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Five Times the US Almost Nuked Itself
kdawson writes "io9 has a scary outline of five times the US came close to accidental nuclear disasters. Quoting: 'In August of 1950, ten B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from what was then called Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California, headed for Guam. Each was carrying a Mark IV atom bomb, which was about twice as powerful as the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Shortly after takeoff, one of the B-29s had engine trouble. On board was General Robert Travis. He commanded the plane to turn back to the base when the landing gear refused to retract. Sensing the plane was going down, the pilot tried to avoid some base housing before crashing at the northwest corner of the base. The initial impact killed 12 of the 20 people aboard, including General Travis. The resulting fire eventually detonated the 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives that were part of the Mark IV. That massive explosion killed seven people on the ground. Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.'"
In the case of the Travis accident, there was no nuclear disaster precisely because the nuclear core was not loaded. The Air Force was all too aware of the number of B-29's that crashed on or shortly after takeoff and never armed the weapons until they were close to the target area. To call this a "close call" is simply fear mongering to get page hits.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
>> Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.
So now we see why the bomb wasn't "armed with its fissile capsule", don't we?
Seriously, sad about the lives lost at the time an all, but to describe this as "almost nuked America" is facetious at best. This being the example chosen to represent the articles contents (and so probably the "best" of the incidents) I see no reason to read any further.
This is no more "nearly nuked" than the making of the movie "Broken Arrow". After all, they had props that looked like nukes in that. What if there's been a mix-up somewhere along the line? OMG! Nearly nuked America again!
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.
And maybe that's the reason the fissile material wasn't inserted into the bomb? And in any event I'd be very surprised if the fire caused the explosives to detonate sufficently simoultaneously to actually cause anything more than a fizzle.
IANANP, but AFAIK a regular explosion or fire will not set off a nuclear weapon. The trigger explosion has to be carefully controlled, otherwise it'll just blow apart the nuclear material instead of compressing it to supercritical. That's why it's so hard to build a nuke. Crashing with a nuke is at worst going to spread some nuclear material over a small area, in the same way that any other material in the crash would be. No nuclear explosion.
Did they try dropping the B29 from orbit? It's the only way to be sure...
This reminds me of the time the US was almost attacked by giant killer terrorist robots. Luckily, Osama didn't invent and deploy them, otherwise the death toll could have been in the 9 figures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash
Not one, 4 hydrogen bombs. 2 of them actually detonated on impact. Probably the worst USA nuclear weapons incident in history.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Not really. Unlike the UK, almost all doctors in America are private practice doctors and not on government salary. The same with hospitals, a mix of private and local/state public hospitals. The health care reform legislation passed is mainly for insurance; the government won't change its control of doctors or which private plans people choose. So the government really isn't in charge of health care, although they've taken a more regulatory role in insurance.
If the fission capsule were in there, it most likely would not have gone off. With a implosion bomb (fat man style, as the Mark IV was), all the explosive has to go off at the same time, to very close accurate (picoseconds). If some goes off first, it just blows the core apart instead of pushing it to supercriticality.That is, if the core weren't scattered in the crash before the fire set off the explosives anyway.
Basically, you would have had a dirty bomb, no more.
Now, a little boy (uranium gun-type) bomb can go off by accidentally more easily, but getting the material for those is so difficult that few are made.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
So none of these times did we almost nuked our self... ,people that will not bother to read, and those that are already full of fear mindless fear. Move on nothing to see here.
The first on in 1950 at Travis the bomb wasn't armed. AKA it had no nuclear material in it.
So there was zero chance that we would get nuked.
The second at Fermi 1. A reactor problem that was contained and couldn't have caused a nuclear explosion as in a bomb going off. It could have been bad but the systems worked.
The third was another un armed bomb.
The forth another reactor problem and again the emergency systems worked and no chance of a bomb like blast.
The last was a when a training tap was played on real systems. Yes air craft where launched and that mistake was never made again but the the safety systems and procedures worked.
What is this a piece of FUD? Good at scaring children
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's a good thing that those aliens have ben monitoring our nukes.
Not really. Unlike the UK, almost all doctors in America are private practice doctors and not on government salary. The same with hospitals, a mix of private and local/state public hospitals. The health care reform legislation passed is mainly for insurance; the government won't change its control of doctors or which private plans people choose. So the government really isn't in charge of health care, although they've taken a more regulatory role in insurance.
While factual, your post goes against the narrative we're trying to push here. Expect to be modded into oblivion.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
In addition nuclear plants cannot cause nuclear explosions so while the US may have come close to contaminating areas there was zero danger of a nuclear explosion in such cases.
I wonder how many other times good risk management and fail-safes prevented a nuclear disaster?
To err is human, to err without planning for eventual mistakes can be criminally negligent homicide.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
These people will soon be in charge of health care.
This statement brought to you by the people who brought you the quote, "The government better keep its hands off my Medicare!"
Or at least one of the top two.
It has nuked itself on quite a number of occasions, often in Nevada. It hasn't done this for a long time now, but it used to.
Scary scary oooh nuclear we're all gonna die! But somehow, against all odds, life on the planet survived the repeated nuking of Nevada. It was a slim chance! How we made it through, god only knows. Good thing luck was on our side.
Captcha: TARGET.
He who regulates something, runs it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
A an accidental detonation from a bomb twice the size dropped on Japan would not result in " immediate death toll" that " may have reached six figures".
In 1950, the population of Fairfield was around 3000. I don't know the size of the air force base, but I don't think it was close to the 6 figure range (today it has 15K military and civilian workers, it may have been higher during the cold war). Suisun City today has a fraction of the population of Fairfield.
Just 3km from the hypocenter of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, most structures withstood the blast and most people that were indoors survived the initial blast.
And that bomb detonated at an altitude of 500m to maximize destruction. An accidental surface detonation in an airplane crash is going to have a much smaller destructive zone, even though the bomb is twice as powerful. So even if that bomb had detonated in the crash, there would be survivors even on the airbase itself.
Even in a 1 megaton blast (50 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki) , there's a 75% survival rate just 7.5 miles from the blast.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/1mtblast.html
So even if a a 1 Megaton accidental detonation occurred in the NW corner of the base today, it wouldn't cause an immediate 6 figure death toll.
This, of course, this ignores the long term deaths and illness caused by radiation exposure.
B-52 crash at Thule, Greenland, 1968.
4 hydrogen bombs aboard, contamination of a large area. The secondary of one the 4 bombs were never found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash
General practitioners, who form the vast majority of doctors in the UK, are not on a government salary either. A doctor's practice is a private business that bills the government for NHS treatments. (Which is why there is no problem with your doctor providing private treatments; he's not a government employee.)
Our situations are more similar than you think.
I see a lot of comments like this immediately following things modded to +5. It seems the Slashdot Groupthink is less powerful than some might imagine.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
You mean the people who through prudent safety protocols managed to not have a single accidental detonation of the most dangerous weapons ever made? It's too bad they won't actually be in charge.
Instead, we've left health care in the hands of the civilian sector which HAS had actual accidental radiation leakage from time to time (though to be fair it wasn't that much) and isn't trusted with the weapons.
As far as medical insurance goes, it really hasn't been handled well by private industry. Ideally, we all pool, and all receive care. The private insurance industry has caused a health class divide to develop; on one side, we have people who get medical care, and on the other, those who don't. Like education, healthcare is a basic need.
