Smithsonian Using Kickstart Campaign To Save Armstrong's Moon Suit

qpgmr writes: The Smithsonian is appealing for assistance to raise enough money to preserve Neil Armstrong's moon suit. The "Reboot the Suit: Bring Back Neil Armstrong's Spacesuit" campaign launched Monday on Kickstarter, marking 46 years since Armstrong's moonwalk in 1969. Smithsonian reports: "....on the anniversary of that 'small step for a man,' the Smithsonian Institution announced a plan of action that is, in its own way, a giant leap for funding the job with what the Institution’s first federal Kickstarter campaign. With a goal of raising $500,000 in 30 days—by offering incentives such as exclusive updates to 3D printed facsimiles of the space suit gloves—museum officials hope to be able to unveil a restored spacesuit by the time of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing four years from now, in 2019."

Comments

$805M budget

[hawguy]

The Smithsonian has a $805,000,000 budget.... surely they could scrounge up 0.06% of their annual budget to pay for it themselves since preserving significant artifacts of USA history is pretty much exactly what taxpayers are paying them for.

Re:$805M budget

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Or we could maybe use 1/3 of the DOD's paper-clip budget.

Re:$805M budget

[OhPlz]

Probably impractical, but imagine if more things in government were funded at-will. Then the projects the people truly care about would receive funding. People could point to the things they helped accomplish rather than feeling like they're pissing their money away into pork projects and padding the wallets of the well connected puppet masters. A space suit today, maybe Mars tomorrow.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. This is just a Republican attempt to make even more money. That is all their kind cares about.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

We spend about 834 billion a year on government healthcare subsidies.

We spend about 538 billion a year on non-defense discretionary spending.

We spend about 420 billion a year on "mandatory" spending.

We spend about 230 billion a year on interest payments to national debt.

Wee spend about 600 billion on the military.

Yet whenever anyone wants to raid a fund to pay for something... its the military budget.

Why is that?

And I should point out that the military is one of the few things the government does that it is supposed to do and it is one of the few things the world... especially our allies need us to be competent in.

So why are you raiding the military budget? Do you want the US to pull out of NATO? Maybe sunset its guarantee to protect Japan? We could let Israel get genocided. Maybe let the Russians run wild in Eastern Europe. Possibly allow the North Koreans to invade and enslave the south koreans?

Where would you like to cut the US military budget?

Maybe cut their medical care? That's a popular one. Or maybe you'd like them to not have the latest high tech stuff so when we go to war more of our people die... or we have to kill innocent people because the military will have to compensate for having bad weapons by using them less discriminately. That precision bomb that blows up one building but leaves the rest standing is expensive. Much cheaper to drop a lot of dumb bombs and flatten the whole neighborhood.

What would you like to cut? Obama is talking about cutting the ability of the US to fight two wars at once. This was something we built into the US budget during and after WW2 because we had to fight the Japanese and the Germans at once. A two front war. So... maybe that's what you want to cut.

Its all well and good to say "lets cut the military budget" but what does that mean? What are you cutting specifically?

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, he just wants to reduce DoD paper clip usage...

Re:$805M budget

[kmarple1]

RTFA: "The Smithsonian’s federal funds—about 70 percent of its resources—are restricted to safeguarding collections, research and the costs associated with operating and maintaining the museums. But exhibitions, public programs and the recent digitization of the collection have largely been privately funded."

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

B-b-but we needed Operation Paperclip to get those Nazi scientists, who got us to the Moon!

Re:$805M budget

[Pseudonym]

We spend about 834 billion a year on government healthcare subsidies.

Actually, plenty of people do want to cut that budget, but can't for ideological reasons.

The US spends just over 17% of GDP on health care, which is a figure only exceeded by Tuvalu. Most developed countries (e.g. most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan) the figure is around 9-10% of GDP. Even France spends less than 12%.

So, yes, you could cut that figure by a third simply by building a real public health system.

I don't know if Obamacare has helped or will help in any significant way. Given that the AMA supported it, probably not.

Re: $805M budget

[Karmashock]

I'm responding to this because it wasn't a troll question... I also felt answering it would get people to think about an issue for more than the .5 seconds they normally do which invariably leads to no actual thinking ever happening in the first place:

To be fair, he's saying that the DoD "Over Spends" so much on paperclips that you could raid the DoD budget indiscriminately and pay for the suit restoration.

here you might say "well, why do you say over spend"... because otherwise you're saying that the government is spending X on paperclips and doesn't need to because apparently they either buy too many or they aren't using them for anything.

Here is what you use paper clips for... to hold bits of paper together. So if you're using them... then what are you going to do when you don't have them?

