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For a forum that uses the slightest provocation to complain about the erosion of our rights, you all seem remarkably silent about the erosion of your very right to life!

That's because the majority of posters seem to be taking this as a method to prevent the state from taking away your right to die, rather than the reality that it's the state removing your right to medical care. You already have the "right to die," no one can take that right away from you, you just don't have the right to force others to help you with it.

Don't forget, we're talking about Massachusetts here, the state where Obamacare was born. They've already hit the reality of Obamacare: skyrocketing medical costs and plummeting quality of care. The solution? Push "death with dignity," thereby forcing people into deciding to die in order to cut costs.

Don't think that's what's going to happen? Think again. Doctors today already push their views onto their patients, strongly suggesting that they would be better off dying even when the patient would much rather live. If this law passes, then yes, expect to see people pressured into "consenting" to suicide, because otherwise they'd be "such a burden on their loved ones."

To say "sea level rise is xxx" is patently false on inspection; that is, it's not that simple.

Fine, consider NYC exclusively:

Over the past 100 years, data from the tide gauge at the Battery in Lower Manhattan reveal that the region has already experienced close to a foot (9 to 10 inches) of sea level rise.

Okay, this is getting marked as flamebait, presumably because of the Nazi tie-in, and maybe he is going a little overboard with attributing malicious intent to people. However i've been hearing about this bill a fair bit lately from some disabled friends of mine, and they are kind of concerned. Here's one of the articles that's been passed around: Suicide by Choice? Not So Fast.

So less "evil Nazis out to kill you and take your property" and more "doctors making ill-informed opinions about what they think is best for you but actually isn't", but it still is a concern for a lot of people.

And this is precisely the sort of scenario that motivated me to take PayPal up on its unusual offer to "opt out" of its new recent adjustment to its service agreement that attempts to force customers to only use singular arbitration and prohibit class actions altogether. These news clauses are all the rage in service industries; all the corporate kids are dying to get one. Valve has one, AT&T has one, and now PayPal. I'm sure there are hundreds more I don't know about or mindlessly clicked-thru. Why PayPal chose to give customers the ability to reject that clause I can't figure, but I exercised it and this incident is demonstrative why. The rest of you have until December 31st IIRC to consider the same; you aren't likely to get this choice often.

As to why these clauses are a big fucking deal, the New York Times and TechDirt both published good analyses of the Supreme Court decision last year that inspired it and the inevitable effects. It's the same Court that gave us the Citizens United ruling and others that are almost slavishly favorable to business at the expense of the common good.

That global warming is occurring can not really be debated, even the skeptics who bother to look at the evidence now realize it's assuradly happening and almost assuradly is manmade. The only debate left is what we can do about it and how we should achieve that change.

Or you could just not install any applications that ask for those permissions is that so hard?

Yes, absolutely, this is harder than it looks. Pay attention much? The problem is related to the phenomena of Decision fatigue.

Every time I go back to the Crap Store, my searches come up with applications I've already reviewed and rejected. Applications that in fact violate my express policy over which invasive permissions I'm willing to concede (let's not call it "grant") relative to the benefits derived.

Here's how it ought to work. Once I decide that messing with my address book is totally verboten, I should never again see an application listed in my app searches that requires this permission. I barely even know that such applications exist. The most I'll accept is "1520 search results screened out by your security profile".

People don't hold up well having to make the same decision day after day, week after week. Even if you succeed by force of will it's costing you a mental resource that could have be used instead to, for example, negotiate a better mortgage on your house or serve fewer years in prison.

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

My inability to define half the applications at the Crap Store by rote as candy-coated virii is a travesty of actualized self-determination.

Indeed. Not even EVs from other manufacturers, as demonstrated last year in Japan:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/business/tsunami-reveals-durability-of-nissans-leaf.html

"The domain name associated with the website Me.ga has been seized pursuant to an order issued by the U.S. District Court"

Well, the rationale for seizing his other one was that since it was a .com, and America owns .com (apparently), it was within their rights.

A domain not registered with a US authority, for a company entirely based outside of the US ... unless they can intimidate a local government into playing along, they may find themselves with no 'real' jurisdiction. A US District Court might get told that what they want is irrelevant.

Of course, it's not entirely without precedent for the US to do these things anyway without the knowledge or permission of the country where it takes place. And there's certainly loads of pressure they would be willing to apply in the form of trade sanctions and other diplomatic pressure.