Sadly, the legislature really didn't do what those who elected them wanted them to do, which was get the insurance companies out of the system entirely. The current half-measures... they're not going to work.
Kind of like Canada. The government pays doctors, builds and run hospitals, chooses what procedures are covered, but has no say in which doctor you use. I can use whatever doctor, at whatever clinic, at whatever hospital I want. The doctor doesn't have to worry about a "pre-existing" condition invalidating my insurance, or about caps, or co-pays.
Still not happy, and have lots of money? nothing stopping you form flying to the states, and there are private clinics up here too.
Anarchists never rule
It's got nothing to do with group-think. Apparently some people have a persecution-complex, even though their views match the popular opinion. Not sure how that happens, but it seems to be quite common.
Kudos to using the correct term supercritical instead of critical like they do in the movies.
I was nearly incinerated by Godzilla yesterday! I remember it well. The only thing that saved me is that there was no fire and Godzilla wasn't actually there!
Man, what a relief that was!
Sorry folks, but "nuking" oneself is not as easy as this article tries to make it sound. If you define "nuking" as meaning setting off a Nuclear explosion rather than just making a radioactive mess of the area. All these accidents would never have resulted in the detonation of a nuclear device. At the very worst, detonating the conventional explosions by ANY method except the devices triggering mechanism would simply scatter radioactive debris for a few hundred yards. It is HARD to create a nuclear explosion. If it was as easy as this author tries to have you believe, Iran would have had the bomb in 1969.....
"Oops"
So the safety features worked as designed.
Bombs were not armed. The critical igniter capsule which was designed to be installed just prior to attack was not in the bombs, as per design and regulations, yet you are handing out Darwin awards?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Which people? The ones who died? The ones who survived?
Or maybe you mean the ones whose nuclear handling procedures successfully prevented an accidental detonation in the even of an airplane crash?
Sensationalist story with absurd summary is absurd. Trying to twist that story into a 'government is incompetent' narrative is like wearing your shoes on the wrong feet. The incident in the summary is a prime example of government properly instituting and following critical safety protocols--or are you going to suggest that only government planes have ever crashed?
Seriously, this is one of the most significant mischaracterizations I've ever seen on slashdot.
The initial impact killed 12 of the 20 people aboard, including General Travis. The resulting fire eventually detonated the 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives that were part of the Mark IV. That massive explosion killed seven people on the ground. Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures."
This is like calling gun movies where actors fire off blanks "Five times hollywood firms almost massacred their staff." As a demonstration that gun movies should not be allowed to be made.
If the US was not handling things properly and carefully, there would be no concept of Arming the weapon. Everything would simply be always armed.
This concept of 'arming' and 'disarming' is a special protection measure designed to prevent accidental activation, and the measure did exactly what it's supposed to do.
Show me a case where a plane crashed with an armed weapon over friendly or neutral area, and i'll agree with you, maybe.
Hell... show me a case where a plane flew over friendly airspace with a nuke armed, and i'll agree with you about incompetence.
This article shows neither.
Pretty much all this shows is that, at least when it comes to nukes, the safety systems are pretty good. Almost nuking yourself means something like "The bomb was going to detonate, but a technician was able to defuse it in time." Not "A bomb was in a perfectly safe condition when the airplane it was on crashed and the bomb did not go off."
Even the NORAD incident. It wasn't a case of one lone guy staving off a nuclear strike while his superiors yelled for launch (as happened in the Soviet Union). It looked like an attack was happening, so things went to high alert. Everyone was ready. What did they do? They WAITED FOR CONFIRMATION. When it turned out that it was a false alarm, they stood down. That is precisely how things should happen. They didn't ignore ti and go "Eh, probably just a bug," but they didn't go full out WW3 for no reason. On the warning, everything got ready to go, but confirmation was needed. For that matter, even had there been confirmation an order would still have been needed.
To me, looks like the US has pretty damn good nuclear safeguards. If the best "almosts" they can find were things when nothing even came close to actually going wrong that is good.
Hell look on the civilian side, at Three Mile Island. The "Worst nuclear disaster in US history." Even with a rather major screwup making the problem so much worse, something the NRC discovered, it still didn't release any significant amount of radiation, not enough to cause any adverse health effects (and it has been studied for decades now). That's pretty fucking good, if the worst it gets is a case of "Nobody got hurt."
here's another could shoulda woulda: http://www.ibiblio.org/bomb/
The US spends over $1 trillion on defense. More than the rest of the world combined. It needs to be increased by a large percentage.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
"Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures." Says it all. Fail. Technologically illiterate dreck bereft of so much as a wisp of credibility to anyone even passingly familiar with the field. Shame.
These people will soon be in charge of health care.
This statement brought to you by the people who brought you the quote, "The government better keep its hands off my Medicare!"
Handy mit Vertrag
No, in Germany you don't get health care included in your mobile phone contract.
(For those who don't speak German: "Handy mit Vertrag" is German for "mobile phone with contract")
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons by the USA is that it is about enough money (by one estimate I read) to tear down and rebuild every building in the USA twice...
California has money problems right now -- a shortfall of, what, US$20 billion? According to here:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_cos_of_nuc_wea-military-cost-of-nuclear-weapons
a total of US$2,139,150,000.00 has been spent on just California's behalf on nuclear weapons in the past.
What are we really defending here?
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
That sure would come in handy for CA right now, to have an extra two trillion dollars in their budget reserve (not to mention interest).
As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of understanding the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Thus my sig below about the irony of such advanced ultra-powerful tools of abundance in the hands of those obsessed with fighting over perceived scarcity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Nukes have to be detonated in a precise fashion or they don't reach critical, no mushroom cloud, just a normal explosion with radioactive debris, aka dirty explosion.
Hollywood likes to show terrorist making nukes and using normal blasting caps to set it off, trouble is, normal blasting caps have way too much variability in their timing. Of course, Hollywood likes to set off nukes by having them engulfed in fires or shot by pistols. Again, these are situations that may destroy the nuke, but won't cause a nuclear detonation, and in fact, may not cause any detonation at all, even a conventional one. I don't know which explosive is usually used in most nukes, but I do know there are various explosives that are not detonated by fire, C4 being one of those. (We often demil'ed C4 for sticking blobs of it to the berm wall and lighting them. It's amazing what you can do with a burning silly putty like substance.)
No, I'm someone who designs or builds nukes, but I have had military training in special weapons and have read a lot of the scientific articles about them at that time out of curiosity about what I was working on. Yes, they are devastating weapons and very dangerous tools, but like so many things that Hollywood has sensationalized, the public perception of how they work and what their dangers are tend to be completely fictional. Just one more note on this, you can't detect a nuke with a Geiger counter unless the shielding over it's core has been compromised, or the device has been detonated. (Of course, if it's been detonated, you can't bloody miss it.)
Have fun with your fiction, but remember that in reality no revolver on the planet shoots 22 shots without reloading outside of the movies.
At first I thought this would cover issues like the one caught on film by Genesis back in 1986. The video clearly shows Reagan getting confused and pressing the "Nuke" button by mistake when he meant to press the "Nurse" call button. That incident threatened the USSR, not the US though. Maybe Clinton nearly did the same thing when he was wanting some "Nookie" though.
