Slashdot Mirror

Your blinders are showing.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_06/018561.php

http://gawker.com/5286144/the-rise-of-right+wing-violence

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/3/21/73725/4486

http://mnpublius.com/2010/03/gingrich-right-wing-violence-is-dems-fault/

What planet do you live on??

Things aren't perfect - they rarely are after a national low-point like the Bush administration. But the unemployment rate is going down, the economy is actually creating jobs, and America is no longer the world's loud and violent 'special needs' child.

I didn't think anyone would be dumb enough to actually defend to Bush administration, or say that things were better under Bush than Obama. I guess your just here to remind us that Americans are terrible at learning from history.

I have a feeling that you won't be able to understand anything more nuanced than a picture, so please scroll down this linked article and look at the chart that proves Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress turned around the economy.

Got the nards to compare the MONTHLY Obama/Pelosi deficits with the YEARLY Bush ones?

Greece, here we come!

"Improved the economy"?!?! Which is why Captain Zero's asking for another 50 billion dollars so he can "save" the same jobs all over again? How many "unexpected" jumps in unemployment and how many "unforseen" drops in things like mortgage applications have to happen before you get your head out of your ass? Or is that Captain Zero's dick out of your mouth?

What planet do you live on??

Things aren't perfect - they rarely are after a national low-point like the Bush administration. But the unemployment rate is going down, the economy is actually creating jobs, and America is no longer the world's loud and violent 'special needs' child.

I didn't think anyone would be dumb enough to actually defend to Bush administration, or say that things were better under Bush than Obama. I guess your just here to remind us that Americans are terrible at learning from history.

I have a feeling that you won't be able to understand anything more nuanced than a picture, so please scroll down this linked article and look at the chart that proves Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress turned around the economy.

During and after Katrina everyone attacked Bush, often very personal attacks for the Federal and even state responses to that event.

Yet here we are nearly two months after this started and there has been very little vitriolic attacking on the current President.

Why is that I wonder? The Obama administration was in charge of the offices at the Interior that oversaw this and no changes were made. The Justice Department could have been turned on to BP and people could be in jail right now, but nothing was done.

I'll field this one.

Why is the difference between Deepwater and Katrina? Well multiple reasons. First, Katrina was a natural disaster, and Deepwater was a man-made one, no matter how many times BP and anti-government apologists claim it was a "natural disaster" or an "Act of God". While not all the facts are in, it's looking increasingly likely criminal negligence and lack of proper enforcement of regulations due to long time corruption in the Mines and Minerals Service are to blame. The government has always had a role in the preparation and recovery after natural disasters. In fact, there's a whole agency dedicated just to that, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. States and even large cities have similar agencies. Man made disasters? Not so much. The government simply doesn't have the tools or expertise in repairing deepwater drills. It never did. Now we can argue whether or not the government should have the tools and the expertise in-house for future events, but it has never had this. Second, Katrina had warning. Days of warning for Katrina specifically, and years of warning about the possibility. Sadly, the devastation of Katrina pretty much played out exactly as predicted. The Bush Administration simply failed to prepare because he appointed political allies instead of the (albeit recent) tradition of professional emergency managers. Finally, and this is the biggest difference. The economic and human toll of the two disasters are simply incomparable. The death toll for Katrina is literally 100 times greater. The economic impact is equally disproportionate.

You talk about coverups, but the only coverup I'm aware of is BP's not the government's. Keep in mind, BP was repeatedly denying access to the site by outsiders and providing the absurdly low estimates. Not the Coast Guard, nor any other government agency.

Oh, and he apparently doesn't like our state seal, either.

This is but one of many shenanigans the new Virginia AG is involved in.

sPh

DNA has been getting relied on heavily lately to solve otherwise cold cases. States have started running crime scene evidence through DNA databases wholesale, and then running with whatever match they get, even if it's just a partial.

Think about it: if there's a one in a million chance that the DNA will match, and you have a 20 million person database, then you're going to get 20 matches. Now just find the guy who's most convenient to prosecute. Boom, instant cold case conversion!

DNA's Dirty Little Secret: a forensic tool renowned for exonerating the innocent may actually be putting them in prison
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1003.bobelian.html

Also:

New Rule Allows Use of Partial DNA Matches
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/nyregion/25dna.html

DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18dna.html

Here's an article I read a while back about who's behind these changes. I thought it was rather interesting but alarming at the same time.

Here is some information on the recent incredible rise in filibusters:
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2009/11/25/the-staggering-rise-of-the-filibuster.html

http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2010/01/25/how-the-filibuster-changed-and-brought-tyranny-of-the-minority.html

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1933802,00.html

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_02/016901.php

This is NOT business as usual. This is obstructionism, plain and simple. The Democrats are more than willing to debate, but what the Republicans are doing is not debate. The voters are desperate for change, though, and the Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot.

Thankfully, Obama is spearheading a reform of the filibuster. Hopefully, the Democrats will force the Republicans to play their filibuster card over and over again, to demonstrate to the people that the Republican party is the party of NO. That is the answer the Republicans are providing to this country's problems: don't let the Democrats 'score points' by doing anything useful.

