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For-profit schools. Shut them down. Period.

The average annual tuition for for-profit schools this year is about $14,000. Public four-year colleges charge, on average, $7,605 per year in tuition and fees for in-state students. What's worse is this: The default rate on student loans from for-profit institutions is 15%, while the default rate at public universities is only 7.2 percent (same source).

For-profit schools are milking the American taxpayer for money. Just walk into any one of these schools, tell them you want to be a nurse / chef / accountant / whatever, and they'll lay down a student loan form for you to sign before you could even say "Herbie Hancock." Because, at least with the present law, once a for-profit school gets their money from Uncle Sam, it's theirs, no strings attached. I'd almost call it fraud, except those students who enroll in a for-profit school actually do get something in return, even if it is a sorry-excuse of a half-ass education. (PBS did an excellent documentary a year back on for-profit schools, particularly exposing the "value" of a diploma one gets from these crooks. You can watch it here.)

What's sad is that there's a really simple solution to all this: require a for-profit school to assume some of the risk. If we required a for-profit school to pay back even just 50% of the loan that was defaulted on, you'd see the default rate decrease overnight.

In fact the rich are paying much more, both, fractionally and in absolute numbers than anybody below their earning bracket.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office.

[do a google lookup and fuckoff]
Seriously. Try it. Here is the goole search and then here is a nytimes article on it. This idiotic [citation needed] shit is so utterly rediculous. Oh Obama is an American born on US soil? Fuck that [CITATION NEEDED!!!]. Global Warming? Fuck that [CITATION NEEDED!!!]. Even wikipedia has an article on it. What do you expect people to do for you? Find internal documents from the FTC that categorically prove what happened? All we both have to go on is that Intel spent a shit load of money trying to defend itself and has been ruled against and has settled a deal to AMD and paid out even more money.

What's wrong with clicking the link and having the PDF launch in the viewer of your choice? This is significantly increasing browser footprint and attack surface for no appreciable benefit.

I've configured the majority of my web clients to use external PDF viewers in the past because there wasn't much benefit to running them inline as opaque applications in affordable housing. There's nothing wrong with being too old for school. However, if PDF behaved more like web content and integrated fully with Zotero, Session Saver, AdBlock, and NoSquint the benefits would be highly appreciable.

I've grown fond of having the ability to remove any image (or logo) from a document I'm reading in Firefox by whichever of my multitudinous plug-ins added "remove this object" to my popup context menu.

Neither am I particularly fond after a system restart of having to rearrange my PDF windows on their habitual desktops, after fighting round one with FF.

From How Netflix Lost 800,000 Members, and Good Will

Reed Hastings was soaking in a hot tub with a friend last month when he shared a secret [doomed plan]. "That is awful," the friend, who was also a Netflix subscriber, told him under a starry sky in the Bay Area, according to Mr. Hastings. "I don't want to deal with two accounts."

In fact, I've always hated that PDF was a cloistered universe. I'll be much happier when it's demoted to just another www markup language and treated as such.

But don't feel bad, Reed couldn't see it either.

Please excuse me when I say you've been brainwashed by MSNBC.

The answer is always more government. I mean, we put more government on Education so that we can "think of the children." What do we have? An education system that is not keeping our graduates competitive with the world, an inflated cost of education (mainly due to subsidized loans), and teachers who help kids cheat on exams to get more funding.

IMO, the reason corps big and small are sitting on their capital is because of ObamaCare. The uncertainty surrounding that whole mess is causing business to withhold investments in workforce. Another testament (again, IMO) to the government sucks rocks at stimulating anything.

Your reasoning is circular and inaccurate. The government CAN'T and WON'T solve every problem a civilization has. People have to work their way out of it. Handing out money from the "evil rich people" only creates a society of dumbed down lazy group of nitwits to be easily dominated when our Robotic Overlords arrive.

Fixing it is simple -- get the government out of the people's/corporations lives. Treat problems, not symptoms.

You're still pretending that the difference isn't blatant.