This ignores Medicare and Medicaid, and the outsized role they play in health care. Raytheon Is a private company, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that government doesn't determine their success or failure.
The only reason he didn't die is that there weren't any bullets around.
except we've had more and more government involvement over the last 50 years, and healthcare, in many ways, gets worse and worse. The real problem is we encourage third party payment. Imagine if employers gave out food insurance because the government gave them tax breaks for doing so, we'd eventually have the same situation, and everyone would blame the insurance companies then.
So, now slashdot needs to add a filter for pathetic troll stories submitted by kdawson too? What, he's not happy with just approving pathetic troll stories anymore?
You do realize in the youtube clip you link to that Medicare (government run) paid for most of her treatment, including getting a pacemaker so I'm not sure it really backs up your point. There is a ton of waste in medical spending because Americans think more is better and doctors worry that if they don't run every test they'll be sued if something goes wrong. Pointing out that more is not always better does not equal 'death squads'. Did you know every time a woman gets a mammogram it increases her chances for breast cancer. It's a risk/benefit decision that should be made by doctors using reason instead of emotion and fear of a lawsuit.
In the Youtube clip doctors had different opinions of whether a pacemaker would help the elderly lady or not. Doctors came to the conclusion it would help. The government paid for it. Obama starts to address the issue of waste and starts to make the case that people are not always better off with surgery then the clip cuts off. Obama is not a doctor but I have heard doctors say similar things. Sometimes a doctor will give into a patient whether or not something is beneficial to the patient or not because the doctor doesn't want to get sued.
Do I believe tort reform would help? Yes. Do I believe caps are the answer? No. Do I know what the answer is? No. But there is certainly a problem with cost of health care and some regulation needs to be introduced/modified to correct it?
Do I trust corporations more than the government? No. Corporate America has more cash on hand than it has ever had since it's been kept track of. Yet they won't hire anyone because the economy is down. The economy is down because companies won't hire.
Pro tip: Corporations have more control over the economy than the government.
Still not happy, and have lots of money? nothing stopping you form flying to the states
And what do you think we are fighting to preserve? That's right! It is the world's last bastion of choice health care.
Still not happy, and do NOT have lots of money? Nothing is stopping you from moving to a country where the system run by one man telling all the doctors what they can and can't do. Don't worry, a lot of procedures are covered. Just don't get sick with something we don't cover, (which is inevitable if you have to stretch the government dollar to cover EVERYONE).
One big thing that has happend - the control over what is and is not insured has pretty much been ceded to the goverment now. It was previously in the hands of the state Board of Insurance in each of the 50 states. This has a huge effect on costs.
How does it effect costs? Well, let's say you are part of a group that believes that Fibromyalgia is a serious condition that must be covered by insurance plans. Previously, your group would have to lobby in each of the 50 states to get coverage approved and mandated. Now all you have to do is stop at one federal agency and if they agree, it is mandated for all 50 states.
Copy this for acupuncture, massage therapy, sex disfunction treatments involving use of a surrogate, etc. You get the idea. It has now become about 50 times easier to get coverage for the malady of the week covered by insurance.
Why is health insurance more expensive in California than in, say, Wyoming? Well, California mandates coverage for a lot of things that aren't required to be covered anywhere else.
When people say costs are going to triple in 2014, I'd listen to them. They stand an awfully good chance of being right.
These people will soon be in charge of health care.
The US Military will run healthcare?
Fandroids hate facts.
Ah, the "investigative" "reporting" from morons type post.
A while back, I planned to stop reading Slashdot, but it obviously didn't "take". Now it's time to remove the link from my bookmark bar.
Anyone with an updated list of alternatives?
what is your solution? NO regulation at all? No regulation equals total corporate control. The government is the only institution that we have big enough that can prevent total overrun. And don't talk about "voting with your feet" because that only works if you have a real choice, and if you allow corporations with this much power do anything you want you can guarantee you WON'T have any choices.
First, don't pass 2000 page "solutions" without even knowing what is in them. If ever there was a complete dereliction of duty, that was it.
Second, take some time and effort to understand why costs are high. I suspect you will find the cost of drugs is related to the extremely high cost of getting the approved. I also suspect that a lot of the hoops they have to jump through are redundant and/or irrelevant to the safety and effectiveness of the drug.
Third, look at the current laws surrounding insurance...I can't by insurance offered in the next state even it it's a better deal than what is in my state, etc. WTF is up with that? How may other stupid laws prevent common sense courses of action?
The current system has come about piecemeal, driven by ill thought out laws enacted since the 40s. What we need is to actually understand what's happening before jumping in with hammers and saws and dynamite.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Try to regulate your physician into seeing patients if he doesn't get paid.
Good luck with that.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You are not pushing the people's anti-nuke agenda! More fear mongering! More misinformation! MORE MORE MORE!
"It nearly turned the Earth into another Sun!" has a much NICER ring to it!
Now conform or your opinions are invalid! ;-)
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Sadly, the legislature really didn't do what those who elected them wanted them to do, which was get the insurance companies out of the system entirely. The current half-measures... they're not going to work.
I see your point, and raise you another...
The insurance is the leading cause of escalating health costs, these days.
Example: Go to the doctor's office for some reason. Speak to the doctor for 8 minutes, after a 47-minute wait (but if you're 15 minutes late for your "appointment", they charge you for the visit and cancel your appointment). Speak to the financial desk immediately after (if not before) the appointment. If you have insurance, the visit is $480. If you don't, it's $120.
In any other field, this would be called fraud. What gives?
Bringing this up as "technically possible" makes this article automatically idiotic.
Ever heard of this one? My father in law told me about it.
A Nuclear Incident "Worse Than Three Mile Island"
The wikipedia version.
And this one is fairly close to where I live (though thankfully not WHEN I lived here. Which is now. And not then).
Please don't humanize the morons around me. It makes me very uncomfortable.
"[CITATION NEEDED]"
I see someone hasn't been paying attention to lobbyists and voting records of those in the House and Senate.
We've got about 150+ years worth of citations. Are you that lazy to look for an example yourself?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I don't even want to know all the times we almost nuked ourselves ON PURPOSE...
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
Let me explain the situation to you. People paid into Medicare their entire working career and now the Democrats have decided to cut Medicare benefits to pay for something new and shiny. If I make you buy a hamburger for $50 you'd be upset. If I hand the burger to someone else after you paid me you'd be furious. Why is that so hard to understand?
kdawson, you dumbass. You need to learn about a subject before you start making stupid comments.
Here, let me enlighten your stupid ass. A nuclear device will not cause a nuclear explosion unless it is armed. It can cause a conventional explosion but it can not cause a nuclear explosion.
Now, please shut the fuck up about shit you know nothing about, you pathetic shithead.
Learn to spell, asswipe. Or, learn to spell "asswipe." Either one.
Your "or" is ambiguous. Did you mean one or the other or even both, or did you mean either one or the other but not both?
The grammar nazi profession has fallen on low times when a retired one has to correct an active one.
Infuriate left and right
Hopefully. The VA system actually has proper electronic medical records shared between hospitals.
Not a typewriter
Given that we've had several approved drugs recently kill & maim a whole lot of people, how do you propose to make the current system both easier (and thus cheaper) and safer?