It looks like Google was ahead of the curve after all with their idea for floating server farms.

There are bad cops, there are asshole cops, and there are cops who look the other way when they see the bad asshole cops. They refuse to testify against their fellow cops. They refuse to turn them in for breaking the law. Hell, even after their fellow cops get caught violating the law, they still turn out en-masse to protest the fact that they are not above the law!

In my mind, this is how it should go. You're found out to be a bad cop? You lose your pension, instantly, period. You're found to have known about a bad cop and do nothing? You lose your pension, instantly, period. You turn a bad cop in? His pension is added to yours.

Hit people where the wallet is and watch how fast the cops start policing themselves.

Back in '06 Disney basically payed Pixar to come and fix the problems in their animation department, too. Disney's turned a corner since Michael Eisner left, and doesn't scare me as much as it used to.

Roughly 100,000 years of human history in which it was done one way and worked, compared with 50 years of sexual liberation where youth descended into ramapnt suicide, depression, crime and delinquency.

Hmmm... self-destructive deaths among teens rose from the 1950s to the 1970s, then generally declined.Teen-age suicides peaked in 1977 with 13.3 deaths per 100,000.

Your "facts" are wrong. Rather than descending into depression and suicide, depression and suicide peaked almost 40 years ago, before the "gay liberation". What about crime and delinquency?

Juvenile arrest rates were flat until 1987, peaked in 1995, and have been dropping since.

You may not realize it, but before 1900 maternal death rates were horrendous. Many, many children were motherless because their mothers died birthing their sibling. Then there were horriffic wars that caused fatherless children... and diseases that made children motherless, fatherless, and often orphaned.

Your logic is as wrong as your facts. Your ignorance of juvinile depression and crime rates is as bad as your ignorance of history.

So how does this compared to the health problems created by the mining and burning coal? You realize that coal pollution is very slightly radioactive itself?

No longer. I had always wondered about this argument involving coal. It turns out it is based on a failure of the US government to get its act together and regulate what has to be regulated until recently. You know, in civilized countries nobody has died from radioactive coal fumes for decades.

Fun trivai fact - if you extracted the uranium from 1 ton of coal and used it in a reactor, it would produce more energy than burning the coal itself.

Irrelevant.

See here:
http://viableawesomism.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/viable.html

Silicon valley solves problems. It may not solve the ones you want, but it solves many of them, and with cutthroat efficiency.
Why? because it allows people to take risks with new ideas. I'd transport you 100 years back, or maybe 700 years, and let you try acting out new ideas back then.

Some of them may be world-changing. Others may be fart apps.
But the important thing is that there are many, and there can be many, because the risk is not all worn by government or the taxpayer or some planning comittee of old farts who care more about their seat than about what they can use their power to fix. In Silicone Valley risk is worn by the people who consciously choose to take it.

I find this "war" between people who want to fix the world and people who want to make money one of the dumbest ideas ever concocted.
If you don't like east-coast MBA's being taught that money is the single important product of any business - good on you. neither do I. Money is a byproduct, albeit an important one. The real product of any organisation we build should be the awesome it creates, whatever that may be. If you agree - prove that old-school profit-over-everything MBA culture wrong. Go and DO something awesome.

And why can't you do something awesome for the world AND make a killing?
Money is important. If awesome organisations don't make money, if they don't have a built-in economic engine, it's like giving birth to a child without a heart, who will need to spend the rest of his life carrying around a life-support machine. I'd rather that life-support machine comes built in.

Our societal life support machinery (charity, government funding) is limited and finicky. You want to build organisations that will die the second someone closes a tap? go ahead. I'd rather see us create things with the resilience of Google.

You think Facebook and Google aren't awesome?
Suggest you take your head out of your ass, because you can't perceive the change these technologies made to places elsewhere in the world, outside your nice comfy American bubble. Compare Hama, Syria - 30 years ago and today. Compare India, China or Brazil back then and now. What do you think technology has done to these people? Given a lot of them more hope and dignity and prosperity than they every had in history.
Recognize you are not alone in the world - there are 7 billion of us now. And things that were possible when there were 10 times less people may no longer be possible when there's this many vying for the same amount of resources. If your idea is going back - it's a bad one. If your idea is going somewhere new - stop bagging the existing system and start being very specific about how you want to make it better.