However, the Republicans will find that people do not look kindly on people who, though they have no answers or plans of their own, nonetheless obstruct anyone who does.

... and you conveniently overlook that it was the Bush administration that encouraged and started the stimulus spending before Obama took office.

I am a conservative and feel that Bush was a rather moderate Republican. He made mistakes and I disagreed with him a lot.

And, most notably, he was not a conservative.

Yeah, in our system, we may pay a lot more money and get worse results than, you know, everyone else in the developed world... but hey, at least we don't have government bureaucrats* getting between us and our doctors! USA! USA!

* Instead, we have bureaucrats from the for-profit insurance companies, who make money by denying us care, and answer to no one but their stockholders.

they have problems communicating with other planes:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/09/AR2009070903020_4.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2009071001019

and don't seem to like the rain:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_07/019076.php

among other things like jammed canopies.

And it's funny too. People who don't like unions, bloated government and stimulus packages seem to think the government owes them a job when it comes to flawed weapons systems and unneeded military bases.

But it's nice to see A10s and B52s still in service. Made dack when the US actually knew how to build something.

Certainly all those thoughts are legitimately expressed in the United States, even though many of these shows occur at times when young children would be expected to listen. We assume that these are just words, and hearing that gay people should be punished, or that Lutheran doctors might deserve to be murdered are just words and will not effect them. This is the same logic we use to support the distribution of other content that reasonable people might find objectionable. Of course merely being objectionable does not make it subject to regulation. We may not agree that shooting police in a video games is acceptable, or verbally promoting the murder of large groups of people based on superficial characteristics, or limited opposition speech, but that does not mean we can regulate it

Of course Germany has a history of hate speech escalating to mass murder, so they have different tolerance to such entertainment

Stanford University has been "gaming the system" for years. The following excerpt was published almost a decade ago:

Not surprisingly, there is evidence that schools alter policies for the sake of rankings. This isn't automatically bad; most of what U.S. News encourages is pretty good. But because U.S. News doesn't measure the most important thing on campus--actual learning--it is pushing colleges to prioritize in ways that are not necessarily the best. In a sense, the rankings are like a professor who ignores the content of her student's papers and instead bases her grades only on spelling and punctuation.
[...]
The introduction of U.S. News' category of "percentage of alumni who give" also significantly affected fundraising. When I was at Stanford, student groups were paid $25 an hour to solicit donations from alumni and, on the one shift I worked, were specifically told to mention that any donation would increase our ranking.

(Source: "Playing with Numbers", by Nicholas Thompson, in the Washington Monthly, September 2000,
at the link: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0009.thompson.html)

Despite its high US News and World Report ranking, Stanford has significant problems. An article in the Stanford Report by Ray Delgado (published May 19, 2004) admitted that Stanford's faculty members are apathetic towards undergraduates:

Acknowledging that undergraduate advising and mentoring programs at the university fall "below the standards" set in other undergraduate education reforms, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education John Bravman announced several new initiatives that should significantly alter the experience for students and their advisers. ...
Bravman cited a number of issues that have contributed to disappointing experiences for many.
-Faculty participation in advising has dropped from as much as 48 percent in the late 1970s to 12 to 15 percent today, partly due to ever-increasing demands on their time.
-Some advisers complained that they were matched with groups of students with nothing in common with each other or their adviser and felt uncomfortable participating in the standard socialization events. He said some faculty also complained about having too much information to digest when they became advisers. ...
[Vice Provost Bravman said] "I think 15 percent is just a number that we should not be happy with. As a reasonable goal, I would love to get back to the point where we have half of our advisers who are on the faculty."

Five years later from that report, nothing seems to have changed:

[Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education] Bravman noted that the major impingement has been on his staff - 16 layoffs, five hires for revised roles and the loss of nine positions due to attrition have meant an 18 percent reduction in the Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education's non-lecturing staff. Further reductions have hit advising, which slashed the $750-per-year honoraria for its advisors and resulted in the loss of its HPAC (head peer academic coordinator) and peer advising programs, as well as the Sophomore Seminars and Sophomore College programs, which will face "continued reductions on the order of 15 to 20 percent." The latter two programs, Bravman said, are where students will feel the pain.

... Stephen Stedman...probed Bravman on the elimination of the HPAC program. The vice provost responded bluntly.

"We received evidence that HPACs were giving poor advice," he said. "The life experience of a 19-year-old is not optimized to offer advice to an 18-year-old."

(Source: "VPUE restructures", by Devin Banerjee in the Stanford Daily, May 15, 2009)

Complaints by students have been published:

Stan

My bad, only 3 out of 5 were charged with wrongdoing, Edgar was indicted but not charged. Thompson was apparently clean, though his firm did represent Ryan in court. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_12/015984.php

LOL,

Glad you found the article thought provoking. Unfortunately, that's not the one I intended :-). This is the one I meant to link to:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html [washingtonmonthly.com]

The other one perhaps does overstate the reality of rolling out VistA throughout the entire US health care system :-). But I guess if president-elect OBama wants to infuse a ton of money into the development of MUMPS programers, more power to him :-).