Because your state has different regulations than your neighboring state. See, in a democracy, the people elect representatives who then create "the rules". "The rules" for health insurance in CA are different than "the rules" in DE.
Conservatives used to like having that kind of local control, where individual states got to decide what was important to them. Apparently, conservatives now believe we should let some other state decide what the de-facto regulations are in our own state. At the same time they're decrying federal regulations...but with the federal regulations we at least get to vote on the people making "the rules".
Actually, we evil liberal commie bastards have been working on this for a very, very long time (Truman administration, to be precise). We know what's happening. We know that health insurance can never be an efficient market due to factors like adverse selection, and their being 'no price' on our individual lives. That's why we've been trying to get health insurance out of the private sector for so long - the 'invisible hand' only works in an efficient market.
So now we don't have to be afraid of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons anymore. Hell, we should even give them to them!
We deliver like pizza.
Liberals don't think government has no problems. They just think the solution is to fix them.
Problem: Inadequate response to Katrina/Gulf oil spill.
Liberal proposal: Better funding and training so next disaster gets a better response.
Conservative proposal: Disband FEMA and cut taxes.
Only one of these proposals is actually a solution.
Did you miss the part where he said we have private clinics in Canada too? No need to fly anywhere, unless it's unethical you can always pay someone to do whatever you want, right at home.
If it's unethical you can always fly to some medical tourism destination. The US is FAR from the last bastion of get-what-you-pay-for.
I worked there for five years. It's the only job I've had that had a yearly body count.
As far as medical insurance goes, it really hasn't been handled well by private industry. Ideally, we all pool, and all receive care.
That is absolutely not what insurance is. When you buy insurance what you are paying for is to reduce your risk by paying the average expense of someone with that risk up front, plus whatever fee the insurance company charges to provide this service. So someone with higher risk pays much more because the average cost of someone with that risk is much more. If you have particularly bad genes, your rightful insurance payment may be much more than most can afford, because those factors put you so much at risk. That is what insurance is, and that is the service insurance companies are offering. The idea that unaffordable risk can be eliminated with insurance is simply a misunderstanding of what insurance is. Thus insurance can never be a vehicle for health care for all, not even health care for all people working and with a median US income. To make that happen you have to do what you described - pool the expenses, with the people less at risk subsidizing the people more at risk by way of everyone paying a similar price. That is socialist redistribution of expenses from the people with a lesser need to the people with a greater need. Which is great - it's just that in the US socialism is a dirty word so there is a great attempt to classify socialist ideas as something else. In this case redistribution is being sold as insurance to avoid facing the truth that some socialist ideas are just the right thing to do, because everyone can immediately perceive the unfairness of a good person being ruined and then dying because his bad genes makes insurance unaffordable and then he gets sick and can't pay to be cured. Insurance can do nothing for this person, only redistribution can.
It might be better to say that when one has the potential power to regulate or tax then free enterprise ends. After all, if you know full well that the government can pass new rules or new taxes that apply to you then you must run your business as if it will certainly occur to be safe.
The same thing applies to speech. When I see a man locked up for the following remark I cringe : If I had known then what I know now I would have gone to my guns instead of going to court. The judge ruled that that constituted a threat and put the guy in prison even though the remark was made no where near the court house. The point being that it was hypothetical and in the past tense and did not threaten any particular court or judge. They did this by a nonsense definition of the word threat. They claim that anyone made uncomfortable by a remark is threatened and therefore the remark is a threat. So they changed no laws. They simply redefined a word in the law. I find that severely idiotic and a crying shame.
One of the comments on the article points out a Romanian mathematician named Bernard Bereanu, who "figured out in the 70s that the cold war and the nuclear standoff is doomed sooner or later to produce such incidents, pretty much bringing inadvertently the two superpowers on the verge of extinction through a series of mistakes."
I suppose it would be appropriate to add nuclear mistake to the list of other other incidents, such as asteroid impact and volcanic eruption, which could potentially result in an extinction event on this planet. While the probability of a single incident resulting in a world-wide catastrophe may be small, over time the probability of such a catastrophe occurring approaches 1.
You do realize in the youtube clip you link to that Medicare (government run) paid for most of her treatment, including getting a pacemaker so I'm not sure it really backs up your point.
Yeah--if I'm in heart failure, I want most of a pacemaker.
There's no place like
Okay, let's use this thought experiment: suppose there are 100 parallel universes that split off just after the first nuke was created. Suppose 75% of these earths had accidents that started WW3 which killed most humans (up to 2010). If you are a random human chosen from among these 100 worlds, most likely you'd be living in the 25% that didn't have a WW3 mishap. Thus, as an observer, your observational position is biased by those earths that "got lucky". There may not be 100 such earths, but it would still affect the probability of observing near misses.
In other words, our very existence as individuals pondering the probability is biased by having nothing significant gone wrong (so far). If there was a mistake that killed 90% of us, then most likely you and me would not be around discussing how good the government's safeguards are.
Table-ized A.I.
TMI was good initial design and sheer good luck overcoming later complacency, stupidity and cost cutting. The control systems wouldn't have been found acceptable in a fertilizer plant (I'm not making that up, they did not meet that standard). It was the best possible nuclear accident to have since it woke everyone up out of their complacency while nobody actually got hurt, and it marked when civilian nuclear power started to come back under adult supervision. After that a lot of plants were upgraded and some that in hindsight were a lot more dangerous than Chenobyl were shut down forever.
The lesson is to take dangerous things seriously and to have people with a clue keeping an eye on them - not "Hell dawg, we done OK eben when dose eggsheads sayd we can't".
A lot of defense theory is based on ancient proven tech. When a paradigm shift happens every preconceived notion falls flat. A hacker can bring a standing army to it's knees just by modifying immunization data. Break into a vaccination center change some ATCG into a delayed time bomb. And when they vaccinate their own army with a tainted cure for smallpox they all wind up with something really unpleasant several years down the road. Until we develop a protein folding system with an understanding of all major variables in the human body we shouldn't deploy such a weapon until we can defend against it.
These people will soon be in charge of health care.
Should I take this to mean that you think private companies like British Petroleum, Countrywide or Union Carbide should be managing the nuclear arsenal?
I think the simplest way to describe the difference between liberals and conservatives and this pretty much is true irregardless of what your speaking of, BTW
Liberals are whores...but well paid whores...we don't just give our vote away without being paid handsomely for it in the way of Government Action.
Conservatives ARE NOT whores...simply sluts...they will simply give their vote to anyone who makes them feel all cuddly inside irregardless of the truth.
Make no mistake, whichever side you're on, you're going to get f$%ked...no question about it. The only choice you have is whether you actually get something out of the deal.
With that said...Democrat for life, thank you very much.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
And what do you think we are fighting to preserve? That's right! It is the world's last bastion of choice health care.
No, it's not. The reason why what GP described happens (Canadians going to US for private health care paid out of their pocket) is because Canada has this strange notion that any form of private health care (even if it exists alongside tax-funded public service) is evil - presumably because it lets the rich guys get better care (shock! horror!). This is something rather unique to Canada, and I haven't heard of any similar arrangement existing in any other Western state with socialized healthcare system.