Last, I sense a big disillusionment with "money". Money is not merely a vacation or a new plasma. It's not just a gold star. Money is power to change. Succeeding in Silicon Valley (and anywhere else in the world as an entrepreneur) is about convincing people of ideas and obtaining the resources to make what you can imagine happen. Money gives power to do that. You're not going to change anything by whinging or waxing ethical theories. You need to get off your bum, figure out a vision to do /something/ better, figure out how to connect a "power source" to that vision in the form of an economic engine so your idea isn't a public liability, and go build this organisation that does awesome.

As a society we have a list of problems as long as the eyes can see. Quit wasting people's time by ranting. Society as it hangs together today is stacks better than anything else we ever tried. If there's things you don't like about it - start fixing them, or get the fuck out of the way of those that are doing just that.

Yes, that's a dare.

Well, if your friend told you so, then by all means you're right to be modded "informative"

Oh give me a break, it's not like this is something unheard of, it IS an accepted fact that tax evasion in Greece is a huge problem for the government. And of course it's not just the taxpayers fault, nor is everyone doing it (if you have been following American politics at all "47%" of the US doesn't effectively pay any taxes - "the minority" of people doesn't mean it's a small amount of tax revenue - the wealthy in Greece have higher tax bills, and are doing most of the evading). But blaming "the government" for everything (hello, ALL governments spend money on stupid things and are corrupt to some extent) is such a cop out.

And just in case for some bizarre reason you want to pretend it's something I just "heard from one person", here are a few of the thousands of articles written on the topic:

[Some of my favorite quotes - and I'm pretty sure "only the stupid pay tax" would be considering evasion "as an obligation"...]

    * Cash provides a convenient escape route for lawyers, accountants and builders. The government has published the names of almost 70 doctors it says have cheated the taxman and some surgeons are said to be earning €900,000 a year and not declaring tax.

    * “Only the stupid pay tax,” one eye surgeon told a Greek state radio.

    * Helicopters have been hovering over plush suburbs in northern Athens in the search for swimming pools in the homes of professional people who claim they are living on only €35,000-€43,000 a year. ... The swimming pool fraternity are also responding by using nets to cover the pools to avoid detection.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8585593/Greece-loses-15bn-a-year-to-tax-evasion.html

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

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/09/greece-tax-evasion-professional-classes

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/09/how-greek-tax-evasion-sunk-the-global-economy/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/business/global/greece-warns-of-going-broke-as-taxes-dry-up.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/09/tax-evasion-greece

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203937004578076801161935378.html

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/07/11/110711ta_talk_surowiecki

Thanks for injecting some common sense. Slashdotters usually like to sneer at the masses and call it "common sense", but in this case common sense means being prepared.

The sheer extent of the storm will mean a massive impact. Emergency responders can only work as fast as they can work. The expected number of power outages will mean that linesmen just can't fix them all in a timely manner.

Philadelphia International Airport has shut down. PHL is the 12th busiest airport in the world. That's a simply huge impact considering the number of people who would ordinarily pass through the area on a given weekday, and the financial losses. It's not a decision they'd make lightly (and an airport has their own very sophisticated weather monitoring and analysis stations).

Margate, NJ, was already flooded this morning, and the storm has barely even started. It's both massive and slow moving, so it'll be hanging around for ages as it's dumping rain on us.

Here's Red Hook, Brooklyn, and that's just the beginning.

Here's more, courtesy of NY Times. They've opened their paywall. Scroll down and have a look at the pictures and remember it's barely started yet.

To Our Readers
The Times is providing free unlimited access to storm coverage on nytimes.com and its mobile apps.

I can't say whether it would be better or worse for the ITU to "control the internet", especially since the article doesn't even explain what control it is about (DNS? BGP routes? IANA? ...). But the article does contain a whole lot rosy-coloured-glasses stuff:

"These proposals, from the Russian Federation and several Arab states, would for the first time explicitly embrace the concept that governments have a right to control online communications and disrupt Internet access services," Feld said on a blog post.

"This would reverse the trend of the last few years increasingly finding that such actions violate fundamental human rights."

As others have already mentioned, the US everything but shies away from doing those things. It isn't carrying out drone strikes yet, but getting sites removed from Google because they offer travel to Cuba (from Spain!) to taking down various sites (often hosted outside the US) for infringing on US copyright law are fairly common.

Rohmeyer said it was unclear whether a conspiracy was at hand, but that "the suggestion that the Internet is a dangerous place could be used to justify greater controls."

