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Just like it would have ended in 2009 if only McCain hadn't been elected? ...Oh, wait.

You're right, it'll actually be the end of 2011 by the time all American troops are out of Iraq. So maybe I should've said "It would have ended in 2007 if Bush hadn't been re-elected."

Don't forget, Kerry voted for the war. He wasn't going to be pulling us out of it.

We'll never know what he actually would've done, but I see no reason to focus on that vote in 2002 while ignoring the platform he was running on in 2004, which did include withdrawing from Iraq.

They sell fresh produce, it is only logical that they have some kind of fruit for their logo. It makes a lot more sense for company selling fruit to use fruit for logo as opposed to pc manufacturer using fruit for their logo. This reminds me of how Johnson&Johnson sued The American Red Cross for using the red cross symbol... that's RIGHT! The symbol of red cross on white background is a registered trademark so Johnson&Johnson sued The American Red Cross (the non-profit organization known for and named after a red cross) for using a red cross.

How long before some asshole trademarks the christian cross, the crescent moon and the star of David and sues everyone?

Read the book, Fast Food Nation The U.S. government allows abuses that are far, far worse and more extensive than mentioned in this New York Times article: E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Ground Beef Inspection.

http://www.theodora.com/wfbcurrent/israel/israel_economy.html

GDP (purchasing power parity):
$200.7 billion (2008 est.)
$193.2 billion (2007)
$183.3 billion (2006)
note: data are in 2008 US dollars

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/world/middleeast/17israel.html
Israel to Get $30 Billion in Military Aid From U.S.

This is a better breakdown, year by year:
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/114bill.html

This estimate of total U.S. direct aid to Israel updates the estimate given in the July 2006 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It is an estimate because arriving at an exact figure is not possible, since parts of U.S. aid to Israel are a) buried in the budgets of various U.S. agencies, mostly that of the Defense Department (DOD), or b) in a form not easily quantifiable, such as the early disbursement of aid, giving Israel a direct benefit in interest income and the U.S. Treasury a corresponding loss. Given these caveats, our current estimate of cumulative total direct aid to Israel is $113.8554 billion.

It must be emphasized that this analysis is a conservative, defensible accounting of U.S. direct aid to Israel, NOT of Israel's cost to the U.S. or the American taxpayer, nor of the benefits to Israel of U.S. aid.

One or two percent of GDP? Hmmmmm - how many nations are donating that much to MY country? I can't recall any headlines proclaiming the generosity of foreign nations giving aid to the United States.

According to a startling report just issued by the "New York Times", "senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired 'sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable' atom bomb." In 2007, American intelligence erroneously concluded that Tehran in 2003 stopped further research into designing [a] nuclear bomb. This [American] conclusion was contradicted by Germany, French, and Israeli intelligence. Recently, London has concluded that the American assessment is incorrect.

So, here we are. The Iranians have the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb and have been working relentlessly to perfect its design. Tehran is now creating the parts (e. g., enriched unranium) that can be assembled into such a weapon.

Meanwhile, Jerusalem is justifiably on the verge of ordering its military to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. Will Paris offer military support to the Israelis? A bombing mission against Iran is a difficult military operation and needs the assistance of the French superpower."

Flu shots are for people with weak immune systems and old people that are at higher risk to "die" from it.

And as it turns out, there's evidence that flu shots benefit to the elderly has been grossly overetimated, that previous studies claiming a benefit did not control for differences in the populations that get flu vaccines versus those that don't.

It's also interesting that (according to the story I linked above) there has not been a placebo-controlled trial of the flu vaccine. So, anyone out there who rails against any sort of complimentary/alternative medicine and says they would never receive a treatment that can't produce placebo-controlled trials, can't get flu shots. (Of course, you also can't get surgery...)

Widespread flu shots are a great subsidy to big pharma, but as a public health measure, they're a questionable use of resources.

Its interesting that all this blame is being put on the US, our culture, warmongering, Passport control, Obama, Bush, whatever, but the more I read about it, the more it sounds like the US bid failed because the USOC just failed and the tone of the Administration's pitch was wrong.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/sports/04usoc.html

In the lead up to the vote, there were killings in Chicago, fights over the Olympics, corruption over the Olympic bid, and just flat out Chicago style politics. Besides, Chicago in August, not where I want to be. New York and Chicago are poor choices for US Olympic pitches. LA, the Bay Area, Seattle or Denver would be better choices for Olympics in the US. LA showed how to make a profit from the Olympics, Seattle would show that mix of new and old industry and in a great place to live, Denver would show the frontier spirit that made the US and the glory of a modern sprawl ;).