So, if a rich Canadian does want better healthcare, they have to go to USA because it permits private healthcare, not because it doesn't have public healthcare. Neither the mess that is "Obamacare", nor the real, properly implemented social healthcare system along European lines, would diminish that freedom.
It would diminish the freedom of people to not pay into the public system at all, sure. But that's a different story, and, like taxes in general, is subject to a cost/benefit analysis from the point of view of both individual freedoms, and effect on the society as a whole.
Just don't get sick with something we don't cover, (which is inevitable if you have to stretch the government dollar to cover EVERYONE).
Again, most Western socialized healthcare systems I know of (which includes Canada) cover even the most expensive procedures, provided they are possible to do in the country. This results in waiting lists, because, where in USA, 9 out of 10 people having a particular condition would ultimately just die because of it since they cannot afford to cure it, the 1 remaining guy doesn't have much of a queue ahead of him to get it done. When you make it available to everyone, even with the same amount of resources - yeah, you get queues.
I'm not an American, but have you considered that US is a large country with a lot of variation on state level, and even below that? I'm not saying it has a perfect place for everyone, but perhaps there are some which align well enough with your world view to be a decent place to settle down?
Ideally, going to the doctor would be something you pay for out of your own pocket.
Everyone clamors for national health care; most everyone in the US drives a car and must have car insurance by law, but nobody is clamoring for national car insurance. That's because there's actually competition in car insurance. And that's because car insurance doesn't cover when I run out of gas or hit a nail with my tire, it covers things like when someone runs into the side of me in an intersection.
Likewise, in health care, a terrible illness or accident would be something that insurance would pay for. A routine check up (which would include mammograms for older women, prostate exams for older men) is something that all insurance would provide once or twice a year (not due to regulation, but because competition would force them to, like with car insurance). If I get sick with strep throat and all I need is to see a doctor for 15 minutes to a Biaxin prescription, then I should pay for it myself. If I know I have something simple, I don't need to go to Mayoclinic to have the health care gods look at me. I can go to the doctor that has good reviews online for $20 and get my medicine. For someone genuinely too poor to pay for medicine, we already have something like that for food -- they're called food stamps.
And if I'm in charge of my own money and making my own medical decisions for my own self, I'm not going to go to the doctor that refuses to quote me a price before I go in. I'm going to go to the doctor that has a clear, transparent pricing scheme. Would you give your car to a mechanic that wouldn't tell you how much he was going to charge?
National health insurance may inevitably be necessary in the US. But it won't have been necessary because you can't have privatized health insurance. It will have been necessary because the US government was too incompetent to properly set up a competitive industry for health care. Our car insurance system is running mostly fine, and honestly, a sick car in the US is just as detrimental to your livelihood as being sick, yourself. The deal is that car insurance is very transparent, it covers only what is necessary (i.e., not everything), and you have a choice of where to get your car fixed, by whom, and for how much.
You resoundingly do not have any such choice in medicine, and that is why it is so god damn expensive, mismanaged, and quite frankly, often downright evil (doesn't matter if health insurance company X makes little Suzy die in the emergency room, none of their "customers" are really capable of switching to a different insurance company).
The US military will soon be in charge of US health care?
When did this happen?
Oh what the hell, even the Nigerian military taking over US health care will result in a drop in price and massive improvement in services.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Hey, look! Ayn Rand is back from the dead and she's pithier than ever!
Sand's overrated... it's just tiny little rocks.
US$2,139,150,000.00 is (a bit over) 2 billion, not 2 trillion (using US numbers). In UK numbers, that's 2 milliard. Either way, not 2 trillion.
Oh, and I'd like to see the aforementioned cost estimate (the one with rebuilding everything twice). That's a spectacular claim, especially in view of the figure you bring for California.
Or not everyone's a republican and screams about death panels and shit :)
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Still not happy, and have lots of money? nothing stopping you form flying to the states
And what do you think we are fighting to preserve? That's right! It is the world's last bastion of choice health care.
I'm in Finland, and even here I have a choice of healthcare. I can go and use public healthcare-services if I want, or I can go and use private healthcare-services. So what exactly am I missing out on, when compared to USA?
Still not happy, and do NOT have lots of money? Nothing is stopping you from moving to a country where the system run by one man telling all the doctors what they can and can't do.
Such as? Hey, didn't Prez Bush tell doctors that stem-cell research and treatments are not allowed?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
dude, California hasn't EXISTED for hundreds of years.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Maybe the information changes hands properly, but the medical work is abyssmal.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
why the hell is this modded as funny? I was looking forward to a nice discussion on tfa, not yet another healthcare flamewar
Ok, judging by your use of dollars, and the language you use, you seem to be mistaking the UK situation for the US, which is rather silly since the situation for both medical and dental care in both countries is wildly different.
If the private sector had been in charge of preventing accidental nuke delivery the Earth would have been a smoking cinder a loooooong time ago.
FTFY
If you think that's bad, take a look at the people who are currently in charge of US health care.
" ... "io9 has a scary outline of five times the US came close to accidental nuclear disasters. Quoting: 'In August of 1950, ten B-29 Superfortress ..." ... means a story about how five times the US [population] [area] came close to accidental nuclear disasters. The hanging "s" on "disasters" doesn't really fit, but we've already read the "five times the US" bit and come to our comprehension.
There's a word we sometimes use in English. It's called "the". It helps us understand sentences, used appropriately.
"lo9 has a scary outline of the five times the US came close to accidental nuclear disasters."
Oh, I see. Five incidents, not five times the US population. The "s" fits now too. Isn't English wonderful?
You haven't been reading io9 much, have you? 'O' in io9 stands for OMGSensationalism!..
They don't do "articles". Those are blog-posts.
It's all about the page hits baby... Journalism and correctness be damned.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
My problem isn't that the logic of the Anthropic Principle is technically invalid. It's that it doesn't really get us anywhere interesting, whereas other explanations often do. Postulating parallel Earths might be interesting, except that it's fundamentally unprovable when they don't interact in any measurable way.
There are much more fruitful lines of reasoning, like how it's actually really hard to make an implosion bomb go off by accident, or how triggering mechanisms simply aren't installed during routine transport for exactly the problems highlighted in TFA.
Not a typewriter
You could have an armed nuclear weapon in your living room and your tv set would be more a danger to you.
E Proelio Veritas.
What we need is to actually understand what's happening before jumping in with hammers and saws and dynamite.
And nukes.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
actually in the UK a lot of GP's (family doctors) are self employed or partners and NHS consultants also are allowed private practices - its part of the deal made at the founding of the NHS to get the medical profession onside.
Nukes will not go off accidentally. Which should be obvious if there were five opportunities and none of them went off. It's hard to get a nuclear explosion. It will not happen in a fire etc.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Often if someone posts to say something will be modded down, people then mod it up. Also, just because you see something at +5 Informative, doesn't mean it wasn't blasted down as Flamebait, Overrated or Redundant which comments often are for a while first. On the whole, the Slashdot system balances things out because moderations are capped, so it only takes a few people to mod something up to counterbalance a horde of people modding it down. For some reason the process tends to go down first then up, so it depends how long after the comment was posted (and how far down the story it's slid) what outcome you see.