Yes, because the US would never do that. *cough* Echelon *cough* warrantless wiretapping *cough* Thomas Drake *cough* *cough* *cough*

Observers are also troubled by a proposal by European telecom operators seeking to shift the cost of communication from the receiving party to the sender.

Yes, because US telecom operators are completely united in favour of network neutrality and would never dare to make Google pay for the massive bandwidth use triggered by youtube and the like.

I doubt it. According to the New York TImes: "Copyright protection lasts only 50 years in European Union countries, compared with 95 years in the United States, even if the recordings were originally made and released in America. So recordings made in the early- to mid-1950's -- by figures like Maria Callas, Elvis Presley and Ella Fitzgerald -- are entering the public domain in Europe, opening the way for any European recording company to release albums that had been owned exclusively by particular labels. Although the distribution of such albums would be limited to Europe in theory, record-store chains and specialty outlets in the United States routinely stock foreign imports." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/world/companies-in-us-sing-blues-as-europe-reprises-50-s-hits.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

The fact is that American capitalists have an interpretation of "the free market" meme that is indistinguishable from some ephemeral "right" to get rich through any means.

By their own analysis, wages go down when the supply of available labor goes up and wages go up when the labor market is tight.

So they act as though they just don't know whatever it is you're on about , and maybe you're a little racist or xenophobic or protectionist -or all three - when you point out that by prevailing on Congress to flood the market with H1Bs, you're putting your thumb on the scale of the "free market" in favor of business owners and to the disfavor of labor .

American capitalism isn't now and never was about the free and fair functioning of a market for goods and labor. It was is and always will be about crony capitalism.

If wages are up, the free market solution to that problem is something we briefly had in the late 80s and early 90s - massive enrollment and enthusiasm on the part of the job seeking portion of the citizenry for Computer Science as a major. More labor chases those dollars and the labor market swells stabilizing wages. Everyone wins. But the idea that everyone wins makes American business owners want to puke.

You have to read Ron Hira from Rochester University and Norm Matloff - two guys who actually crunched the numbers on this topic - in order to understand that absolutely, indisputably, the H1B program is nothing but another of the ways the rich prey on the middle class and undermine their opportunities so that the rich can pocket a little more money:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/do-we-need-foreign-technology-workers/

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2011/09/answers-for-sen.html

http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-foreign-stem-graduates-get-green-cards/broad-stem-grad-green-card-exemptions-would-distort-labor-market

Nobody was talking about Ron Paul.

Alan Greenspan and Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson. They were the last two people on earth that ever would have been for interventionist bailouts, but they had to bite the bullet and do it anyway. They were preventing an economic calamity beyond the worst of our great depression.

Later, Greenspan had to tell congress and the American people that many of the very basic tenants of his economic philosophies of the last 40 years turned out to be tragically wrong.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/greenspans-mea-culpa/

The summary makes it seem like China's blocking the NY Times is a some rare spectacle. It's happened before, multiple times. The explanation is generally, "we don't know why your site is inaccessible," or "it may be a technical error," but it can be assumed that you've said something they deemed dangerous or inflammatory, just as they would stop you at the border and seize your materials if you were a missionary blatantly trying to promote religion in their country.

The Times has been pushing the story for a few days on its home page, which is also unusual (an indication of how important they deem the story -- if you didn't catch it one day, you'll catch it the next... Or the next). The key here is that it's basically accusing the leader of the country of supporting massive corruption at a time when the reins are being handed over to a new group of people who will be selected in the next few weeks and control China for the next decade. The timing is seen as intended to influence China's politics at this very sensitive time and push people to call for reform. If China had NOT blocked it, THAT would have been a story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wen-jiabao-holds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html?pagewanted=all

So what is stopping the NY Times of *altering* the content rights and making that report something like Public Domain and then power-posting it to 100 Chinese news agencies?

They've pretty much done that, more or less. They released a PDF translating the article to Chinese. This was obviously meant for people to disseminate without having to worry about getting through the Great Firewall to directly access the NYT website (even though it is easy with a VPN).

Your link should be relabeled, "The Useful Idiot's Guide to Iran and the Bomb."

New Evidence on Iran’s Nuclear Aspirations

I find myself believing the opposite of what the U.S. govt is saying.