Going for bling with no substance is par for the course.

See how Obama jumped in over his head, floundered, and only asked "What went wrong" after it was too late..

Like a complete amateur.

Hmmm, am I talking about cap-and-trade (dead), Obamacare (dead), Afghanistan (failing), closing Gitmo (not happening), pulling out of Iraq (we're waiting...), Iranian nukes (be good or the UN will send you a sternly-worded letter...) or the 2016 Olympics (major FAIL)? Could be any of those, couldn't it?

Read that NY Times editorial and find out.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/oct/03/ruling-rattles-mortgage-industry/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/business/27gret.html

No, some things are complex. To make laws is a highly complex issue, ...

A very good point. And I hasten to point out that without a version control system, it would be virtually impossible for a large group to craft such a complex thing as the linux kernel. Now, since making laws is a collaborative exercise often resulting in highly complex legislation (like health care reform), then it stands to reason that the only way to achieve its goals without lots of "bugs" (ie unintended consequences, resource leaks, missing features, etc) would be to use some form of version control with incremental, easily diffed and peer-reviewed changes. The reviews would of course be documented so the public could see the reasoning behind the various components of the laws, and the debates, pro and con, that went into them.

Unfortunately this is not how politics work. The so-called "debate" is actually more like horse-trading. I'll vote to include ammendment X if you vote to allow ammendment Y. Or we'll throw in ammendment Z to get the votes of this particular block. Sadly, openness, peer-reviewing and indeed rational thought are anathema to the political process. Instead, this is a process (at least in the US) that relies upon bizarre procedures and rules, bartering and extortion, featuring such tricks as filibustering (http://www.yuricareport.com/Law%20&%20Legal/Senate%20Rules%20on%20Filibuster.html) or procedural loopholes like reconciliation (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/us/politics/02hulse.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all). Small wonder we end up with so many unintended consequences.

they are invulnerable:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/business/worldbusiness/21iht-wto.html

PARIS -- In an unusual ruling Friday at the World Trade Organization, the tiny Caribbean nation of Antigua won the right to violate copyright protections on goods like films and music from the United States - worth up to $21 million - as part of a dispute between the two countries over online gambling.

The award comes after a WTO decision that Washington had wrongly blocked online gaming operators on the island from the American market at the same time it permitted online wagering on horse racing.

Antigua and Barbuda had claimed annual damages of $3.44 billion. That makes the relatively small amount awarded Friday, $21 million, something of a setback for Antigua, which had been struggling to preserve its booming gambling industry. The United States had claimed that its behavior had caused only $500,000 damage to the Antiguan economy.

Yet the ruling is significant in that it grants a rare form of compensation: the right of one country, in this case, Antigua, to violate intellectual property laws of another - the United States - by allowing them to distribute copies of American music, movie and software products, among other items.

i mean of course its all bullshit. the concept of intellectual property makes no moral, financial, logical, or philosophical sense in the internet age. but i guess we have to wait a few years for the vanguard of ignorant dinosaurs to die off

globalwarming please?

What warming? Seriously! We are on a downturn right now. Now that the climateaudit guys figured out that the famous "hockey stick graph" data was cherry picked, you have to wonder what all the hype is about.

cocksuckers. one side of the tech business is actively thinking "hmmm fossil fuels will be running out, WTF are we gonna do" whilst the other side goes "WOOOOOOOOOO! Wireless power! PARTY ON!"

Ummm. We have plenty of oil (highest levels since 2000). A friend of mine recently sent me this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/24/business/energy-environment/24oil.html?hp

"In fact, the actual data shows that newspapers almost always turn out to be very well matched in political slant to their readers. (As should be obvious, since if they weren't, they'd lose readers even faster than they now do.)" Hmmmm. And yet most large news papers are failing. Would this perhaps be some indication that *maybe* a certain type of political slant is not being represented well?

If it had been the case that particularly papers of "a certain type of political slant" that were failing, perhaps, but it's not.