To your other points, I agree. I don't know what they'll do to continue supporting this system as programmers migrate out/retire and there are not MUMPS programmers to replace them. I've heard and/or read about the difficulties of coding in MUMPS, but have never looked at code myself.

As you point out, the cost of developing/deploying a large scale, scalable, customizable, thorough EMR is shockingly high. And one of the reasons I think most hospital systems don't want to touch it. The cost savings are too distal, and potentially lost when you lose a patient to another plan (because they changed jobs, health care benefits, or some such thing). Every preventive measure you take now is cost savings down the road. But if that patient leaves, you've just saved your competitor money ;-).

One last thing. We do have a complete pharmacy package built in to Vista. This includes physician order entry, medication history (including active, inactive and d/c'd meds), administration, refill history, etc... Physician practice isn't really an issue here cause our clinics are all subsumed under the main hospital, so the documentation end is no different than if the patient is seen during an inpatient admission. With that said, much of our outpatient scheduling package is integrated as well. I can review past appointments, records attached to that appointment, appointment history, whether the patient no-showed, cancelled, etc..., what diagnostic and procedures codes were attached to the visit, etc...
Finally, at least at my facility, we have two long term care "nursing home" units (a total of some 200+ beds). They are also part of the facility, so again everything is simply tied to VistA. No genetics module for sure. But they've really advanced on medical imaging. For example, I can pull up both the radiology reports and complete imaging from my desktop. The remote access on the imaging module is not yet available. In other words, I can't view CT scans from another facility. But otherwise, as a provider, it certainly covers the overwhelming majority of my day-to-day record management needs, regardless of setting.

take care,
jeff

LOL,

Glad you found the article thought provoking. Unfortunately, that's not the one I intended :-). This is the one I meant to link to:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html

The other one perhaps does overstate the reality of rolling out VistA throughout the entire US health care system :-). But I guess if president-elect OBama wants to infuse a ton of money into the development of MUMPS programers, more power to him :-).

To your other points, I agree. I don't know what they'll do to continue supporting this system as programmers migrate out/retire and there are not MUMPS programmers to replace them. I've heard and/or read about the difficulties of coding in MUMPS, but have never looked at code myself.

As you point out, the cost of developing/deploying a large scale, scalable, customizable, thorough EMR is shockingly high. And one of the reasons I think most hospital systems don't want to touch it. The cost savings are too distal, and potentially lost when you lose a patient to another plan (because they changed jobs, health care benefits, or some such thing). Every preventive measure you take now is cost savings down the road. But if that patient leaves, you've just saved your competitor money ;-).

One last thing. We do have a complete pharmacy package built in to Vista. This includes physician order entry, medication history (including active, inactive and d/c'd meds), administration, refill history, etc... Physician practice isn't really an issue here cause our clinics are all subsumed under the main hospital, so the documentation end is no different than if the patient is seen during an inpatient admission. With that said, much of our outpatient scheduling package is integrated as well. I can review past appointments, records attached to that appointment, appointment history, whether the patient no-showed, cancelled, etc..., what diagnostic and procedures codes were attached to the visit, etc...
Finally, at least at my facility, we have two long term care "nursing home" units (a total of some 200+ beds). They are also part of the facility, so again everything is simply tied to VistA. No genetics module for sure. But they've really advanced on medical imaging. For example, I can pull up both the radiology reports and complete imaging from my desktop. The remote access on the imaging module is not yet available. In other words, I can't view CT scans from another facility. But otherwise, as a provider, it certainly covers the overwhelming majority of my day-to-day record management needs, regardless of setting.

take care,
jeff

"...works better. The only real question is our government one of the worst and least efficient at performing tasks like these and is that likely to continue? Our government has already managed some of the worst implementations of social constructs around the world. Currently our healthcare system is one of them, but there are may more..."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html

jeff

I wanted to point out this article as well:

According to a newly declassified memo, not only did al-Libi provide us with false information suggesting that Iraq had trained al-Qaeda to use WMD, but U.S. intelligence had a pretty good idea the information was false as early as 2002. Colin Powell nonetheless presented this to the UN as credible evidence of Iraqi WMD programs in February 2003, shortly before we invaded Iraq.

Via Atrios, it turns out that we had excellent reasons to be skeptical of al-Libi's testimony. As Newsweek reported last year, al-Libi was one of the first test cases for Dick Cheney's campaign to introduce torture as a standard interrogation technique overseas, replacing the FBI's more mainstream methods:

        Al-Libi's capture, some sources say, was an early turning point in the government's internal debates over interrogation methods...."They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo" for more-fearsome Egyptian interrogations, says the ex-FBI official. "At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, 'You're going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I'm going to find your mother and I'm going to f--- her.' So we lost that fight."

So yeah, torture works if you just want to be told what you want to hear, and use that to mislead people into an unjustified war.

> Why do "net neutrality" advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a "series of tubes," and then trust them to regulate it?

A) Ted "Tubes" Stevens is a convicted felon who won't be in the Senate much longer (even if that count goes the other way, he'll get expelled by the Republicans and replaced by Gov. Sarah Palin).