New Evidence on Iran’s Nuclear Aspirations

If I had a time machine that could take me back to 1899, I don't think my newly acquired smarts would help me in getting into Harvard. Oh well. -Josh

The bigger risk is from identity thieves, once they have your personal data, SS#, and account #. New York Times reported on a $66,000 "life savings" loss of an 81-year-old woman just one month ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/business/retirementspecial/old-trusting-and-prime-prey-for-swindlers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The reason you're paid on-par is because American wages have dropped a massive amount in the past few decades. It's a plan that's been at work for decades. We were warned about it but failed to listen.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/us/the-1992-campaign-transcript-of-2d-tv-debate-between-bush-clinton-and-perot.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

"To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young -- let's assume you've been in business for a long time and you've got a mature work force -- pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care -- that's the most expensive single element in making a car -- have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.

"So we -- if the people send me to Washington the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street. One last part here -- I decided i was dumb and didn't understand it so I called the Who's Who of the folks who've been around it and I said, "Why won't everybody go South?" They say, "It'd be disruptive." I said, "For how long?" I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, "well, how does it stop being disruptive?" And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We've got to cut it out."

So yeah, it's great for people who come from other countries to work, but it came at the expense of the American people who used to be able to afford vacations, health care, and college but now no longer can.

Better to be an asshole than a bunch of criminals. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/business/global/30samsung.html?n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes%20Topics%2FSubjects%2FP%2FPresidents%20and%20Presidency%20(US)%2FPardons&_r=0

I present two points that indicate people are noticeably dumber today than in the past (without precisely defining how far back the past is).

First, consider an entrance exam (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf) to Harvard. The document is dated 1899. Take this exam then draw your own conclusions.

Second, the overwhelming amount of entertainment that is available 7x24 from an explosion of different types of devices sadly means that many, many more people have become consumers and many, many fewer people are producing content of any form (and by "any form" I mean, especially, knowledge and not simply entertainment).

I attribute the dumbing down of America to two main causes: greed (corporations want to sell you endless numbers of devices and all the entertainment you can afford, then when new technologies arise, sell you the same content numerous times (CD, DVD, Blu-ray, etc.)) and laziness (it's easier to consume mindless entertainment than to learn something new on your own).

Many people thought Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) was hilarious. I found it a disturbingly possible paradigm of the future.

On a related note, I also find it disturbing that in spite of our spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually on education, today's students in America consistently place poorly among major industrialized nations. Citation: punch "worldwide rankings of students" into google (omitting quotes) and read some of the 84+ million hits.

Is Iceland an example of good local governance considering it basically went bankrupt?

Yeah, they made the same mistakes as many other nations running up to and during the financial crisis but didn't try and prop up failure like other nations did. And they've come through it and have made changes like updating their constitution with a referendum that got an impressive turnout. If it wasn't for the fact that I find winter days short enough at just 55 degrees north I would favour living there now.

It is unlikely that Michigan will be competitive. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ shows 97.3% chance of Obama win.

If Huawei (and all equipments from all Chinese companies) are suspicious, what makes you think that equipments from Germany or Japan or Britain or Korea or Canada or USA aren't?

Hmmm . . . are there any other one party communist states with aspirations of hegemony, a long history of enmity against democratic government, free enterprise, and personal liberty, that currently have intense foreign espionage efforts directed against the West, that make direct threats against the United States while being armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons, on the list? No, China. . . make that the People's Republic of China, one of the few remaining Communist dictatorships on earth, is unique in that regard. Isn't that clear? China is reforming economically much faster than politically, although that is coming along in small fits and starts. But fundamentally, China is still a dictatorship run by the Chinese Communist Party.

Which equipment the Stuxnet virus targeted?

That was SCADA controllers made by Siemens, a German company, being used by Iran - a Shia lead theocratic government imposing Sharia law in Iran while they seek hegemony in the region. Iran is using that equipment to run centrifuges to develop highly enriched Uranium, and has been discovered to be engaged in activities applicable to only nuclear weapons development. Iran tries to intimidate its neighbors, is a state sponsor of terrorism world-wide, fund, trains, and arms Hezbollah with tens of thousands of rockets and missiles to control Lebanon and attack Israel until it can make good on it barely veiled threats of genocide against Israel, and general threats against Europe and the United States. Until the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, Iran and Israel had been on good terms. It is the theocratic government in Iran that has declared them to be enemies - the conflict isn't Israel's fault - Iran was not part of the Arab-Israeli wars. And yet some people take the bankrupt position that it is Iran that needs protection from Israel. Stuxnet and its kin may be the only reason the world isn't in a shooting war in the region now.