But, more notably, it turns out that newspapers in general do tend to mirror the politics of their consistencies.

For data, here's a paper.
Here are the salient paragraphs from a summary: [from the data, it turned out that] "...the main driver of any slant was the newspaper's audience, not bias by the newspaper's owner. A comparison of circulation data (per capita) to the ratio of Republican to Democratic campaign contributions by ZIP code showed that circulation was strongly related to whether the newspaper matched the readers' own ideology... The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Dr. Shapiro put it in an interview, "The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers' demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales.""

Yeah, and I'm so far off-base right? Let's also not forget that unemployment numbers only measure the people currently receiving unemployment benefits, which is a subset of the total unemployed.

We haven't had an explicit nobility in the U.S. since we became a nation, but we've never become a truly classless society, http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/. As people with more wealth have tried to accrue more wealth, which is fine there is nothing wrong with wanting more money, it has to be taken from elsewhere. Unfortunately not everyone starts on a level playing field or plays by the rules, this only hurts everyone who does and eventually they realize that it doesn't benefit them to play by the rules and it leads to nothing but backroom deals and shady business practices.

I agree here!! I've been hearing rumblings that at least parts of this new Healthcare mandate they are putting forward will be challenged as being unconstitutional. This article has some information on it. And I thought I'd heard a talking head on tv cite an actual Supreme ct. case where they had ruled that medical procedures were not, in fact, subject to interstate commerce, thereby negating the feds ability to legislate it...? I can't find that one yet...but here is an article that alludes to this principal.

I thought that was very good. From his blog

24:

Given decentralized constrained optimization by maximizing agents with well-defined convex objective functions and/or convex production functions, engaging in exchange and production with free disposal, leads, in the absence of externalities, market power, and other distortions, there exists an equilibrium characterized by Pareto optimality.

7:

Greedy people, competing, make the world go round.

Microsoft also set aside that special $1,150,000,000 fund for repairing those loss leader Xbox 360s. Across the less than 12 million units it had shipped up to that point, that means the company dropped nearly another $100 per unit. Return rates were over 50% at one point, and are still fairly high.

Compared to that scale of money loss (and Sony's expensive effort to promote BluRay via the PS3), Nintendo's tiny Wii hardware profits look phenomenal. But they're still very thin margins and depend upon software licensing deals to make it worth doing.

--

Why Apple is betting on Light Peak with Intel: a love story

how about witching batteries ?
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/better-place-unveils-battery-swap-station/
that's a battery swapping station, like a fuel station, except you don't have to leave the car, and it is faster.

Do you have any suggested reading for me?

A good place to start for some not-too-numbers-heavy basic ideas would be John K Galbraith, The Affluent Society (or it might have been Almost Everybody's Guide to Economics -- they're dated, but they're focused on basic ideas of how economies work). John Galbraith (and to a lesser extent his son James) was a great writer of popular economics tracts, with reasonably middle-of-the-road politics (not one of the so-called "freshwater economists" that are typical of the hard-right, free-market-fundamentalist position that underlies a lot of our current government).

Having started there, you can look at some of Paul Krugman's work for again-popular treatments of more interesting problems; "The Return of Depression Economics" is a great book.

You also wouldn't go too wrong by lurking on some of the well-reputed economists' blogs; you'll pick up a fair amount by osmosis. Krugman's NY Times blog is good; Greg Mankiw's blog, and especially Brad DeLong. Like I said, you'll want a couple popular books under your belt, but from there since a lot of interesting economists these days are hip to the Internet and blog a lot, you can pick up a huge amount by watching them actually at work.

When you have a bit of background, you can also pick up an awful lot just by reading American history, too. Economists LOOOOVE to talk about the Great Depression; it was basically the equivalent of Einstein and Newton rolled into one for the field.

One more thing: you'll probably realize that there's a very major rift in the economics profession right now, divided between the so-called "freshwater economists" and "saltwater economists." With a little bit of reading you'll probably be able to identify which camp any given opinion falls into pretty quickly.

Anyway, hope this is helpful, it's vastly vague and incomplete, but at this point I don't even remember half of what I've flipped through at one point or another. Learning comes from everywhere :D

The best way to stop malware is to audit code so that it doesn't have vulnerabilities. The OpenBSD volunteers have been doing that for many years.