B) There's no true competition among ISPs. If a backbone provider does this, we're screwed. Period. Full stop. You can't just stop using the backbones. That's why they're backbones. The only way we can force them to listen is with regulation.

So it's not like we want regulation per se, it's more like regulation is the only way to keep them honest. Unless you know of some other way to control the behavior of natural monopolies that doesn't require duplicating billions of dollars of infrastructure when we've already paid for it once?

But you're right. Regulation is a responsibility. We can't just let the rules grow into a huge morass. We have to be careful to come up with clear, simple restrictions like "You cannot throttle traffic based on its destination unless it's part of a DoS attack." Let customers do their own QoS. They know better than the ISP what they want to prioritize, anyhow.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118781024289705455.html?mod=home_health_right

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_10/007290.php

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/nyregion/06health.html?pagewanted=print

See http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0506.roth.html for a nice summary of the issue I'm talking about. I believe 35 U.S.C. section 42 is the law in question re: USPTO self-funding.

From the article:

Then, in 1991, under pressure to reign in massive budget deficits, lawmakers passed (and President George H.W. Bush signed) a law that revolutionized the way the patent office does business. Borrowing ideas then in vogue among private sector consultants and CEOs to "reengineer" organizations to make them more "customer-driven," Congress instructed the patent office, which had always been funded from government revenues, to now pay its own way through fees charged to applicants, and to make the process of winning a patent easier on them.

In many ways, these changes worked exactly as planned. Partly because patents were easier to get and partly because the 1990s were a period of explosive technological innovation, the agency saw a rush of new business. Patent applications more than doubled from 178,083 in 1991 to 355,418 in 2003. The office became self-financing and flush with cash. Congress was even able to tap its surplus pool of user fees to help pay down the federal deficit. The patent office hired new examiners, and in 2003, moved into fancy new headquarters in a billboard property along the George Washington Parkway near the Pentagon.

The 1991 decision to make the PTO pay for itself, however, has created a series of perverse incentives that encourage the office to approve undeserving applications, and has made it easier for applicants to game the system.

Because each new application now brings in a $380 fee, the agency has an incentive to approve those patents sending a signal to the market to apply for more. Additionally, patent-holders pay annual maintenance fees for the first 12 years of a patent's life, meaning that each approved patent brings in a total of over $3,000 to the office. So every patent issued means a bigger budget for the patent office, and helps to guarantee that Congress will continue to look kindly on the office. "It's like telling the Treasury Department, go call the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and tell them that they're gonna get paid by how many twenties they print," says David Martin, who runs M-CAM, an intellectual-property consulting firm based in Charlottesville, Va., and has testified frequently before Congress about the patent system.

That wasn't the point of Joe's question. Joe stated he wanted to buy a business and hoped that his hard work would bring in more than 250K. Obama stated that he wanted to take that success and spread it to people that made less than Joe hoped to make with his business acquisition and hard work.

One very, very rarely makes an income of more than a quarter of a million dollars in a year solely through one's own hard work. One usually makes it by leaching, to some degree, off the hard work of others. (The exceptions are mostly matters of dumb luck - a superstar performer getting "discovered", for example.)

And the answer to the GP's question is, yes, Joe (who is not really a plumber, under city of Toledo regulations) would get a tax break even if he owned the business, as will the vast majority of small businesses, assuming an Obama victory and that his plan goes ahead pretty much as stated.

It's one thing to say you want to "tax the rich" to fund the government, it's another when you want to do it to give other people the money, i.e., "Spread the Wealth".

In our capitalist system, the government does a tremendous amount to help those who have wealth, get more. It's so basic to the system we rarely think about it, but how much concentration of wealth would there be without government-issued corporate charters, land and resource deeds, copyrights, and patents? Not to mention a reserve banking system that lets privately owned banks make money out of thin air, and an economic policy that uses the DJIA as a measure of economic success.

These government actions and policies are so successful at concentrating wealth that the top 20 percent own 90% of all financial wealth. And it stays in the family; the U.S. has lower intergenerational mobility than France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway or Denmark

The small effects of progressive taxation and social spending - spreading around the wealth that other government policies helped concentrate - act as a (small and inadequate) governor on the machinery of state capitalism.

Now, I would rather get rid of that machinery entirely, but I think that unlikely, at least in the near term. If we're going to have it, I'm all for decreasing the power of the government to help the wealthy become wealthier by adding some negative feedback to the system.

Can you provide some sources for this?

• $200 Billion Broadband Scandal
• Universal Service Fund
• Broadband Penetration: An Empirical Analysis of State and Federal Policies
• "Verizon, for instance, didn't complain last fall when Pennsylvania handed them subsidies for broadband deployment worth nearly 10 times what Wireless Philadelphia will cost. Neither did Comcast object when Philadelphia approved a $30 million grant to build a skyscraper that will house its headquarters. To the incumbent providers, "unfair competition" means any competition at all."