Here:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-healthy-food/

Read and quit acting like there is no difference. We're at the point in this discussion where the facts have been shown and you still point to anecdote and personal belief as 'evidence'. You clearly have no real experience in groceries to keep regurgitating this same argument that there is no price difference. Everyone I know with families (including myself) understands the full scope and cost of foods and the drastic gradient of price vs goodness.

Read some facts; or better yet, go to the grocery store and bring an excel spreadsheet. I've done it several times, comparing stores, comparing food quality, comparing organics. I feed four mouths, and like every other finance balancing responsible family member, I take deliberate interest in knowing where money can be saved and where healthy choices are costly.

This has next to nothing to do with the financial crisis, as many financial insiders (like the old Lehman Brother's CEO and others) have discussed.

How do they know? Because they're insiders? There's so much misinformation and genuine complexity that it's almost impossible to say. However, look at this little tidbit in an article about Capital One's plans to buy ING Direct: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/in-feds-move-on-capital-one-deal-a-test-of-dodd-frank/

Clarity, if not an answer, may have come inadvertently from National Community. The coalition argues that Capital One’s application to acquire ING Direct is suspect because Capital One refuses to lower its credit standards to extend Federal Housing Administration-insured loans to people with credit scores of 580. This is the lowest credit score allowed by the F.H.A. National Community contends that this is discriminatory against members of minority groups because they tend to have lower credit scores and have been hit harder by the financial crisis.

Capital One has responded by agreeing to lower its credit score requirements by 2012. For National Community, this is not enough, because Capital One’s F.H.A. loan volume is relatively flat in growth. Capital One is now a bit player with less than 1 percent of the F.H.A. loan market. National Community wants the combined entity to make more of these loans, since they help people who could not otherwise afford a mortgage.

Who is National Community? (http://www.ncrc.org/)

In recent years, NCRC has led efforts to reform the financial system, respond to the foreclosure crisis, and expand the Community Reinvestment Act. We are experts on banking, business development, community reinvestment, community development, civil rights, housing, and workforce issues.

I love the idea of "inadvertent clarity" here -- it's funny but absolutely true. This organization is working with the government to make banks, today, right now, take on more risk and make more loans to poor people, and fight legitimate business deals that reduce risk. They don't go out of their way to advertise the role they play in adding risk to the financial system, of course, but the fact that it was slipped into this rather dry article is awesome. You really don't see that happen in the NY Times too much.

You're claiming "Those loans were extremely profitable to the banks" -- I'm curious if the excerpt I posted makes you change your mind on that.

And you also claim "and in any case, it has nothing to do with the housing bubble in Spain, Ireland, China, etc" but surely you see how the largest market in the world (the US) has an affect on international banks (e.g. ING Direct is owned by a Dutch conglomerate).

I too don't have time to dig into the actual budget docs to find the warnings.

But here's a biased source that DOES quote a center-center-left source, the NYT, in contemporary reports.
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/bush-mccain-tried-to-reform-housing-finance
From http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/business/new-agency-proposed-to-oversee-freddie-mac-and-fannie-mae.html

New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
By STEPHEN LABATON

September 11, 2003

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac â" which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt â" is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

âThere is a general recognition that the supervisory system for housing-related government-sponsored enterprises neither has the tools, nor the stature, to deal effectively with the current size, complexity and importance of these enterprises,â Treasury Secretary John W. Snow told the House Financial Services Committee in an appearance with Housing Secretary Mel Martinez, who also backed the plan.

Mr. Snow said that Congress should eliminate the power of the president to appoint directors to the companies, a sign that the administration is less concerned about the perks of patronage than it is about the potential political problems associated with any new difficulties arising at the companies.

The administrationâ(TM)s proposal, which was endorsed in large part today by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, would not repeal the significant government subsidies granted to the two companies. And it does not alter the implicit guarantee that Washington will bail the companies out if they run into financial difficulty; that perception enables them to issue debt at significantly lower rates than their competitors. Nor would it remove the companiesâ(TM) exemptions from taxes and antifraud provisions of federal securities laws.

The proposal is the opening act in one of the biggest and most significant lobbying battles of the Congressional session.