In my opinion, and the opinion of many others, the vulnerability of Microsoft products to malware is a result of Microsoft managers not allowing Microsoft programmers to finish their jobs.

When people have problems with their computer, they often buy a new computer. Then Microsoft sells another copy of Windows, which, of course, still has huge security risks. For examples, see the New York Times article Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster. Vulnerability to malware is very profitable for Microsoft and its main customers, who are computer manufacturers.

Solving the problems with malware will not be fully successful if Microsoft managers do not want it to be successful. Vulnerabilities are profitable when a company has a virtual monopoly.

This is slightly off-topic, but your original post reminded me of something a Stanford Professor whose name I'd forgotten was pushing -- he was essentially calling for developed countries to set up autonomous zones in 3rd world countries and transfer their laws and rulesets to the 3rd world. This wouldn't be colonialism because it would be done essentially altruistically and with a legally enforceable get-out clause.

A few hours after replying to your post I came across this article on the Freakonomics blog with an interview with him ... he's fleshed out his proposal a little more and calls it "Charter cities" these days. It certainly makes for very interesting reading, especially considering your point about whether a "culture is too fundamentally backward".

Personally, I don't believe any culture is too 'fundamentally backward', and that any culture where a middle class can be bootstrapped will do well -- the challenge is bootstrapping one, and here Romer's ideas are provocative and potentially very useful.

Please forgive me if I gave the I gave the impression that I believe there is only one problem in our school systems. This was one of the problems I encountered on a regular basis while attending our fine public schools. Even in the honors and AP classes and I was not the most brilliant student in the school.

What I do believe is the approach to education in the United States is structurally flawed and arguments such as smaller class size and more funding will fix the problem are a joke. If that is true, why do schools in other countries with a larger average class size that spend less per student consistently outperform US students?

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/class-size-around-the-world/

These are the latest figures I could find for per student spending around the world. They are old...

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_spe_per_sec_sch_stu-spending-per-secondary-school-student

There is also the problem that many Americans are inherently selfish. This results in "school funding being tied directly with property taxes" and "parents having to work three jobs to make ends meet, making them too tired when they get home to give a shit about if their kids did their homework."

http://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters
and try your home zip here
http://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters/polluters

how many bloggers are going to amass that kind of data
and which reporting affects people more, and matters more.

OOH-- my ipod tells on me!
frick- my kids have liver disease....

http://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters
and try your home zip here
http://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters/polluters

how many bloggers are going to amass that kind of data
and which reporting affects people more, and matters more.

OOH-- my ipod tells on me!
frick- my kids have liver disease....

Anyone have a link to that heinz video?

I tried hard to find it as I got a kick out of it but came up empty handed. I do have a link to our discussion on this as well as from there you can see that the videos were deleted on YouTube and have broken links on the NY Times. If only the NY Times was ballsy enough to cache them locally in the name of journalism :) Unfortunately there's not much left in the name of journalism these days ...

Also, if anyone has Don Hertzfeldt's e-mail address I'd chuck $20 at a paypal fund to commission him to make a video for a Win7 launch party. I mean his video for Johnson's Bean Lard (now with 50% more sodium!) made me want to purchase it.

Several years after that, the fourth stage contest could be for someone to actually send a man on a trajectory to hit Mars. Fifth stage could be an economical way to retrieve small bits of spacecraft and human body parts from the surface of Mars.

This is pretty much what Paul Davies and Lawrence Krauss have already been arguing for.

I wonder if they're volunteering to go first.

Several years after that, the fourth stage contest could be for someone to actually send a man on a trajectory to hit Mars. Fifth stage could be an economical way to retrieve small bits of spacecraft and human body parts from the surface of Mars.

This is pretty much what Paul Davies and Lawrence Krauss have already been arguing for.

I wonder if they're volunteering to go first.

Eh, there's a very real fear that nuclear weapons, if acquired by Iran, would lead to Nuclear war.

Either the leaders believe their own propaganda and really thing israel should be wiped off the map - or else Israel will believe the threat of Iran with nuclear weapons is too great, and order a pre-emptive strike which will THEN provoke Iran to launch them.

It's very hard to tell how much of what comes out of Iran is just saber-rattling propaganda, and how much is really batshit-crazy religious belief.