Falcon

It's known as the "Flesh and Blood Defense." It's complete rubbish, but those who never graduated high school may find it realistic. Backstory

here are some links to what the gp is talking about, well i think he's talking about, just me googling and such http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_05/006282.php http://articles.latimes.com/2005/apr/03/opinion/oe-kinsley3 and i think there are links inside those to take you onto more references

Iraq may have been involved with 9/11, though maybe not.

Well, the bipartisan 9/11 commission said, "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." [emphasis mine] And in case you think that was just politicized or the analysis incompetent, the Washington Post reported, "In testimony before the commission, CIA and FBI officials said they agreed with the staff report's assessment of the abortive relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq. A CIA counterterrorism analyst who testified using the pseudonym Ted Davis said, 'We're in full agreement with the staff statement,' which he said did 'an excellent job' of representing the agency's current understanding of the al Qaeda-Iraq relationship." Finally, even President Bush has said, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks." So, essentially, the President, Congress, the CIA, and the FBI don't think there was a connection.

They were tied to the '93 WTC attack

Again, the experts disagree. As one article puts it, "In sum, by the mid-'90s, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the F.B.I., the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the C.I.A., the N.S.C., and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack."

the '95 OKC attack

Given McVeigh's ideology, this doesn't even make much sense. Also, remember, he fought against the Iraqis in the first Gulf War. Again, the investigation into the attack did not turn up such a link, and the only claims I can find for such a link are right in the run up to the most recent Iraq War (and not particularly credible).

But somehow, Clinton looks like a saint and Bush made it all up.

Saint BJ? Leaving aside irrelevant comparisons to Clinton, the fact is that the Bush administration made many false and misleading statements about Iraq in the run up to war. People who want to deny that try to focus on the question of whether Iraq was a threat, but that is not what they lied about. Many governments believed there was some level of threat from Iraq, but the lies from the Bush administration came in the details and the claimed level of certainty. They presented tenuous or already discredited (within the intelligence community) claims as solid. They had reason to believe some things based upon circumstantial evidence, but in describing them they used phrases like "no doubt," which you can find in the transcripts of interviews with multiple administration officials. Given that few outside the administration had access to classified intelligence, and only the administration had the ability to release (declassify) information, there was very little way for anyone to expose these falsehoods. All the false and misleading statements are way too numerous to list, but thankfully someone has gone to the trouble to catalog them.

When a public servant is in that position of power and trust and something as important as going to war is on the line, we the people must demand honesty and cannot tolerate that sort of deception. You can have a different opinion about th

I'm rather impressed that you can inveigh against profligate spending and support infinite imperial military ventures overseas under the "libertarian" banner. (Please drop the figleaf of concern over human rights. It's gone past laughable at this point and straight into grotesque.) And also that you can pretend that the unprovoked and murderous invasion of another country is going to "reduce spending".

Also, unless you're making over $225k per year, you'll do better tax-wise under Obama than McCain. (Source.) But, I mean, if you want to shill for rich people to keep more of their money, that's fine. You should just be a bit more honest about it.

Remember, kids, it's strong-jawed libertarianism when rich people get their taxes cut, but it's "shiny candy from the government" for the rest of us.

What's going to happen is that there will be a severe wealth gap (gini coefficient) developing between those who do science and those who don't (aka. the shallow culture). This is already happening (as evidenced by the creative class: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html
and the geek class:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/opinion/23brooks.html
  and it will just get worse. There's not really too much to fear if you have a Science degree and a bit of business sense, but if you don't, watch out.

No amount of whining on slashdot, or politician concern will change it. It's a culture that has to change.

The real serious immediate threat facing America is the possibility of a terrorist group smuggling in a low grade weapon, nuclear, biological or chemical into the country and detonating it.

Actually, the chance of any of those happening is slight because of the technology required to create them. Nuclear and biological weapons, in particular, require a technological infrastructure which terrorists groups--especially the modern, non-state, distributed groups--don't have and, frankly, don't want. The insurgents in Iraq are doing fine with nothing more complicated than explosives, detonators, cel phones and RPGs. Even 9/11 was a decidedly low tech attack: hot building with big, flammable thing. Modern terrorism is about sascading system failures, and you don't need a nuke to do that. Look at the steadily declining amount of electricity available to the residents of Bagdhad to see how you can paralyze an entire city with nothing more than simple explosives and carefully chosen targets.

The real issue here is the Air Force's refusal to acknowledge that its force structure is out of step with the threats we're facing now. The Air Force wants more and more F-22s, even though the F-22 hasn't been near Iraq and Afghanistan and it won't go near them, as it's payload and loiter time are too small for close air support, which is all our pilots and aviators are doing over there. Air Force brass also continues to give short shrift to the A-10, even though it's uniquely suited to the present, and potential future, conflicts.

Take a look at the Air Force budget request for the next budget and you'll see it's stuffed full of shit we don't need. Meanwhile things we do need, like more airlift capacity, more tankers, etc., are being ignored because they don't go Mach 2. All of the services are having to adapt to the current realities. The Air Force is doing the worst job.

The other side of the issue is that the procurement system is completely broken, but that's a whole 'nother thread.

Regan talked about welfare queens.