;)
I'm a anti-piracy AGW-skeptic. Trust me, I know about getting modded down.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Ok, judging by your use of dollars, and the language you use, you seem to be mistaking the UK situation for the US, which is rather silly since the situation for both medical and dental care in both countries is wildly different.
While American doctors are still mostly private--the moment our government takes over the insurance industry, they pretty much have control over the doctors incomes.
There's no place like
Oops, you are right, thanks for catching that. Poor choice of source there, even as the basic scale is right (since that is apparently for just one year, and they total the whole year at US$16.5 billion) and in my haste I though they were talking about the total costs and the ballpark was close. So, the total is going to be more like 100 time that.
From:
http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_atomic_audit.html
"The amount spent through 1996--$5.5 trillion--was 29 percent of all military spending from 1940 through 1996 ($18.7 trillion)."
I've seen higher figures too (What about clean up costs? What about cancer costs? What about interest on those costs incurred as national debt? What about lots of other hidden costs? Etc.)
So, add another fourteen years on to that $5.5 trillion estimate (which may be low, and not include interest) and you'd probably get, say, seven trillion dollars for the total cost of the US. So, the cost to California, base on being 13% of the population, would then be about $900 billion for the total cost of the weapons program, not including interest on past expenses (or interest paid on military-related debt that was never funded by taxes).
So, US$900 billion is only about approaching half of the two trillion dollar figure I cited. So, I'm still in the ballpark, even as you were right to point out I missed several decimal points by a poor choice of data source which I misinterpreted as total costs, not one years cost -- I guess, luckily, my two mistakes just about cancelled out. :-) But I might have noticed it if the figure was not about what I remembered from other sources.
Glad someone around here is double checking calculations and posting about it. :-) Thanks again. Sorry about the sloppy math.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
According to this it would cost about US$23 trillion to buy all residential real estate: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=493795
However, that includes land costs, so you may have a US$100K house on a million dollar piece of land. So the rebuilding cost is probably only, guessing, US$10 trillion?
Of course, that is only residential real estate. There is a suggestion there that all commercial real estate comes to around US$3.7 trillion. Again, some of that is probably land, so let's guess $2 trillion to rebuild, or adding the two, about US$12 trillion in costs to rebuild every building we have now.
The total cost listed here as a *minimum* is $5.8 trillion dollars through the mid 1990s: http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_atomic_audit.html
And as in my other reply, we can probably guess it is around US$7 trillion total now as a minimum. But it may be higher with hidden costs, including interest on the national debt and opportunity costs. What if that money had gone into medical research instead? Or robotics? Or green energy? Or biotech? Or what about all the social energy that has gone into prosesting against nuclear militarism and a MAD policy?
So, certainly, by that estimate, the US nuclear weapons program has cost more or less enough to rebuild everything once. As for rebuilding twice, in that nuclear cost, I'm not sure it includes interest on that money had it been invested. So, it may be a simple addition of all the costs, not any consideration of what it means to spend money way back then as far as returns on investment. Also, when I read that, it was probably twenty years ago, so the ratio may have been different.
Certainly the orders of magnitude are comparable, even if it depends on exact natures of the estimates.
Thanks for questioning this. I hope you look into it more for yourself. :-)
Obviously, then there is the cost of the roadways, industrial infrastructure, and contents of all that. So, the cost of rebuilding absolutely everything in the USA might be more. But, it is still ironic that the "insurance" against losing everything in the USA to the "communists" has been ... about the cost of everything in the USA. :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Well if their reaction to seeing Katy Perry's cleavage on TV is to cry 'n crap their pants, I guess there's not much hope for them to not be complete pussies about everything else huh.
This story's just another example of people crapping their pants over nothing. None of them were "close calls", because nukes aren't 'explosions' in the classical case, they *require* triggering, if anything, all these examples of accidents show how safe they are. It's like complaining how unsafe it was to leave a gun lying around, cuz a baby picked it up, pointed it at someone, and pulled the trigger, while completely ignoring the fact that it was a water pistol. WELL IT WAS NEVER GONNA ACTUALLY KILL ANYONE THEN WAS IT?!!! Some people are just obsessed with fear, they have to actually make shit up to be scared of. They must have real empty lives.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
"Are you that lazy to look for an example yourself?"
I think it takes real effort to miss something like that, so I don't think it can really be attributed to laziness.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Have to love people who just bitch and moan about problems they have no intention of fixing.
Seriously. If you don't like it, propose something else. Explain the tradeoffs. If it's gonna kill 100 more people, but streamline the approval process such that it saves 200 people, then it's worth the extra risk.
In your opinion. If the majority of your state agrees, then it will be.
In other states, they are of the opinion that it's better to pay a little more and avoid some of the horror stories.
Back in the day, you conservatives thought this was a good idea. Each state could decide whether it was better to be cheaper, or if it was better to be more expensive with stricter regulations.
Instead, you seem to want health insurance to follow credit cards. Where all 50 states are subject to the laws of DE and SD. So those of us who live in the other 48 states have no say in the regulations. Conservatives used to understand that this was a bad state of affairs. Remember that whole "taxation without representation" thing? But it's a very, very profitable state of affairs, which apparently makes conservatives quite happy with it. And now they'd like health insurance to follow the same path.
Nope, it doesn't. Single-payer does. It would also save money while improving patient care (we spend more than all the single-payer nations, yet have worse outcomes). But conservatives blocked that since the current state of affairs is very profitable for insurance companies.
What you fail to understand is there is not a market for health insurance. At least, not a functional market. And there can not be one, due to the fundamental problems with health insurance. Unfortunately, econ 101 theories only hold up for efficient markets, and not all markets are efficient.
Out of curiosity, how many new replies are you going to make to my post? Seems you add a new one when the old one gets modded down.
That's important stuff, but I'm looking at the bigger perspective of whether nuclear weapon mishaps have not ended (most) the world because there are plenty of safeguards, or because we are "lucky". The Soviets had their own close-calls. What if a Bush-like prez was in Kennedy's shoes at the Cuban Missile Crisis? We've had a lot of very close calls and feel "lucky" to be here, but are we really lucky, or is there a filtering mechanism affecting our viewpoint? The 100 earth example is not meant to imply there are parallel universes, but to test our probability models.
Table-ized A.I.
Good for you. I'm sure you'll be received well wherever you choose to move to. I would say more but I know how touchy the extremists you mention are and I just won't be able to resist getting sucked into a flaming haha anyway, yeah, come join us in this little place we like to call, "the rest of the world", the more the merrier :-)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
"So what exactly am I missing out on, when compared to USA?"
The FEAR!!!! Hahaha yeah I'm here in the UK, we have private health care available to anyone, and public health care available to everyone, and it's been amazing me to hear all the fear speak coming out of USA, about people dying here in the UK because we can't [something that we actually can]. I've just been completely dumbfounded, hearing people thousands of miles away crapping their pants thinking that England's made up of castles and dragons and that's what Obama's importing. It's funny how ignorant people can really be.