After the hearing, Representative Michael G. Oxley, chairman of the Financial Services Committee, and Senator Richard Shelby, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, announced their intention to draft legislation based on the administrationâ(TM)s proposal. Industry executives said Congress could complete action on legislation before leaving for recess in the fall.

âThe current regulator does not have the tools, or the mandate, to adequately regulate these enterprises,â Mr. Oxley said at the hearing. âWe have seen in recent months that mismanagement and questionable accounting practices went largely unnoticed by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight,â the independent agency that now regulates the companies.

âThese irregular

When I read the article the other day in the New York Times, it mentioned the founder was "Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who led iPod and iPhone."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/technology/at-nest-labs-ex-apple-leaders-remake-the-thermostat.html

I just finished reading this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/us/politics/republicans-push-military-trials-for-terrorism-suspects.html

One wonders what it will take for those who want to suspend social and legal traditions because of an attack on freedom, to recognize that it is they who are destroying our freedom.

http://i.imgur.com/tPdL9.jpg

Also:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
Go back 11 years and start reading that blog.

Some evidence that Paul Krugman's been pretty accurate:

2005, calling the housing bubble (he actually did so repeatedly throughout 2005)
2006, calling the housing bubble and risk of a crash

Not saying that the Austrians couldn't have reached the same conclusions. Heck, I worked for a couple of months for a firm that handled the paperwork of many of the subprime mortgages, and I could tell there was likely a serious problem (nothing illegal, nothing I could tell that was overtly fraudulent, just patterns that suggested that the people taking out loans couldn't pay them back and the lender was lending them money anyways).

My point is, to not see the bubble required willful blindness to whole schools of economic thought.

Just as a note on tax revenue in particular: Assume that permanent tax cuts which leave some non-zero level of taxation have a permanent positive effect on annual economic growth. There exists some year N such that from that year forward government revenue is higher than it would have been without the tax cut.

2 major problems with that argument:
1. N may be a couple of centuries from now. As Keynes famously put it, in the long run we're all dead.
2. When the economy grows, government responsibilities grow with it. For instance, an economy that's growing so much it needs more workers attracts immigrants, and thus there's a higher population that the government now has to police.

I should also make it clear that what Keynesians generally advocate is for governments to run surpluses during good times and deficits during bad times. In other words, buy useful stuff during recessions (when they're nice and cheap) and then effectively 'sell high' by upping taxes when the economy is doing better. The desired effect of this is that the federal government, along with the Federal Reserve, act to smooth out the economic growth curve. The trouble is that the US government almost never has the discipline to run surpluses during relatively good times - either somebody wants a tax cut, or somebody wants a new spending program.

Models aren't equal to models, and even rough models of chaotic phenomena can be very useful and predictive, if they are the right ones. Read this for some acknowledgement of which brand of economics has been right during the last few years. Here is another account, including some pointers to predictions of the current crisis reaching as far back as 1999. Krugman even has a "model" of how good models get out of fashion.

Economics suffers from the manipulation by political interests, and by the wish of many practitioners to project their moral ideals onto the world. Many economists simply go and try to prove that the world works however they want it to work, and find funding for that from rich supporters. That makes the endeavour biased.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/24/technology/steve-jobs-patents.html

He is credited in 317 Apple patents so far. He is principle inventor or designer on 33 of them. I think this list actually misses a number of them from outside of Apple; NeXT filed patents under several different names, among them, NeXT, Inc., NeXT Computer, and NeXT Software. There are also still a boatload of pending patents with his name on them, some as principle inventor.

It's not just penile cancer. Also, depending on how transferred, HPV can cause rectal and oral (throat) cancers.

I also ready today (here) that HPV may lead to future heart trouble.

What? What! I don't want to know how you managed to put it that far in.

300x is hyperbole, but 18x is not: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-healthy-food/ The comment you replied to is basically right. Eating healthy food is a privilege in this country, and it's a privilege that millions of people don't have.