And he was telling a lie and continued to tell even when called on it. If you want to do some research you will find that, before Welfare "Reform", the average stay on welfare was 1.9 years. Only about 5% of welfare recipients were on welfare for more than 5 years. It was actually one of the most efficient and effective social programs this country has ever undertaken.

That said, I do agree with you that the broken procurement system has enabled corporate welfare of the worst kind.

Please name one substantive change to patent law passed by Congress and signed into law by the President since 1982.

Okay. You asked for it, you got it Toyota.

I should note, though, that the USPTO generates a great deal of its own revenue in the form of fees related to the filing and prosecution of patents.

Precisely. And that's wrong.

It is an advantage to large rightsholders who can afford to pay periodic maintenance fees. However, it's a drawback to the small inventor who might have managed to patent his invention, but can find it falling into the public domain well before the expiration date because he couldn't afford to pay the fee. That's one example of how Congress skewed the patent system to serve corporate America at the expense of the independent inventor. Please don't tell me that it doesn't matter because the only significant innovation comes out of corporate labs. That's just not true. I have a few patents myself, and at the time I was just an independent developer contracting for a big company. I pushed the envelope enough, improved their product enough, that the new design was patentable. As it happens, I share those rights with a large corporation whose law firm picks up the tab for the maintenance fees.

This article describes much of what I'm talking about here and puts it better than I could. Here's a relevant passage:

Then, in 1991, under pressure to reign in massive budget deficits, lawmakers passed (and President George H.W. Bush signed) a law that revolutionized the way the patent office does business. Borrowing ideas then in vogue among private sector consultants and CEOs to "reengineer" organizations to make them more "customer-driven," Congress instructed the patent office, which had always been funded from government revenues, to now pay its own way through fees charged to applicants, and to make the process of winning a patent easier on them.

Here's another tidbit:

Additionally, patent-holders pay annual maintenance fees for the first 12 years of a patent's life, meaning that each approved patent brings in a total of over $3,000 to the office.

Consequently, due to Congress' fiddling (I would call it "malfeasance in office") the USPTO is now highly motivated to just issue the damn patent and let the courts sort it out later, because it is in the patent office's best interests to do so. It is not, however, in the best interests of the United States and its citizens for them to operate that way.

I suggest you read the rest of the article, it's very informative. So yeah, Congress did this, and they're the only ones that can fix it.

Not even close to the truth. Here's a quote from http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0207.schaeffer.html "The Bush administration faced a dilemma: How do you mount a stealth attack on environmental protection without making the most obvious mistakes of the Reagan-Gorsuch era? The first step was to appoint as EPA administrator Christine Whitman, who provides a moderate face, but already had a reputation for gutting anti-pollution enforcement programs while she was governor of New Jersey. Another was to leave the enforcement program rudderless: 18 months into his term, Bush has not yet filled the top EPA enforcement job (his first nominee, Donald Schregardus, withdrew amid criticism of his record running Ohio's program). Leaving the job unfilled not only deprives the staff of leadership, but also robs the administration's critics of an actual person to blame for poor performance. Bush political appointees in the White House and EPA quickly took up the many other ways of thwarting enforcement without drawing attention. Here are a few of their tricks:" And it goes on and on and on. Bush eviscerated the EPA.

I'm going to have to ask you to prove that one to me

I beg to differ. If you think the VA is crap, go to a private hospital. The VA consistently ranks better than any hospital system in the US. The following article is 2 years old, but it outlines how it beats the crap out of other hospital systems:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html

If you think the VA is bad, you can always go to your favorite HMO and have a higher chance of death.

Did I mention that the VA is a leader in hospital IT infrastructure and is decades ahead of other hospitals?

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

The VA is the largest hospital system in the US and its budget is decreased most years after adjusted for inflation. Given the predicament that Congress puts them in, they've done pretty well.

However, every single mistake they make is a public headline. Private hospitals have the luxury of being sued and quietly settle for $$$. Instead, the VA has to endure lots of bad publicity.

If the VA was a corporation, costs would skyrocket and even more corners would be cut. If you want to make it better, how about you ask Congress to provide adequate funding for the avalanche of people they are getting?

so how is that the USs fault? because russia and other states in the region havent laid sufficient fiber, the US is somehow responsible?

You miss the point. It isn't about who's "responsible" for anything. We recently passed something called the "Protect America Act"- in full view of everyone, ironically with limited public debate- that allows the American government to engage in warrantless surveillance of any Internet traffic routed through the United States if either or (commonly) both endpoints of that traffic lie in a foreign country.

And it turns out, surprise surprise, that most people in the world would rather not have their packets routed through a police state.

FEMA shows up with bluster and fake news and contributes what? How much better would the taxes that fund FEMA be used by CDF even with mismanagement like the 4 year C-130 retrofit that failed? Local is always better than federal so take back the money and power granted to FEMA.

Here is a source. It should be noted that US News uses student satisfaction and graduation rates as its criteria, and both UC Berkeley and MIT are well known for not being easy schools to attend, and I remember UC Berkeley having the lowest rate of student satisfaction in many national surveys, so if you're trying to assess a school to send your kids to, you should use the US News report -- but if you're trying to determine which are the best technical schools in the United States in terms of name-recognition and reputation -- then you should probably take a look at the report I just linked to.