Given that these are the same iranian leaders who had men locked up, tortured & raped for protesting a fixed election, you should rephrase that to "... open homosexuality in anyone not associated with the mullahs in power ...".

Here's a little demonstration Iran's peaceful intentions; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/middleeast/29tehran.html?bl.

It wasn't rust, see: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/more-details-about-1959-bel-air-crash-test/

PS: Jeeps flip over at the slightest provocation ... and flip-overs are among the most likely-to-be-fatal type of accident.

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/more-details-about-1959-bel-air-crash-test/

"We didn't want to crash a museum piece," Mr. Zuby said. "We were not looking for one that had been restored for museum or show quality." But the vehicle had to have a solid structure, although a little surface rust would be acceptable.

They found what they wanted in Indiana. "The frame was sound and all the body panels were sound," he said. It had a 3.9-liter 6-cylinder engine and was in driving condition.

The car was bought for about $8,500 and had about 74,000 miles on the odometer, which was broken. It was trucked to the test center in Virginia.

Clearly, you've never heard of "food deserts." In the US, there are large areas of cities, predominately in the poor parts of town, where there are literally no grocery stores. If you don't have a car, and the bus system either doesn't go, or makes it very arduous to get to a grocery store in richer part of town, you simply don't go. Instead you head down to Mickey D's or the 7-Eleven and buy something to eat. No one believes that it's healthy, but you do what you've got to do. The NYT and the NYC Dept of City Planning reported on this phenomenon, complete with maps overlaying income, food availability, and obesity and diabetes rates.

A few people were calling shenanigans, claiming there was no drive train or that the IIHS used a vehicle with a rusted out frame.
So a writer for the NY Times caught up with "David Zuby, the senior vice president at the institute's crash-test center in Virginia"
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/more-details-about-1959-bel-air-crash-test/

Making it look like the initial login failed is one way, another is to tell you that your session timed out and that you need to reauthenticate to continue. If you're a very security-conscious customer you might catch on, but the overwhelming majority of people are going to be fooled by this. If the SMS message told you exactly what you were authorizing, it would go a long way towards defeating this kind of attack. Unless the attacker can intercept and modify the SMS message before it gets to you, you're going to see what's really going on.

SiteKey is practically useless. People either don't notice that the picture is missing, or they're so used to answering security questions that they just go ahead and do it without thinking.

Whoa. Fat kid step on your puppy or something?

I am not too keen on the whole vilify-the-fatties thing, because this is NOT 100% an issue of individual actions. We are influenced by our friends, we are influenced by physical cues. We also subsidize fat in various ways, everything from relatively low taxes on gasoline (easier to drive than to walk/bike or walk to transit) to crazy farm policies. This stuff didn't just happen in a vacuum.

I had mod points today (still have 'em). Went through this story at -1, read everything carefully before I added my mods. After having taken the effort to read all the opinions and comments, when I got to the end, I had to log out without actually moderating anything. There's something which no one has pointed out and seems to contradict the majority of justifications for the march of the storm troopers (although there is no possible justification for trapping college kids in a stairwell to tear gas them).

It's a story in the New York Times. "Thousands Hold Peaceful March at G-20 Summit"

And there's a slide show, too (linked on the same page) -- "G20 Protest Turns Peaceful."

'Nuff said.

A link to the marketplace audio or article would be nice.

I'm going to assume, based on the topic "unwinding the bailout" that these "loans" they speak of were the funds they gave to the banks to prevent them from collapsing. A quick google renders multiple headlines stating that some banks are in fact repaying the bail-out monies:

http://www.google.com/search?q=banks+return+bail+out+money&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

And what is this... "As Banks Repay Bailout Money, U.S. Sees a Profit"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/business/economy/31taxpayer.html

Now I'm not saying that the government and thus the taxpayers are not going to lose money. I'm just pointing out that some of the bail out money is being returned. Will we get back every dollar we put into it? Probably not, but that's not what you are saying. What you said is that none of these loans, implying the bail out funds given to individual companies, will be repaid, and from what I can see that is not true.

We know why most audio CDs cost $17.99. Illegal price fixing.

We know why video games cost $60. Illegal price fixing.

The FTC and the Justice Department's antitrust unit were out to lunch during the Bush administration, but that seems to be changing. Stay tuned for enforcement.

Actually, no, you are completely wrong.