I think the problem NetFlix is facing isn't obvious to everyone. With the expiry of their Starz license and the general consensus that the licensing deal they gave NetFlix was ridiculously cheap ($25 million a year for access to Sony and Disney movies) and will never happen again, with Starz or any other company.

This article claims that Netflix's (sic?) licensing fees are going to go from $180 million in 2010 to $2 billion in 2012. It was in the face of this impending tidal-wave that Netflix hiked its prices. Customers may have been shocked, but in hindsight it seems inevitable: this famous article from December of last year cites Time Warner's CEO saying exactly the same thing - that NetFlix was only competitive because of its unbelievable deal with Starz and once that deal expired NetFlix was screwed. And he said them becoming a major player in broadcasting was the equivalent of the Albanian army taking over the world - a quote that people immediately jumped on like it was the equivalent of Michael Dell saying Apple should be broken up in 1997. Except that right now it would seem the guy was onto something.

I think NetFlix are/were an innovative and exciting company and I wish them all the best. But I don't know if they're going to be around in 5 or 10 years, for the simple fact that the competition has caught up and can throw much more weight around when it comes to licensing content. At the end of the day, it might turn out that licensing made NetFlix, and will ultimately break it. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe they will be able to continue to out-innovate the competition, or sign some sweet-heart content deal that saves them. But I don't think I'll be investing in NetFlix at the moment.

Here's what happened in Japan when the 2011 tsunami encountered a sea wall that is just a bit too low.

And a story about another town with a double sea wall. The tsunami destroyed the outer sea wall, and came over a 10m seawall to essentially destroy the town.

A sea wall that is lower than a tsunami offers almost no protection.

I'm in exactly the same boat. This assistance they are so determined to extend in my direction can only jostle the elbow of merit-based purchasing decisions if I allow it to do so.

A meme I've dropped here in the past is how having a cable TV subscription is like parking a salty chip truck on your front lawn. One thing we know about human nature is that if you wish to prevail, you must win your battles in the store rather than at the refrigerator door where we quickly succumb to Decision Fatigue.

Eventually, at the rate this economic model is progressing, they'll have to legislate that failing to succumb to decision fatigue as theft of service. It's become our preferred payment program, hasn't it? There's no tax more widely lauded than a hidden tax. It's not that we hate to pay taxes, it's that we hate to know we pay taxes.

HPV is 100% avoidable... it's like herpes... it isn't something that just happens.

HPV and HSV are 100% avoidable if you abstain from physical contact with others. Not just sexual contact, _all_ contact. HSV has been transferred from parents to children by kissing. You can acquire it just by making out with someone, which I assume most people would refer to as a "safer" activity.

In addition to transfer via fluid, HPV can be active under the fingernails. If an infected person with an active outbreak touches you where you have broken skin (or digitally penetrates you without a barrier) you can be infected. Essentially, skin-to-skin transfer with an infected person _can_ give you HPV. Touching, mutual masturbation, frotting, making out.

Then, of course, you have things like this, where children are being infected out of no cause of their own.

Or the fact that you can do everything right (and have "safe" sex, using condoms and dental damns and finger cots and not-brushing-your-teeth-before-oral-sex and discussing histories with your partner, and still get infected, because many people can carry these infections without having an outbreak or being aware that they are a carrier.

your ignorance is rampant, you're turning this into The Scarlet Letter for the present time.

It's not just penile cancer. Also, depending on how transferred, HPV can cause rectal and oral (throat) cancers.

I also ready today (here) that HPV may lead to future heart trouble.

This link to the New York Times might work better for the article and since submitting it I have stumbled on the research page and its English translation.

In 2008 the FCC mandated an emergency alert system for cell phones, which would send a text message to everyone in the affected region. This is being rolled out now but isn't yet ready nation-wide.

Bullshit! That anecdote is no more grounded in reality than Reagan's mysterious welfare queen who collected 500 checks a week (who he never identified, which is a crime). Save your blatant and ridiculous propaganda for the people who already agree with you.

Look, these are liberals reporting the fraud:

I can do this all day

And even the government, who is made to look bad, is the one who commissioned the report:

Original Department of Education report

"same price for a much needed engineering degree and an unneeded philosophy degree? WTF?"