For the record, I did go to Berkeley myself, and it's not an experience I would wish on my kids. I'd want for my kids an easier, smaller, less competitive, and more supportive environment than what I've received at Cal.

The original catastrophic failure statistics were supposed to be between one in 10,000 and 1 in 100,000. This is how the program was sold - a fleet of 8 shuttles with a launch a week, with a very low risk of loss during the life of the program. Real life is another story - total failure odds worse than 1 in 100, and turn-around times that are ludicrous and costly (nearly half a billion - disposables would be cheaper).

NASA also originally projected (1976) up to 75 flights a year ... for 10 to 12 years. Here's what the program looked like back in 1980 - a financial disaster. Read about the problems with ice and the tiles, and all the other bugaboos. The Saturn 5 could have outdone the shuttle in every way - cost per mission, payload to LEO (5-1/2x as much). Heck, the Saturn V could put twice as much in orbit around the MOON than the shuttle can put into earth orbit.

Everyone in the space community admits that the shuttles were a waste of money, draining funding from all other areas.

Here's a comparison of Canadian vs. U.S. health care from a peer-reviewed medical journal, by Gordon Guyatt, who is one of the world's top experts on comparing health care systems. The article points out that the U.S. health care system costs about twice as much per capita for the same or worse results.

http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/8/1

Open Medicine, Vol 1, No 1 (2007)

A systematic review of studies comparing health outcomes in Canada and the United States

Gordon H. Guyatt, P.J. Devereaux, Joel Lexchin, Samuel B. Stone, Armine Yalnizyan, David Himmelstein, Steffie Woolhandler, Qi Zhou, Laurie J. Goldsmith, Deborah J. Cook, Ted Haines, Christina Lacchetti, John N. Lavis, Terrence Sullivan, Ed Mills, Shelley Kraus, Neera Bhatnagar

ABSTRACT

Background: Differences in medical care in the United States compared with Canada, including greater reliance on private funding and for-profit delivery, as well as markedly higher expenditures, may result in different health outcomes.

Objectives: To systematically review studies comparing health outcomes in the United States and Canada among patients treated for similar underlying medical conditions.

Methods: We identified studies comparing health outcomes of patients in Canada and the United States by searching multiple bibliographic databases and resources. We masked study results before determining study eligibility. We abstracted study characteristics, including methodological quality and generalizability.

Results: We identified 38 studies comparing populations of patients in Canada and the United States. Studies addressed diverse problems, including cancer, coronary artery disease, chronic medical illnesses and surgical procedures. Of 10 studies that included extensive statistical adjustment and enrolled broad populations, 5 favoured Canada, 2 favoured the United States, and 3 showed equivalent or mixed results. Of 28 studies that failed one of these criteria, 9 favoured Canada, 3 favoured the United States, and 16 showed equivalent or mixed results. Overall, results for mortality favoured Canada (relative risk 0.95, 95% confidence interval 0.92-0.98, p = 0.002) but were very heterogeneous, and we failed to find convincing explanations for this heterogeneity. The only condition in which results consistently favoured one country was end-stage renal disease, in which Canadian patients fared better.

Interpretation: Available studies suggest that health outcomes may be superior in patients cared for in Canada versus the United States, but differences are not consistent.

Further reading on the Canada vs. U.S. comparison is:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/000 7.marmorsul.html
Canada's Burning!
Media myths about universal health coverage
By Theodore Marmor & Kip Sullivan

the difference between a high B average and a low A, for instance... that could mean the difference between admission to an elite private college and a less exclusive public one

Republicans at the state level want this too. It's even in TFA, if you care to RTFA. Of course, the blame will be shifted to Democrats, because we all know that Republicans never raise taxes...

"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with." ('Atlas Shrugged' 1957)

... brought you some of the "best care anywhere". From the article:

The Annals of Internal Medicine recently published a study that compared veterans health facilities with commercial managed-care systems in their treatment of diabetes patients. In seven out of seven measures of quality, the VA provided better care.

Also:

It gets stranger. Pushed by large employers who are eager to know what they are buying when they purchase health care for their employees, an outfit called the National Committee for Quality Assurance today ranks health-care plans on 17 different performance measures. These include how well the plans manage high blood pressure or how precisely they adhere to standard protocols of evidence-based medicine such as prescribing beta blockers for patients recovering from a heart attack. Winning NCQA's seal of approval is the gold standard in the health-care industry. And who do you suppose this year's winner is: Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every single category, the VHA system outperforms the highest rated non-VHA hospitals.

People need to just drop the idea that government-provided healthcare is somehow inferior. It's not. By almost any measure - patient satisfaction, outcomes, costs - the government run VA system is significantly better than private medicine. You don't need heavy sedation to believe it.

Funny thing, the VA system is actually some of the best care in America. Too bad you're too busy paying for your yacht to realize that...

