know what the ratio has been recently, but those commissions many years ago rejected more than 3/4 of the appeals they heard.

So after being presented with the administration's best shot and the teacher's, this commission, which in all practicality boils down to the judge who chairs the commission, decided the allegations are overblown, that he isn't a danger to anyone, he's a good teacher, and the administrators didn't even care enough about firing him to document their case.

You'll also discover that the commission's decision is final

(4) The decision of the Commission on Professional Competence shall be deemed to be the final decision of the governing board.

and that their decision was plainly that the employee should not be dismissed or suspended — since that's the only one of their three options that fits the story at all. It's remarkable that he's not back in the classroom.

Read this again: the appeals are over. The district lost. The judge who saw all the evidence rejected their allegations and said the district administration didn't do their jobs.

Yes, it's VERY hard to do your job if you can't be bothered to, you know, actually do it.

It's almost impossible to fire a teacher. Read up some of the "rubber rooms" operated in Los Angeles and New York.

"About 160 teachers and other staff sit idly in buildings scattered around the sprawling district, waiting for allegations of misconduct to be resolved.

The housed are accused, among other things, of sexual contact with students, harassment, theft or drug possession. Nearly all are being paid. All told, they collect about $10 million in salaries per year -- even as the district is contemplating widespread layoffs of teachers because of a financial shortfall."

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/06/local/me-teachers6

Citation needed. I've been doing what digging I can on my lunch hour, and haven't seen anything to prove or disprove this.

Don't have any handy, but several articles I have read over the last couple of months have pointed this out. The sheer volume of articles written about the recall efforts makes finding a specific article rather difficult. Here's one that I could find offhand from http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/08/business/fi-toyota-recall8:

In a written statement, the NHTSA said its records show that a total of 15 people died in crashes related to possible sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles from the 2002 model year and newer, compared with 11 such deaths in vehicles made by all other automakers.

Sure, that's something to go on, but really, 15 deaths in 9 years??? That's hardly statistically significant. I could just as reasonably argue that it's because Toyota drivers are more prone to treating their cars like appliances and are less skilled drivers. Anyhow, even today, the number of verified cases of unintended acceleration is so small that it is hard to believe there is this much concern over it. There are plenty of other things that could be done with this much time, energy and money that would be far more effective at saving motorist's lives.

I did not say otherwise. So even if we take this as given -- most != all. Therefore assuming that an incident is due to user error and dismissing the possibility of any other cause remains the wrong conclusion to draw. I don't know about you, but I'd get fired or demoted if I refused to accept responsibility for flaws in my systems with no means to prove my assertion.

Sure, but what is happening now is that anyone who has an accident with a Toyota is blaming it on the supposed 'defect.' The media shares responsibility because they focus the vast majority of their efforts on blaming the car manufacturer and creating hysteria. If instead, they reported the truth, that it is unknown if there even *is* a problem, and repeated over and over how to safely deal with this 'issue' that could come about in ANY car, they'd be doing far more of a service. But nobody ever wants to suggest that a paying customer might be in the wrong.

I recall it vaguely, but it's also not really relevant to this discussion.

It is relevant, as it's much the same thing over again. Once you start looking for a problem, when you have a sample size of tens of millions of vehicles, you are going to find SOMETHING to support whatever conclusion you are looking for. The point is, reported cases of unintended acceleration are not new, they are just the issue that is currently under the microscope.

Was their yard ugly or do their neighbors simply hate them?

From the looks of it, both. Their yard is brown. It doesn’t even look like a desert. It looks brown. It is a brown yard with patches of scraggly, weedy-looking vegetation.

If they’d used a fair-quality sand or rock instead of WOOD CHIPS, at least it would look decent.

It's the cruise control software. Pay the man his one million, please. Not that he needs the money, mind you.

LA Offers upto a $2000 rebate for ripping up your lawn

Seems that in June of '09, LA wanted to try to catch up with LasVegas who is paying people to rip up their lawns as well.

the intent of the cash-for-grass program is to reduce the 50 to 90 inches of water routinely applied to turf every year. Drought-tolerant substitutes may require just 15 -- in keeping with L.A.'s average annual rainfall.

For information on the L.A. Department of Water and Power program, call the regional water agency rebate hotline at ..... The recording will say funding for regionwide programs is exhausted, but keep listening. DWP customers can press 3 for more details on their rebate.

Also, here's the link to the SoCal Turf Removal Program.