Actually now some colleges are charging different prices for different degrees.

When you say "the rate of college education" what do you mean? The "rates" as in the "costs" have been steadily increasing. The "rates" as in number of applications has also been increasing. Typically, it jumps when unemployment increases.
Application Inflation: When Is Enough Enough?
Applications Rise (Yet Again) at Dozens of Selective Colleges

So I'm not sure what you are referring to. As for the unemployment rates of college grads - That is always true, more education rarely hurts. But that doesn't mean that some of those individuals would be better off as trade-school grads. Right now, there are lots of people in community colleges and the military who probably should be in trade schools instead.

When you say "the rate of college education" what do you mean? The "rates" as in the "costs" have been steadily increasing. The "rates" as in number of applications has also been increasing. Typically, it jumps when unemployment increases.
Application Inflation: When Is Enough Enough?
Applications Rise (Yet Again) at Dozens of Selective Colleges

So I'm not sure what you are referring to. As for the unemployment rates of college grads - That is always true, more education rarely hurts. But that doesn't mean that some of those individuals would be better off as trade-school grads. Right now, there are lots of people in community colleges and the military who probably should be in trade schools instead.

Cheating:

- Governmental currency manipulation which is pretty much a certainty.

- "Product Dumping", e.g. selling a product at below production cost (either by simply eating the loss or cutting corners and dumping an inferior, unsafe product) so as to drive competitors out of the market and then price-gouge once you're the only supplier (already seen in some markets where China did, in fact, run US companies out of business)

- Rampant theft of intellectual property - we're not just talking Napster-grade "file sharing" here, we are talking about rampant spying and thievery of patented products and designs. As the last article I link shows, it's not just the US getting burned by the Chinese - this is a major point of concern in the EU as well.

Are you getting some form of a clue now?

Yes, a teacher is best. There are ways computer can help, by giving individualized instruction that a teacher may not have time to give, or may not have the training to give. I once worked for a literacy company that sold software that gave students personalized help to assist them in learning to read and write. From the results I saw, using the computer program for fifteen minutes a day really helped. In the writing samples I saw, the students often went from making unintelligible scribbles to writing coherent paragraphs within a year. Of course, the teachers still had to have some training, and the work at the computer was reinforced by giving the children cheap "books" printed on thin paper to take home, but using the program was an essential part of the instruction.

I've heard that JUMP Math may be a similar system for teaching math.

You can't just plop a student in front of a computer and expect that the student will learn better, or even learn anything at all. The curriculum needs to be in place, and the computer needs to do what a computer is best at -- interacting with a student repetitively without making a mistake or judging the student. And computers can even help in the U.S., especially in classrooms crowded with poor children who need far more attention that one teacher can give.

He does have a point in that CS is a very small discipline in terms of its body of knowledge (in relation to other STEM fields).

One needs to be careful with this kind of pronouncement. Computer science branches from mathematics in much the same way that chemistry branches from physics. The PC revolution matches the great blossoming of polymer chemistry dollar for dollar, decade for decade.

Just one word: octane.
Just one word: Isoniazid.
Just one word: plastics.
Just one word: lithograhy.
Just one word: Visicalc.
Just one word: infoglut.
Just one word: megadata.
Just one word: entanglement.

In Archimedes' Puzzle, a New Eureka Moment

Since I'm presently under the late-month NYT blackout (the mote in god's eye), here is a refracted redaction, via In Archimedes' Puzzle, a New Eureka Moment:

The Stomachion, concludes the historian, Dr. Reviel Netz, was far ahead of its time: a treatise on combinatorics, a field that did not come into its own until the rise of computer science. ...
"People assumed there wasn't any combinatorics in antiquity," he went on. "So it didn't trigger the observation when Archimedes says there are many arrangements and he will calculate them. But that's what Archimedes did; his introductions are always to the point."

Modern computer science is more about praxis that theory. But then, so is lithography. And music, too. Computer science is what you get if Mahler composed symphony of 100,000 as a jazz improvisation. There is no slight body of work to navigate to work yourself up from cowbells to timpani.