...In 1991, under pressure to reign in massive budget deficits, lawmakers passed (and President George H.W. Bush signed) a law that revolutionized the way the patent office does business. Borrowing ideas then in vogue among private sector consultants and CEOs to "reengineer" organizations to make them more "customer-driven," Congress instructed the patent office, which had always been funded from government revenues, to now pay its own way through fees charged to applicants, and to make the process of winning a patent easier on them.

The patent office has not, however, tackled the more important issue of how companies use patents. Patenting a gene and releasing it into the public domain, as the National Institute of Health now usually does, harms no one. Some private companies, Incyte Genomics for example, have also earned reputations for allowing other companies to use their patents widely and cheaply, in no small part because money can often be made just as easily with lots of companies paying small fees to use a patent, instead of a few companies paying astronomical ones. But not everybody's sharing. Myriad Genetics, for example, used its patent over a gene that served as an indicator of breast cancer to stop research on it at the University of Pennsylvania. Two years ago, in another well-known case, the Miami Children's Hospital received a patent on a gene for the rare Canavan disease that it had identified in one of its patients, Jonathan Greenberg. Without informing Greenberg, the hospital set out to block free Canavan tests offered elsewhere.

"Major hepatitis C and HIV genes and various diabetes genes are all owned," Crichton, an M.D., tells us. "Researchers working on those diseases must worry about getting permission and paying high fees." During the SARS epidemic, he says, some researchers hesitated to study the virus because three groups claimed to own its genome. "It's OK to own a treatment or test for a disease, but no one should own a disease," he insists.

From: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1998/981 0.califano.prescripton.html:
"If we don't deal with alcohol and drug abuse and revamp our system of crime and justice, one of every 20 Americans born in 1997 will spend some time in jail ..."

I assume that for earlier cohorts the percentage is less that 1 in 20. Are you just pessimistic by nature? Anyway, where do your figures come from?

This is obviously a rare case event, but even the rarest events have to happen to someone; luckily for me, I didn't get hurt. Even if you don't believe this story (and I'm not expecting you to after all, this is Slashdot), at least admit that it carries more weight than the "SUV flipping over because they are too wide and trip on guardrails" claim.

Okay, let's check my memory of Bradsher's "High and Mighty" (2002). Here's some quotes, from pages 153-156 (trade paper, 2003 edition published by publicaffairs):

Federally funded tests have found that SUV drivers can face disaster if they strike a glancing blow at high speed against a guardrail with a top edge at 26 inches or lower. The rail can either "trip" the vehicle, causing it to roll over, or may even fail to keep the SUV on the road at all.

Even when guardrails are high enough to prevent vehicles from going over the top, their design poses special risks for SUVs. The problem, once again, is that SUVs are designed for off-road driving and have the wheels placed differently from car wheels.

The SUV's front wheels are close to the front of the vehicle with very little of the vehicle's structure in front of them so that they can climb up and over large rocks, or handle the transition from flat ground to a steep incline.

The problem, according to researchers at the Texas Transportation Institute, is that guradrails work best when they interact with a vehicle's metal structure. Problems arise when one of a vehicle's wheels gets far enough under the guardrail to snag the pillar holding up the rail. Since the pillars are virtually unbreakable, a snagged wheel either rips off or, if it stays on, achors that corner of the vehicle to the pillar while the rest of the vehicle swings around. In both cases, a rollover is likely.

SUVs were involved in fatal crashes with guardrails at a rate 20 percent higher than the typical vehicle. That is a surprisingly high number, because heavier vehicles usually protect their occupants better in guardrail crashes ...

SUV design is also changing in ways that may make this problem worse, not better. To reduce the risk of rollovers during everyday driving and improve overall vehicle stability, automakers have been mounting SUV wheels wider on new models. On some of the best-selling new models, like the 2002 Ford Explorer and Chevrolet vehicle, with very little metal in front of them.

So there you have it. I'd only give myself a B for memory on this one, I was pretty close, but not dead-on -- not too bad for a book I haven't looked at in years, I suppose.

• text of an interview with Brasher
• Review of 'High and Mighty'

Although many people are not aware of it, the Veterans Health Administration (otherwise known as the Veterans Affairs/VA hospital network) in the United States has progressed from a backwards, poorly-kept system in the 1980s to the best, most advanced medical organization in the nation. Read more here, here, or this reprint from Time Magazine.

It's proof that government + healthcare + technology does not always equal disaster.

That's how to become a professional lobbyist. To become a successful lobbyist, you've got to get a job with a lobbying firm (or department in a corporation) that has a lot of money. A real lot of money. That money, and the corporate people who spend it on operations and bribes, is where the influence comes from. The individual lobbyists are just the way the money gets from the rich people to their political assets.

With the Republican's diabolically successful "K Street Project", you pretty much have to be a Republican to get hired by a lobbying firm. Before the 1994 Republican victory in Congress, lobbying firms tended to employ equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans - a reasonable approach given that they want access to both parties, both houses of Congress and the Whitehouse - no matter what party is in power. But Grover Norquist started a project to track the party affiliations of the employees of the various firms. It was astonishingly successful. ANd because lobbying never appears on C-Span and has virtually no public profile, they have been able to write laws. Literally.