Not all searches require a warrant and not all wiretaps require a warrant. This has been and is upheld by the courts. It's not a violation of the 4th amendment either.

Now, the courts and congress, since the very first session, has maintained that the right of sovereignty and the protection of that sovereignty makes searches at the borders and communications entering the country reasonable search under the 4th amendment. This is laws made by the very same founding fathers who wrote the constitution in the first place. I believe their interpretation of the 4th to be more legitimate then yours.

What about when the neighboring farms spread their unwanted "Natural" pollen to the GE farms? Why is that not an actionable offense?

You farm, you pretty much either accept what pollen comes your way or you plant hybrids that do not need pollination to fruit.

Pollen only affects seed production. Not root crops.

Unless you grow and replant your own seed, what the wind blows from the neighbor does root crops no harm. For those raising seed crop, this might be a problem, but so would being down-wind from a so called "natural" seed farm. (Which of course do not exist, as the seed stock has been artificially selected for centuries).

This is, when all is said and done, a situation where one farmer is getting out-produced by the next, and having difficulty selling his crop. Rather than proving his crop is better, they run to a judge.

Norman Borlaug is turning in his fresh grave. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/energy-environment/14borlaug.html?_r=1

I agree. Bush did too little to correct the lending practices that led up to the troubled asset relief program (TARP). So where did it originate?

Roots of the Crisis
The cause of this crisis is the overly relaxed lending from 2000 onwards. Bankers driven by bonus targets lent to families who could not afford the mortgages: today there are five million American homeowners delinquent or in foreclosure. This is no longer a sub-prime lending problem, but a lending problem as excess home inventories push down all home prices.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/09/28/franks_fingerprints_are_all_over_the_financial_fiasco/t/

So what is the root of the lending that created all the troubled assets?
The first time was in 1922.
See PDF from this page
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E01E7DA1339E133A25752C2A9639C946395D6CF
and in 1929 the economy imploded.

Again in 2000, followed by about 8-9 years.
Here is the root again;
http://americaswatchtower.com/2009/06/24/barney-frank-asks-fannie-mae-to-easy-up-on-loan-regulations-will-he-ever-learn/

"The architect of the mortgage meltdown is once again asking Fanny Mae to ease up on their loan regulations. This is exactly what got us into this trouble in the first place. Even as the mortgage industry was in trouble Barney Frank denied that there was any problem with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Even as President Bush and John McCain were trying to warn of the impending crisis Barney Frank was in denial."

The start is here;

The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/09/28/franks_fingerprints_are_all_over_the_financial_fiasco/

So yes, Bush is at fault for not stopping it. He warned about it and left it to fall apart on it's own.

If ESC treatments become viable, IVF leftovers do not provide a sufficient supply for more than a tiny fraction of the people who would request treatment

Citation needed. These are self-renewing cells. It's not like you need to sacrifice one embryo for each patient.

True -- in some previous treatments, each patient may be implanted with brain tissue from as many as seven aborted donors. Granted, that was before isolated stem cells were in use, but for ESCs to move from the laboratory into the doctor's office, unless we plan on keeping all of our patients on immunosuppressants, I was under the impression that SCNT or some other form of "therapeutic cloning" is necessary to obtain ESCs that are usable cells that won't cause rejection. Ultimately you're right -- it's hard to say what would be like in the future, but unless I'm missing some important fact of cell biology, this is one of the serious bottlenecks on the horizon.

So that's a real gap in my knowledge -- IVF embryos are perfectly usable for research, but does another method exist for taking a pre-existing ESC and making a rejection-free compatible cell line from it? All of what I've read has pointed to either pointed to SCNT or induced pluri-potency in ASCs as the "best ideas running" for obtaining usable stem cells for treatment. Am I correct in thinking that, or what are some of the other ideas being floated?

You slipped "people" in there. You realize of course that's a not exactly a clear cut issue. It's a major difference between the execution and ESC.

Perhaps I should have used the word "human"?

If one (such as James Thomson) says that there are 400,000 frozen human embryos that are going to be incinerated anyways, and we should at least put that life to good use before it is destroyed, that's one thing -- but I don't think we can simply ram past this issue and ignore the fact that such human treatment makes anyone who thinks about it at least a little uncomfortable.