It's easy to bash China - as China has become the poster boy for bashing orgy - from Presidential debate to this one in Slashdot - but I do expect MORE from those who come to Slashdot. Unlike the tweedledee and tweedeldum on the presidential debate, you guys do have brains. It's time you use your brain to think, rather than letting others doing the thinking for you.

Some people use their powers of reason to understand the facts above and their implications, others use their reason to rationalize away uncomfortable facts, like those above.

In much of the West, the well educated have been taught to believe that they can know nothing and that they can draw no independent conclusions about truth, unless they cite a study and "experts" have affirmed it. "Studies show" is to the modern secular college graduate what "Scripture says" is to the religious fundamentalist. -- Dennis Prager

I can see your point, but I don't think this is a slippery slope issue.

Then
You're
Not
Paying
Enough
Attention

Hockey stick is proven fabrication.

Well, if you desire a citation for my claims of independent verification, check out Richard Muller who previously attacked said graph and consequent IPCC claims (the results of which earned them the 2007 Nobel Prize). Pay attention to these first three paragraphs. That 2007 IPCC report is important because that is what Mann contributed to.

If I'm not mistaken, Muller tackled the same problem from a as different an approach as possible and came to the same conclusion.

The studies approving Vioxx were "peer reviewed" as well...

Sure, just because something is peer reviewed doesn't mean it is without fault but it sure is a good deliminator between a crackpot on the internet and someone trying very hard to participate in a community that also tries to hold itself to a higher standard than baseless claims and unreproducible results, wouldn't you agree?

We meet again, dumass.

I think you have no clue about the state of the private medical system in the US.. Health care in the US used to be affordable until the government got completely involved in it. Did you know that before Obamacare, the government was the single largest provider of medical coverage? They had something like 60% of all the non-elective health care market sowed up with Medicare, Medicaid, and VA services.

Who do those services cover? The old, wounded veterans, and the poor who cannot afford care or insurance on their own. And for the latter, in many cases they've been "recissioned" by their health insurance company because they have a high-cost ailment, or lost their job (and thus their insurance) because of a severe accident or disease like cancer.

Gee, who's going to use the most medical care?

Maybe the elderly, wounded veterans, and patients recovering from cancer or a head-on collision? Here's your sign....

And it is exactly how they are involved which is why the costs are so high. The government does not pay for services as you or I would should be go in ourselves. They pay an average cost for the region which could be more or less then the actual bill. Now the government said it's going to save money by only paying a percentage of that costs. So what happens, the medical service providers jack the costs up so the government pays what is normally asked for. This increases the area average and provides incentives for increasing the costs.

As is usually the case, this is substituting wingnut ideology for reality. Every other industrialized nation has some form of universal health care (or insurance companies regulated to within an inch of their lives), so they must be paying more than we do for care, right? Because their providers just keep raising prices, right?

Except here in the real world, as opposed to Randian la-la land, they pay less money for better care. Even here in the U.S., Medicare, Medicaid and the VA have 2-4% overhead, compared to 30% overhead for private insurance. Why? Because the government agencies aren't paying people exorbitant salaries to find new excuses to deny you care. Because Medicare doesn't have shareholders demanding increasing profits from the agency. Because the head of one of those agencies makes less than $200,000 a year, as opposed to millions for health insurance CEO's like Stephen Hemsley, who made $100 million in one year.

Because on Planet Wingnut, insurance executives become the highest paid CEO on the planet by paying out claims rather than denying them...

I really wonder where people get some of their numbers from, especially when it comes to defense/military spending. The best numbers I can seem to find are the following with some historical context:
2011 budget proposal
2013 budget proposal (best view by department)
2012 budget proposal
2013 budget table by department
Lots of details here that you can drill down into
current running totals for the current fiscal year
There are probably more good sources I could find that seems like a good start.

I really wonder where people get some of their numbers from, especially when it comes to defense/military spending. The best numbers I can seem to find are the following with some historical context:
2011 budget proposal
2013 budget proposal (best view by department)
2012 budget proposal
2013 budget table by department
Lots of details here that you can drill down into
current running totals for the current fiscal year
There are probably more good sources I could find that seems like a good start.