Again, you falsely label me as a Republican and assume I think Bush was great. Bush started a massive invasion and attempted erosion of our rights that Obama has continued and expanded. You assume I believe Obama is full of shit, and you are correct. However, your assumption of my view of Bush is incorrect, as he was full of shit as well.

It was not my intent to label you as a republican. It was a shotgun method of addressing you and others that have very similar views which happen to be the republican right. I'm considered a RINO myself even though my "liberal" views are very similar to that of Ronald Reagan that the right idolize. I don't think they like Reagan the person/president. They worship the myth of Reagan who was the most popular republican president in modern history therefore they pretend that Reagan had views similar to theirs and point to the myth as something that pattern themselves as.

You need to see more proposals. The title of "expert" in the organization is loosely applied. Kind of like "sanitation engineers" being real engineers. Many awards are indeed given toward legitimate research, but a strong bias does exist as to who gets the funds. Solyndra is no the only organization working on solar, but they certainly got a disproportionate amount of funds, which was certainly not an accident.

Well I think Solyndra was an earmark from the Obama administration. There is evidence that Obama ignore advisers concern about Solyndra and even insisted on using them as a campaign photo opportunity.

Earmarks are dead. They make up a smaller percentage of the budget than the R&D lines you are standing behind. And many earmarks supported very good programs that are now funded on their own lines. That system was abused, but every government process is abused. And when the earmarks went away, those that abused it didn't stop - they simply shifted their behavior to funding mechanisms you have not learned about yet.

Sorry earmarks are alive and well, the infamous earmark ban never passed congressional vote. However thanks to the Republicans in congress (only because they did this as a publicity stunt) it takes an even larger percentage of the R&D budget and it's less transparent (requires FOIA requests to agencies to uncover). This is how it works.

1. Publicly declare that they will no longer ask for earmarks in legislation.
2. Allocate the money that would have gone to the earmark to the agency that is closest to the function of the earmark. This provides legitimacy to the questionable earmark.
3. Send a letter to the head of the agency stating the intent of sending more money to the agency in exchange for the agency to allocate a portion of the money to the senator's pet project. This allows the agency to collect more money for their management in the form of overhead.

It's called Letter Marking and it's use has risen dramatically since the republican pledge for no more earmarks.

One example is Republican Senator Mark Steven Kirk who solicited the Department of Education (ironic considering the republican rhetoric) to release money "needed to support students and educational programs" in his district. It was later revealed that his district received an additional $1.1 million in stimulus money. More info can be found here.

Knowing how politicians are, I'm sure Democratic congressmen are just as prone to use such a tactic. Except maybe not as hypocritical.

Anyway despite the rampant letter marking, the overwhelming majority of the research grants issued by the government are competition based.

No oil under Afghanistan that I know of, but the Russians tried taking it over so they could build a pipeline from the Siberian oil fields to the Indian Ocean, chopping off a couple thousand miles of pipeline needed if they were going to rout it to Archangel. And on top of it, they'd get to load their tankers in calmer waters than the subArtic Pacific...

Exploitable wealth is not always oil. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html?pagewanted=all

You get adequate care and treatment.

One can hope so.

Of course, some agency like NICE will decide for you what is cost effective. They decided that a "quality adjusted life year" was worth something like $45,500 in 2008 (the quality adjustment is to place less value on a year of life which is diminished by pain or the like). Attempts to do this in the US are met with screams of protest. Although, government agencies in the US, such as the EPA and state highway agencies, do regularly put a financial value on a year of life when making decisions and oddly this doesn't invoke much outrage (perhaps because in the case of the EPA it's generally impossible to prove that the lack of a regulation caused a particular disease or death and in the case of the highway agencies, one assumes they won't be the one to run off the cliff because there's no guardrail). However, Medicare is currently not allowed to consider price in determining what treatments will be covered.

Some of the "overkill" resulting in higher costs in the US system is the result of the lack of rationing.