I've been paying attention to some of the stem cell trials happening here in the UK, my mother's applying for a place in one of them that will allow her to walk without pain in a couple of weeks, rather than the several month alternative treatment which requires fracturing and resetting bones in her knee which will give her most of its use back. It's exciting stuff, that will drastically improve the quality of life of so many people. Meanwhile we have this group of Americans running around like headless chickens, screaming and crapping their pants, because they think that dragons are real. The poor, poor country.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Dental work here in the UK used to look like that, except it was more that the government refused to be ripped off for dental work and charged five times more than it reasonably should cost, so dentists did just have two prices for things, one which they charged the government, and one which they charged private which was many times higher. This meant that private patients were being favoured over state, so if you needed treatment, you had the choice of waiting for months, or going private.
Anyway I'm not sure exactly what our last government changed, I remember them saying something about wanting to fix the dentist situation, but didn't really pay much attention to what they were saying (you know what it's like when politicians say something, and then come back later with some stats that prove technically that it's better, but you'll be damned if you noticed anything). But from my recent experiences, and experiences of family 'n friends, they really do seem to have fixed it. They've even gone what I would consider to be beyond the call of duty, and employed a load of cute girl dentists, which I tell ya, can really take the edge off ;-)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I'm not a mac. And I'm not a PC. I'm none of the things you've heard about me. I'm you. And I approve this message.
Taco's rule!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Err, no, you're wrong, so consider your post irrefudified! I'm not sure why exactly off the top of my head, but I'll post the answer on my website, promise.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Socialism doesn't suck at all. What you're talking about is abuse and mismanagement that comes from not being allowed to do it properly because anti-social people like you complain too much. I can see why you'd confuse the two; it is convenient to after all.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
You are so misinformed it's not even funny. I guess that's understandable, your education over there I hear's about as good as your health care is. Apparently in some places you can't even afford to send kids to school on fridays anymore haha or have street lights on at night, or put out a family's house that's burning down. I hear NYC had 120,000 people go through homeless shelters last year alone, and that's not including all those on the streets who don't spend a night in a shelter. I hear Jefferson County's doing *really* well out of capitalism too, yeah, JP Morgan paying Goldman Sachs $3Mil to stand aside and not compete so they could rip off the government to the tune of over $3Bln, yeah, you guys a a shining beacon of success.
Quickly, more sand! A little bit of somebody's head's starting to appear, we need more sand!!!
Hey guess what, nobody's forced to shop anywhere here if they don't want to either, and you can't get paid just to sit around on your ass all day drinking beer. Nice try though. I guess your "solution" does look like it's the best when you just make shit up about the rest of the world though, huh. It speaks volumes about how great it must be if that's the only way you can justify it.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I think it's interesting that the bomb dropped on Mars Bluff, SC in 1958 didn't make the list. It was flown out of Savannah, GA too. I guess 1958 was the year that Savannah almost got it twice!
So if you have no idea what's broken, how can you know that it can be improved?
Yet until you actually define "better", it is impossible for them to make any improvements.
Seriously. Stop the whiny bitching and figure out exactly what you really want. Then start pushing for it. This isn't rocket science, this is politics.
Until you do, you'll get exactly what you are asking for: nothing.
There, fixed it for you.
There, fixed that for you too.
You may be getting fscked, but eventually if you're a slut or whore, you're gonna catch a disease, and the bad ones are deadly.
No thanks.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
There, fixed it for you.
There, fixed that for you too.
You may be getting fscked, but eventually if you're a slut or whore, you're gonna catch a disease, and the bad ones are deadly.
No thanks.
If it makes you feel better, by all means...tell yourself that.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
Hey guess what, nobody's forced to shop anywhere here if they don't want to either, and you can't get paid just to sit around on your ass all day drinking beer. Nice try though. I guess your "solution" does look like it's the best when you just make shit up about the rest of the world though, huh. It speaks volumes about how great it must be if that's the only way you can justify it.
I think you don't understand communism and socialism. They abolish private ownership of pretty much everything. You may have socialism-lite over there--like China does now. But true socialism does exactly what I said above. Socialism forces people to work for the government and in return they get exactly what the government allows them to get. Capitalism allows people to work freely and negotiate their pay with their employer. If I want to earn $20/hr, I'm probably not going to be able to get that as a janitor. But I'm free to try. I am also able to pay someone to educate me to become a geek so I have a skill that sets me apart from a majority of the population so I can demand higher wages. Not in socialism.
There's no place like
"Socialism forces people to work for the government and in return they get exactly what the government allows them to get"
No it doesn't. What you're talking about is something that doesn't exist. Just like you don't have true capitalism or a free market. Your idea is that even what you define as socialism can't exist because people are purely self serving and not interested in self improvement even for the sake of self improvement. I guess you must live amongst people that have given you only that impression of what people are like, and while I feel sorry for you that that's what your existence has been exposed to, I can't help but wonder if that's a result of the pro-"everybody for themselves" capitalism that you have there. You keep telling people that they are a certain way, they will believe you. You raise people on the other hand to share a social conscience, and you find that people will tend to have that more.
I think you're throwing the baby and the bath out with the bathwater though. I think capitalism is a result of rich people wanting to keep more and more of it to themselves, even though there's no way they could ever generate such wealth without the functioning society that exists around them. Rich people are far more able to convince people that they're right, or at least bribe people to act like they believe that, than poorer people are, which leads to the situation where you don't even question anymore the abuses that the top 1% of the population carry out at the expense of the rest. The reality is that you're wasting your time being all concerned about the bottom 5% of people abusing a system, despite the fact that their abuse is relatively minor compared to the abuse that the top 5% carry out, with all the resources they have, not just against your own people, but against the rest of the world.
People with a social conscience will always know that that's wrong, no matter how much you get paid to say that it's right.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Apparently you're all for taking what doesn't belong to you, under the guise of "well everyone is doing it, I might as well."
It is nothing short of looting the public (yourself) at the expense of the public (yourself) with the government being the middle man whom you pay as a conscience clearing money launderer.
But hey, if that makes you Feel Better(tm)* then by all means tell yourself that.
*(TM) Two Party System, Republican/Democrat parties,
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Apparently you're all for taking what doesn't belong to you, under the guise of "well everyone is doing it, I might as well."
It is nothing short of looting the public (yourself) at the expense of the public (yourself) with the government being the middle man whom you pay as a conscience clearing money launderer.
But hey, if that makes you Feel Better(tm)* then by all means tell yourself that.
*(TM) Two Party System, Republican/Democrat parties,
Oh spare me the martyrdom speech.
I've yet to meet anyone who "rails against the machine" who won't take one side or the other in lieu of whatever it is they, personally, think they deserve.
How ironic that these are usually the people moaning about "freedom"...the problem is it's always the freedom to get what they want.
But you go ahead..."vote your conscience"...15 will get you 20 "your conscience" always seems to settle at the candidate with the "R" after their name.
Difference between you and me? I admit I'm always going to vote "D" AND ensure the person with the "D" after their name EARNS my vote.
But, again, be my guest...if you are really a person of your word (and not just an embarrassed Republican...afraid to admit that all "third party" candidates ultimately end up with that "R" after their name) then vote Independent/Libertarian/whatever screwball "party" appears on your ballot underneath the "D"s and "R"s.
It worked out real good for us in '92 when old Ross helped put Clinton in the White House :)
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
If your car won't start...should you have to diagnose it yourself before the mechanic fixes it? No, the fact that it won't start is defacto evidence it is "broke".
Drugs that cost $100 per pill (or way more) is evidence of a broke system.