I really wonder where people get some of their numbers from, especially when it comes to defense/military spending. The best numbers I can seem to find are the following with some historical context:
2011 budget proposal
2013 budget proposal (best view by department)
2012 budget proposal
2013 budget table by department
Lots of details here that you can drill down into
current running totals for the current fiscal year
There are probably more good sources I could find that seems like a good start.

Chances are that it was rejected the first time. And the second time. And the third time...

You see, when Apple doesn't get a patent approved, they just change a few words and keep trying. Take for example the '604 patent. It was rejected twice in 2007, three times in 2008, once in 2009, twice in 2010 and once in 2011. (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-among-tech-giants-can-stifle-competition.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all )

Finally it got approved (tenth time is the charm!).

Coke Classic (with the coca leaf extract) vs. New Coke

(no more coca leaf extract so that Reagan could have achieved moving cocaine from schedule III or IV to schedule I in the war on drugs. Even though coke classic contains the coca leaf extract (some say its for flavor, but if you're a heavy coke drinker, hasn't the lack of coke reminded you of withdrawal symptoms?) without the actual cocaine,the mere presence of the coca leaf extract was the impediment to moving cocaine to schedule I.

The NY Times reports that the Kewaunee Power Station will close early next year because the owner is unable to find a buyer and the plant is no longer economically viable driven by slack demand for energy and the low price of natural gas. âoeThis was an extremely difficult decision, especially in light of how well the station is running and the dedication of the employees,â says Dominion CEO Thomas F. Farrell II. âoeThis decision was based purely on economics.â When Dominion bought the plant from local owners in 2005, it signed contracts to sell them the electricity, a common practice, but as those contracts expire, the plant faces selling electricity at the lower rates that now dominate the energy market. Other companies have also reported falling revenues, although they may not be on the verge of closing reactors because they are in regions where the market price of electricity is higher. The closing, which did not catch many in the industry by surprise, highlights the struggle of the U.S. "nuclear renaissance." A decade ago, the nuclear industry talked about a nuclear renaissance due to rising fossil fuel prices and concerns about meeting greenhouse gas emissions, but the nuclear revival did not occur in the United States as the cost of fossil fuels like natural gas fell and the federal government has been slow to put a price on carbon. "A number of nuclear units won't run their 60-year licensed lives if current gas price forecasts prove accurate," says Peter Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "The determining factor is likely to come at the point at which they need to decide on a major capital investment."

If Al Gore had been President of the US, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia would probably still be in effect. That means Europe would lack protection from Iranian ballistic missiles and the US from North Korean missiles. North Korea has nuclear weapons now, and Iran is pursuing them. Both of these countries are following their own agenda.

The leaders of Iran and North Korea are either smart enough to realise that actually using such sabres (as opposed to merely rattling them) would quickly result in their respective countries becoming prime sites for massive car parks.

Or they're not.

(Hint: When one side has 6 nukes, and the other side 6000+, MAD doesn't even begin to enter the picture.)

OK, not sure what an obscure ruling from a court in India, of all places, has to do with anything, but let me restate my point: Fuck the 1%. Fuck the sons of wealthy rich politician pricks, beat the shit out of them. Fuck the 1%. The rule of law in itself is inherently racist and exists only to serve the 1%.

Uhhh...
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

The real crooks are the cops and civil defense people

Corrupt building inspectors were most likely the biggest issue. Newly constructed buildings were not built to code and came crumbling down. Of course, it's a lot harder to go after those guys than just blaming some scientists who were making reasonable predictions based on the available data.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/europe/08codes.html

We've something like that happening in NZ. After the big one in Christchurch (22/Feb/2011) one of the buildings in Christchurch collapsed. The investigations have found that the engineer falsified his degree and he may also be liable. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10835563

Somewhat remiss of people not to check on someone's qualifications. Skeptics of the world unite.

...a crime worthy of punishment equal to manslaughter.

Remember, the death penalty for hacking has been seriously discussed. If such a discussion can be considered serious.

What the fuck did I just read? John Tierney is a disgusting hack of a writer. Kind of drivel like this belongs on extremist blogs that nobody reads. This is why print media is dying.

...a crime worthy of punishment equal to manslaughter.

Remember, the death penalty for hacking has been seriously discussed. If such a discussion can be considered serious.

The real crooks are the cops and civil defense people

Corrupt building inspectors were most likely the biggest issue. Newly constructed buildings were not built to code and came crumbling down. Of course, it's a lot harder to go after those guys than just blaming some scientists who were making reasonable predictions based on the available data.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/europe/08codes.html