Similarly, some of the "poorer outcomes" are the result of lack of such rationing - for example because sicker people in the US patients sometimes get treatment which would be denied in some single payer systems (this is true, for example, in end stage renal disease and may be true in the case of extremely premature babies).

The differences in attitudes between the general populace in the US with regards to medical care and some other "first world" countries is quite surprising. For example, a middle class person in the US who would benefit from hip replacement to reduce pain would expect to have the surgery (assuming they are in a condition to have it) in weeks while it's typical to wait for many months in Canada -- few middle class Americans I know would find this acceptable. When talking to someone from Canada not too long ago, I was quite surprised they were fine with the notion of living in unnecessary pain for six extra months. Some years ago I was in the UK talking to a vendor rep over dinner and she mentioned that she would be unavailable for a couple weeks due to upcoming surgery (I gathered it was some sort of abdominal surgery and was elective in its timing -- I can only guess what it might have been but I suspect 1/2 the population couldn't even have had this surgery because they lack the necessary parts) and I commented something like "Well, at least you don't have to pay for it due to your government healthcare system" and she gave me a look of shock and said something like "Oh, no - no one who can avoid it has this done in the government system -- I carry private insurance for things like this". She was a very "middle class" person who was on the marketing/sales side and the company she represented was obviously not a "big bucks" vendor. I don't know if this was common or still is, but it surprised me quite a bit.

Apple paid Xerox (in stocks) for the GUI and the mouse. Apple did not steal them - Xerox gave (sold) them away willingly.

Where does this ahistorical gibberish come from? Xerox sued Apple in 1989, claiming that that Apple ''intentionally and purposefully concealed'' the derivation of the Lisa and Macintosh software from Xerox software and that Apple's copyrights were invalid. (Xerox's suit was barred for technical reasons of standing.)

The technical reasons being that they licensed it.

We're today excavating Norse settlements that have been under ice for several hundred years. Do you research topics you post about at all?

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/science/story-of-viking-colonies-icy-pompeii-unfolds-from-ancient-greenland-farm.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110620095238.htm

You're not kidding. Xerox got 20% or 30% of Apple's stock in the deal. Kind of the opposite of stealing. It was one of those rare win-win deals - Xerox made out like bandits on their share of Apple stock, and Apple got a killer product that put them on the map for good.

And this is why Xerox sued Apple "accusing them of unlawfully using Xerox copyrights in its Macintosh and Lisa computers"?

From the article "Xerox contends that the Lisa and Macintosh software stems from work originally done by Xerox scientists and that it was used by Apple without permission."

As someone else posted this link above - Xerox sues Apple: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html

Apple paid Xerox (in stocks) for the GUI and the mouse. Apple did not steal them - Xerox gave (sold) them away willingly.

Where does this ahistorical gibberish come from? Xerox sued Apple in 1989, claiming that that Apple ''intentionally and purposefully concealed'' the derivation of the Lisa and Macintosh software from Xerox software and that Apple's copyrights were invalid. (Xerox's suit was barred for technical reasons of standing.)

I was born in Plantation, FL. I've lived in Sarasota, Tampa, Tallahassee, and Melbourne. I have relatives in Ft.Lauderdale and Miami. I've pretty much been everywhere in the state of Florida. Of course many people don't consider Florida "southern", especially south of I-4, but my point still stands. The state government of Florida is worse than the federal government, however hard that may be to fathom. But what should one expect from a state that chooses to elect a governor, Rick Scott, who was at the center of the largest Medicare fraud case of all time? The South continues to lag behind in most quality of life standards. This is not due primarily to the incompetence of the Federal government, but rather the incompetence of the people and governments of the South.

• The New York Times says deployed soldiers overseas cost us about $1 million per year, EACH.
• Wikipedia says that as of Dec 2010 we had 103,700 personnel in Afghanistan alone.

What are we currently accomplishing in Afghanistan? I am not saying we're not accomplishing anything, and I'm not saying it's not important... but ask yourself, "is it worth $103.7 billion a year? Is it 9 times more important than the Energy Department's Office of Science, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the U.S. Geological Survey? Because we're spending 9 times as much on Afghanistan per year as we are on all of that combined.