Yet until you actually define "better"
Better in this context is to be affordable...if you had been paying attention for the last decade or so, you'd know that.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
You are operating under the flawed notion that the market can't work. If you take away all the Federal and state regulations that distort the market then it can work.
I can't buy health insurance for myself that does not include pregnancy coverage because state and local laws mandate that. That raises the cost to me and perverts the market for health insurance.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
...and this pretty much is true irregardless...
Oh no. Now you've gone and done it. Dude, irregardless is not a word. When you want to use it, the word you really want is regardless. The english nazis are going to strike any moment.
Here, let me help you out. When they post that this is not really a word, give them this story:
Once during the war of 1812, when the British were about to attack at the mouth of the Mississippi, the US navy discovered that they were going to be seriously out-numbered. In an attempt to even the odds, the Navy moved the guard ships that were stationed in lake Erie down to the Gulf. When they did this, they left the erie-guardless.
You can thank me later.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
The fact that your car will not start means you've applied more analysis to the problem than you have to drug approvals. You have a condition that is not being met (Car should start) so you now can have a professional fix it (make my car start).
With drug regulations, you have yet to actually define the problem. How can you fix an undefined problem?
Yet that does not indicate that the problem is in the drug regulations. There's many other nations with similar drug regulations where the pills cost far, far less. That implies the problem isn't the regulations. What's your evidence that relaxing regulations would make drug makers lower prices, when patents grant them a monopoly such that they have no competitive pressure to lower prices?
So in your solution, drug manufacturers will voluntarily reduce their profits on their monopoly products in return for reduced regulation.
Fact...drug costs are too high.
Fact...getting a drug approved requires millions of dollars and many years.
Fact...regulations contribute to these costs.
Suggestion, someone with the expertise and the authority should look into the millions of regulations to see to what extent they are unnecessary, redundant or not cost effective. Not you, not me.
"I suspect you will find the cost of drugs is related to the extremely high cost of getting the approved"
Suspect and related. That's what I said. The people with the expertise and authority should check it out.
Is that clear enough for you?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Good point, this is more willing ignorance than anything else.
Ignorant seems to be my favorite vocabulary word, next to Fuck.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
We know that health insurance can never be an efficient market due to factors like adverse selection, and their being 'no price' on our individual lives.
Adverse selection applies to all insurance. What do you think is so special about health insurance? And I don't see how a government is better set up to pay "no price" than an insurance company - instead of paying a premium to a company, you pay it in tax. The only advantages I can see of moving insurance to the public sector is that you force everyone to pay for insurance, and you can apply progression to the premiums - i.e. you can charge the rich a higher premium solely because they are rich. And there is nothing wrong with that, but it's nice to cut to the nub of the argument.
Well I read his blog and there is absolutely no reference to any medical studies. I find his opinions of "the Davis-Besse situation", the Price-Anderson Act and Yucca Mountain lack any real depth to be taken seriously. He says "Nuclear pioneer Alvin Weinberg, long-time director of Oak Ridge National Lab, repeatedly characterized nuclear technology as a "Faustian Bargain," urge[d] me to continue using the term, in order to spur nuclear workers to maintain the extraordinary level of technical excellence" he refuses, I feel illustrates his unwillingness to see the Nuclear Industry progress.
Basically the guy looses all credibility here. So rather than refute any of the statements in his blog, that can be found on slashdot on any other day, everything and I do mean everything in his blog I have already analysed and refuted before - just go search through my previous posts.
On a final note I will leave you with the words of a man whom we co-incidentally greatly admire. One whom I would characterise as the greatest Responsible Nuclear Advocate to have lived Four Star Admiral Hyman G. Rickover who directed the original development of naval nuclear propulsion and controlled its operations for three decades sums up this entire discussion;
"I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. That's why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. Unfortunately limits - attempts to limit war have always failed. The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available." Further remarking: "Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it." (Economics of Defense Policy: Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Pt. 1 (1982))
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
that demonstrated that low-dose radiation is actually beneficial, acting like a vaccination to reduce cancer rates and extend lifespan of nuclear workers and atomic bomb survivors.
Basically the guy looses all credibility here.
Well, maybe you can help me. I'm having serious difficulty finding any serious refutation of in-depth studies of radiation hormesis (which you claim makes someone lose all credibility). Maybe if you're so experienced in debating these issue, you could provide me with such a refutation to Bernard L. Cohen's paper published in Health Physics from 1995 titled "Test of the linear-no threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis for inhaled radon decay products."
Here is a link to the original paper: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/LNT-1995.PDF
A tl;dr version of it was described here.
Certainly. Thanks for the paper, I look forward to absorbing it.
Well first of all, and most obviously, Rockwell draws a long bow to compare "acting like a vaccination to reduce cancer rates and extend lifespan of nuclear workers and atomic bomb survivors" presumably to the paper which you link. Radon is one of the comparably benign radionuclides and a nuclear worker is likely to encounter that and more yet the paper (presumably - as that is the title) only speaks to radon and it's daughter products whose half lifes fall *within* a human life span.
However there is plenty of work surrounding ingested low-energy emitters, in particular Tritium which a nuclear worker is as likely to encounter.
Tritium is biologically mutagenic *because* it's a low energy emitter, like radon. This characteristic makes readily absorbed by surrounding cells. The available evidence from studies conducted journal a list of effects if you are looking for similar studies as refutation. From those works;
Tritium can be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through skin. Eating food containing radionuclides 3H can be even more damaging than drinking 3H bound in water. Consequently, an estimated radiation dose based only on ingestion of tritiated water may underestimate the health effects if the person has also consumed food contaminated with tritium. (Komatsu)
Studies indicate that lower doses of tritium can cause more cell death (Dobson, 1976), mutations (Ito) and chromosome damage (Hori) per dose than higher tritium doses. Tritium can impart damage which is two or more times greater per dose than either x-rays or gamma rays.
(Straume) (Dobson, 1976) There is no evidence of a threshold for damage from 3H exposure; even the smallest amount of tritium can have negative health impacts. (Dobson, 1974) Organically bound tritium (tritium bound in animal or plant tissue) can stay in the body for 10 years or more.
It's often said "of all the elements in nuclear waste tritium is one of the more harmless ones" and while it's more benign than most other radioactive effluents it's toxicity should not be under-estimated.
Tritium can cause mutations, tumors and cell death. (Rytomaa) Tritiated water is associated with significantly decreased weight of brain and genital tract organs in mice (Torok) and can cause irreversible loss of female germ cells in both mice and monkeys even at low concentrations. (Dobson, 1979) (Laskey) Tritium from tritiated water can become incorporated into DNA, the molecular basis of heredity for living organisms. DNA is especially sensitive to radiation. (Hori) A cell's exposure to tritium bound in DNA can be even more toxic than its exposure to tritium in water. (Straume)(Carr)
First, as an isotope of hydrogen (the cell's most ubiquitous element), tritium can be incorporated into essentially all portions of the living machinery; and it is not innocuous -- deaths have occurred in industry from occupational overexposure. R. Lowry Dobson, MD, PhD. (1979)
Perhaps you can find that in the paper Histopathologic findings of lung cancer in Navajo men: relationship to U mining and you can read Lung Cancer after Exposure to Radon Daughters and for materials and circumstance background you can read
My ism, it's full of beliefs.