I don't think enough people would be willing to spend their tax money on defense to actually support an army.

Are placing the government's role in scientific research on parallel with the government's role in national defense?

The idea that you should get to decide where your taxes go has been thoroughly rejected in our government, because when it comes down to it, no one actually WANTS to be paying taxes at all, and few if any people realize the actual value of all government programs.

While you and I may both not fully understand the value of government-run programs, it seems that you and I may disagree on the actual value of personal liberty in a society. Everyone agrees that totalitarian governments are the best at getting things done, and forced labor has always been the most efficient means of production. But just because something is effective doesn't mean that it is morally or ethically sound.

However, you and I may be at a disconnect here, since I'm basing my case on ethics that you don't seem to share. Impasse?

There isn't enough cash to go around, but you should be trying to cut the waste as opposed to promising but not yet mature technology.

Def. agree w/ you re: cutting waste.

Promising technology? Relative to ASC treatments, the numbers would seem to show that ESC isn't as promising (unless you feel there is no true distinction?).

You also seem to feel that there is no moral component to any of this, and you seem frustrated that anyone would balk at the idea of ESC research and treatment.

I don't think people should get a say on highly tecnhnical issues when they remain stubbornly uninformed on those issues.

Well to remove this from the realm of abstract third-parties

The first US phase 1 trial, yes. The FDA couldn't have approved the first neural stem cell trial because it was conducted in Sweden by Hakan Widner in 1982 http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/26/us/success-reported-using-fetal-tissue-to-repair-a-brain.html

George Carillo was the first recipient. He was the first and worst of the 'frozen addicts' covered in J William Langston's "The Case of the Frozen Addicts". His and others' poisoning by MPTP contaminated home made fentanyl resulted in Parkinsonism, which was partially reversed by fetal neural cell grafting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP

Their misfortune and subsequent treatment contributed to our now extensive understanding of Parkinson's and of the dopamine system, understanding that contributed to the success of Drs Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, and Eric R. Kandel, recipients of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology. It also contributed to the discovery of endogenous MPTP, and that its conversion to MPP+ in neural mitochondria could be blocked in a majority of cases by trimethylnaphthoquinone, an MAO inhibitor found in tobacco.

I think the author's gripe is with transfer pricing, which is seen by some as a way to abuse the tax system. Wikipedia probably explains it better than I can but it is a fairly ordinary course for a business to engage in transfer pricing (shifting of intangibles including IP within its subsidiaries to minimize tax) and there are a lot of complex rules and regulations involved (albeit, mostly on international level). But some view it a way to abuse the tax system and there has been a lot of controversies involved:

1. Google - http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2007/11/is-google-a-tax.html
2. Amazon - http://www.reuters.com/article/industryNews/idUSTRE5640CR20090705 (here Amazon was hit with about 100M in fines by the Japanese authority).
3. U2 - http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/u2-respond-to-critics-of-their-deal-with-the-taxman/

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_pricing

My view is that it is not (but then again, my view is no corporate tax and high VAT), but I think it is a legitimate criticism.

Perfect example.

Even though most would consider the NY Times to have some real premium content worthy of paying for, they couldn't make it work. How are any other news sites going to?

http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/ts/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13water.html

Not exactly, in an ideal world that might be true, but many water systems are contaminated.

It sounds a little silly, but how different is it from other copyrights? I think most people would agree that culinary arts are as as much an exercise in creativity as visual or audio art. A particular combination of available flavors creates whole greater than the sum. Certainly copyrighting a recipe doesn't seem any different to me than a piece of software code. I guess the weak part in Malaysia's claim is that they seem to be trying to retroactively pull public domain works (recipes that have been around for generations) back into the copyrighted realm, but even that is nothing new. If they can get back the rights to their ethnic food, it seems like Beethoven's descendants should be able to continue collecting royalties on his works.

The British came up with public key encryption well before Diffie & Hellman but since the work was for the secret service it was all highly classified. The work belonged to the government and couldn't be patented for profit as RSA has been. Bit hard to be part of history if it's all totally hush hush.

Can't remember where I heard this, some Discovery channel programme probably, but the guy that did a lot of the work wasn't allowed to take anything out of the secure building he worked in and nor was he allowed to write anything down so alledgedly did all his mathematical work in his head. Bit hard to believe really but not that implausible.