The situation today is not that different. For example, deaths in the US and Mexico arising from heroin generally fall into two classes: (1) deaths because importing and selling heroin often involves violent criminal gangs, and (2) deaths because illegal heroin is impure. Both categories of deaths are purely government-inflicted, in the sense that the US government could end them tomorrow if it chose to legalize heroin.

Category #1 is pretty obvious: no more drug-related shootings if the stuff is being grown, imported, refined, packaged, and sold legally.

Category #2 is less well known to most people. When opiates were legal, people would generally just smoke opium. It had some bad health effects (e.g., constipation), but nothing all that deadly. People weren't overdosing from it. If you smoked too much, you fell asleep. Opium was legal in the US until around the turn of the 20th century. During most of the 20th century in the US, people were using extremely impure heroin. The impurities had two effects. One was that if it was maybe 10% heroin and 90% other ingredients, you couldn't get high from smoking or snorting it, so you had to inject it. AIDS transmission through shared needles wouldn't exist if heroin wasn't so impure that it had to be injected. The other was that the impurities themselves (often really nasty, random stuff like Ajax cleanser) could have devastating health effects. When you see a heroin addict who's lost all his teeth, it's because of the impurities, not the drug itself.

More recently, people have started to use black tar heroin imported from Mexico. Here is a series of articles about black tar heroin from the LA Times. This stuff is much cheaper than traditional heroin, so you don't get as many property crimes because druggies are stealing to support their habits. However, the black crud tends to cause collapsed veins and other problems. Also, a lot of people are overdosing because the black tar is stronger than they're used to. If heroin were legal, people would be able to look at the packaging and get accurate information about its strength.

Let's legalize heroin in the US tomorrow. Mexico could pull back from being on the verge of becoming a failed state. People in the US would stop dying. Violent and nonviolent crime would be reduced. The prison population would be greatly reduced. The US has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, due almost entirely to the failed war on drugs. Keeping all those people in jail is extremely expensive. E.g., California spends more on prisons than on higher education.

even if you have it you are highly unlikely to actually get much in the way of benefits back should you HAVE a serious illness or injury

I think this is a serious misconception. Most Americans with insurance who experience a serious illnesses or injury find their medical care is well covered subject, of course, to their policy caps/deductibles. (There is, however, a serious problem with lack of portability of insurance and pre-existing conditions -- interestingly, COBRA deals with these somewhat effectively, why we don't first try placing similar rules on private insurance policies rather than going the whole "mandate" route perplexes me).

Of course, the media reports the exceptions far more often than the norm (much as the fact the sun came up in the east every morning for the past century is rarely reported but if it came up in the south tomorrow morning, that would be a well reported event).

It seems that most cases where people have difficulty getting their insurance companies to cover expenses (within policy coverage limits/deductibles of course) revolve around the question if a procedure is medically appropriate and necessary for the condition and/or is likely to be successful. These calls are, of course, subject to judgment. Insurance companies may try to avoid paying for things like organ transplants if they don't think they are likely to be successful (for example, see Nataline Sarkisyan). Or, they may deny a request to pay more to accelerate a transplant if they feel such acceleration is not necessary. However, these are the exception rather than the rule (for example, people with various forms of cancer which cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat under standardized diagnostic and treatment protocols find that their care is covered without argument by their insurance company).

It is true that sometimes the insurance company (or, HMO) will limit a policy holder's choice of provider (i.e., only providing full payment to "in network" providers), but the insured knows that before taking out the policy and these providers are licensed and regulated - they aren't unlicensed quacks in some third world nation.

What about living closer to work? Okay, so it's expensive there. It's also expensive to retrofit the bridge. Why should everyone have to pay instead of just the people who need to cross the bridge? If you have to cross the bridge every day, move.

Now with that said, Bill Gates campaigning for lower CO2 emissions is complete bullshit. Remember how the Gates foundation was shown to be investing for-profit in organizations causing respiratory illness in the very people they were immunizing? And then they issued a statement saying they would review their investments for this kind of evil, and then issued another statement saying they wouldn't because it was too hard? It's only been three years, let's try to have a longer memory. This is hypocrisy at its purest.

Don't talk about Blue Cross. They went for profit several years ago and at least here in California they're increasing rates this year by up to 39%. By law in California insurance companies must spend a minimum of 70% on benefits, meaning that they can keep up to 30% for profit, a nice fat profit margin. They made this big rate increase even though they're doing well financially.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/09/business/la-fi-anthem-obama9-2010feb09

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jan/07/nation/na-gatesx07

Please give me one example of how the Obama Administration is more transparent than the previous administration. Second, I was unaware of the Bush Administration using unofficial email addresses, please provide a reference. I believe there was a story about Sarah Palin using an unofficial email address when she was governor of Alaska, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether the Obama Administration is more transparent than the Bush Administration.

http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2469&catid=44%3Alegislation&Itemid=1

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2007/04/rove-and-co-broke-federal-law-email-scam

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/apr/12/nation/na-emails12

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_e-mail_controversy for a summary of the whole thing and more references.