Is $103.7 billion a year in Afghanistan keeping us safe? Or is it just giving us a reason to keep giving the Pakistanis money that they use to pay terrorists to attack us there so we'll keep giving them money? A strike team killed Bin Laden, not a 103,000-person army. A drone killed Awlaki in Yemen last month. Diplomacy and support killed Qaddafi today. As a superpower in the 21st century, huge combat forces don't win wars, they are political liabilities and drains on the economic strength of the country.

Underwater Exploring Is Banned In Brazil, New York Times (25 June 1985)

RIO DE JANEIRO— A DISPUTE between the Brazilian Navy and an American marine archeologist has led Brazil to bar the diver from entering the country and to place a ban on all underwater exploration.

The dispute involves Robert Marx, a Florida author and treasure hunter, who asserts that the Brazilian Navy dumped a thick layer of silt on the remains of a Roman vessel that he discovered inside Rio de Janeiro's bay.

First off mercenaries (the more politically correct term being "Security Contractors") are more expensive than real soldiers. And he doesn't address the Military Intelligence Complex, even scarier than then Military Industrial Complex since their budget are a "black box", another word for "black hole". See "Frontline" and NPR for an analysis.
Some references:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/paul-plan-would-eliminate-cabinet-departments-to-cut-1-trillion/
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/06/140056904/the-top-secret-america-created-after-9-11
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/view/

It only cuts 10% of the workforce! What about the other 90%? That tells me he is not addressing the real problem see:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/paul-plan-would-eliminate-cabinet-departments-to-cut-1-trillion/

I think this is a symptom of a bigger problem that doesn't have a good solution: there are many more people than there are useful things for people to do. Eventually this will correct itself -- people will have fewer children because they have less money, but the time lag involved (~20 years for the kids already in the pipeline to get out) could mean unpleasant times ahead.

The fact of the matter is that lots of jobs are being automated away, from lawyers to factory workers. In the past, a field being automated meant people moved to working in an unautomated field, but we're out of them. Even many of the unautomated jobs could be automated. The only reason a person scans and bags your groceries is because people are still cheaper at doing that job than a machine. If the minimum wage gets raised too much, or those workers are required to have expensive health benefits, then machines may well be the cheaper option.

Apologies for going somewhat off topic, but I've become convinced by this pessimistic view, and I don't see any good solutions to the symptoms because I don't see a good solution to the problem -- barring some technological breakthrough that makes everything so cheap that it doesn't matter what people do.

Skip the paywall.. try this link or copy-paste this link when you hit the paywall. It ought to get you through.

Independence is well worth it and the research and experience will probably pay off for other projects as well.

There are 3 systems already: Russian, American, and the not-yet-complete Chinese. To be fair, the Chinese system is "secret", but there are already dual GLONASS/GPS receivers on the market. I can't imagine what calamity could wipe out 3 independent systems while sparing the new European one, but hey.

By the way, the Chinese use the same frequencies as the EU satellites, which means that the EU will always have to avoid interference with the Chinese system.

This might be helpful: Golden Cyberfetters

It's the New York Times site, they're supposed to allow outside linking to content behind their firewall, but I don't know if it works.

jiggawatts == gigawatts. It is just an alternate pronunciation, one more quirk of old Doc Brown.

cite

NYTimes has a piece about the lack of specific policy goals:

Protesters Debate What Demands, if Any, to Make

By MEREDITH HOFFMAN
Published: October 16, 2011

In a quiet corner across the street from Zuccotti Park, a cluster of 25 solemn-faced protesters struggled one night to give Occupy Wall Street what critics have found to be most lacking.

“We absolutely need demands,” said Shawn Redden, 35, an earnest history teacher in the group. “Like Frederick Douglass said, ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand.’ ”

The influence and staying power of Occupy Wall Street are undeniable: similar movements have sprouted around the world, as the original group enters its fifth week in the financial district. Yet a frequent criticism of the protesters has been the absence of specific policy demands. ...