Wow, between this resolution and one state legislator's proposal to eliminate 12th grade, these idiots make even Arizona look like a bastion of scholarship.

Then why will there be an ebook store for it?

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/images/2008/10/30/elizabeth_banks_seth_rogen_and_ke_2.jpg

A nice pic for comparison purposes.
He's like two people wide

Well, as recently as 16 months ago he was highly concerned over his weight. I don't know how recent these pictures are, but airline seats are somewhat narrow and it would not surprise me if his girth extended into an extra seat. If this was some schmuck off the street nobody would be talking about it, but because we feel some kind of connection to him everyone is up in arms. Obviously the airline definitely handled it in the wrong way, but he still is a fat fuck.

What does any of this have to do with the story we are commenting on?

Believe it or not, it started with me suggesting a random thing - prohibiting wood fire in order to reduce the carbon footprint. I have no idea what controls will be instituted if the AGW is accepted, it was just something that I picked that sounded possible. You are welcome to suggest your own carbon-reducing measures.

All in all, I agree, this drifted away from the topic. The topic, back then, was "how and why green technologies / carbon reducing technologies hurt the civilization."

While we were educating each other this way someone else posted a comment which answered the question simply and effectively. Please have a read.

As humans become more advanced and sophisticated, their own self-restrictions actually increase. For example: a professor's sense of ethics is much more restricting than a homeless drug addict's.

Sorry, but you picked a bad day for such an example.

But to the matter of your observation: indeed more "enlightened" societies become more restricting. That's what kills them. It's not just the environmental regs, but the whole truckload of every imaginable tax, fee and regulation that makes it insane to open a business in the USA generally and CA specifically. Businesses around here close whole buildings and lay people off by thousands, and that's not just recession and outsourcing but primarily the bad business atmosphere. The state is $20B in the hole, and you don't need to be a Google founder to figure out who is going to pay for all that. I'm fixing up a small part of the house now, and the bureaucracy at the county drags this for about a year already, and the work isn't yet even scheduled to start. But they didn't fail to tell me that the reflectivity index of the paint must be not more than 41%. See how careful, thoughtful they are?

I seem to recall watching a documentary that showed the frisbee being invented some time back in 1885 or 1886.

..Just look at his picture ..these are sure 1930's futuristic clothes! =D

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-26/davos-too-big-to-fail-as-bankers-recoil-in-political-backlash.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/business/economy/26big.html NY Times

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528373595925623.html WSJ 2009 before the crash

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oew-ikenson-wial4-2009jun04,0,4807351.story June '09 before the crash

Forgive the formatting, but it's Saturday AM and I went drinking with my sons yesterday.

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

google "ddt breast cancer"....

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/sep/30/nation/na-ddt30

http://www.a-zbreastcancer.com/articles/aDDT.htm

That's not really all that scary, mykos. After the US Supreme court Decision that gives corporations the right to spend any amount of money to influence elections in the US, the corporations are now able to be the government that regulates the corporations that tell us what is OK for us to communicate and do.

How about this; go read the actual decision instead of just puking back the bullshit the mass media is feeding you.

Here's what really happened:

There was a rule that said that corporations were not allowed to spend money on political advertising during the 30 day period before an election. (For some elections it was a 60 day period).
The courts ruled that this was not a constitutional restriction because it amounts to censorship. The rule was only constitutional because a previous court ruling.
So the current court threw out the old ruling, which means that the corporations can once again spend money on political ads during that last month period.

The ruling specifically stated that this did not affect other restrictions on corporate spending, campaign donation limits, etc.

NOW HERE IS THE KICKER:

The ruling specifically stated that this also meant that private citizens have just as much a right to free speech as any "official" media outlet, and specifically that giving any type of extra "free speech" protection to a media corporation OVER that given to a citizen also amounts to censorship. This means that everybody is a full-fledged member of "the press" because to do otherwise is censorship.

So the media organizations are screaming bloody murder and painting this overturning of a ruling as the courts somehow trying to ruin democracy by giving corporations the ability to "buy" politicians.

Again, to clarify, other than the 30/60 day rule on advertising, and the elite status of "the press", this decision does not change anything.