  Staples? Folding the sheets just so? Maybe putting them in a folder?

And that causes your staple budget to go up... and that ignores that there are feature differences between staples and paperclips. Paper clips don't damage the paper when you use them which means you can separate out individual sheets or add sheets. Or folding... doesn't work as well as paper clips which means close efficiency from whatever that does. Or folders means you're now spending more on folders which are more expensive than paper clips per unit and are basically a superior version of the same thing at a higher cost.

I know I sound autistic going through this but details matter. The context of the statement was that there was so much fat in the military budget they could just bill it to the DoD. Now I'm sure the DoD does waste at LEAST half a million a year on all sorts of stupid shit. But every branch of government does that as well.

Obama and his wife took two separate government secret service protected planes to go to Los Angeles on the same day. Now, if they had shared the same plane that would have saved money. But they didn't. They chose to take two planes because "reasons". And I'm not beating up on Obama for that. you see it in every government department. They do stuff like that all the time.

The US Federal government got in trouble recently for running the sprinklers too long in California. They have a very bad drought there and for that reason they're being asked to not run the sprinkers for more than 6 minutes a week. Instead they're running them for about 6 hours a week.

Typical stuff. The city hall of San Francisco dumps about half a million gallons of drinking water down the drain every day to run water boiler heating system for the building. Again... in a drought. Never mind that they could recirculate the same water every day for at least a year at a time without any problems.

Its typical.

So if you want to raid a budget... I'd like people to stop picking on the military as if they're the only ones that do retarded shit on a regular basis. They ALL do it. Raid the general fund if you're going to take money out.

This would properly be filed under the "discretionary non military" fund. ANd that make up about 420 billion dollars of our annual budget every year. So add it to that.

Re:$805M budget

[cheater512]

Last direct attack against the US by a enemy force, might that be Pearl Harbour? (To be honest, US history isn't my strong point, but attacks by a couple of people and the threat of attack doesn't count)

Number of stupidly pointless wars the US has created since WWII............

Yeah I wonder why defence is first on the chopping block.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Well... depends on how you define "enemy force"...

Regardless, if you want to talk about stupidly pointless wars the US has fought since WW2, nearly all of them were part of the Cold War which was neither stupid nor pointless.

Typically what you'll see there is a list of proxy wars between the US and the Soviets that basically kept happening until the Soviets folded.

As to why defense isn't on the chopping block... so many reasons its hard to do the topic justice.

the long and the short of it is that the only thing giving international law, the UN, or stablizing the majority of the first world is the presence of the US military.

The Navy keeps the sea lanes open for trade and makes pointless any rival powers investment into naval power because whatever it is will be meaningless against the US Navy.

The Army and Marines are based around the world. We secure the border between north and south korea. We have bases throughout Europe that actually serve as the continent's actual military. And there is really a very complex and not very well understood logistics network the army maintains that is critical for rapid mobilization of US forces and the subsequent projection of force that permits.

The Air Force has bases all around the world capable of very rapid force projection anywhere in the world. They do the majority of the reconnaissance of the western powers. How do you know X country is doing Y? The US Air Force has pictures. Added to that, investment, development, and production of fighters and bombers the world over is suppressed by the existence of the air force if only because the USSR tried and got their faces shot off more often than not.

I find this video to be especially hilarious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I mean... that's US pilots in WW2 era slow as shit propeller ground support craft... dogfighting a mig from Vietnam... and basically winning some crazy how.

That means countries don't develop air power because there really isn't a point with US air superiority.

We suppress all of that. Every day.

Again, if you want to cut the US military budget. Which thing that the US military does would you like to cut?

No patrolling sea lanes? No maintaining an international military logistics network? No investing in air superiority? No protecting Japan? No protecting South Korea? No protecting Israel? No protecting Europe? No protecting Eastern Europe? No defense agreements in South America to defend country X if attacked by country Y?

Tell me what you'd like to cut? Who should we hang out to dry. *takes out ball point pen, clicks pen head out, and pulls out a lined ledger*

Tell me who we're fucking over. I'll make a list. :-D

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Just like we cut education spending and improved quality with the public education system right?

Sorry... nationalizing stuff is not a panacea.

The thing lost in your statistics is that the US if you compare equal demographics to equal demographics compares very very well to other countries even the hyper socialized ones.

Where things fall apart is if you compare people and cultures that exist in the US but not somewhere else.

Compare white women between the ages of 22-35 with any country you like... the US does just fine. Compare it against sweden if you like... same thing... the numbers are about the same. Where things get bad... and very bad at that is when you start to compare inner city minority populations or simply average them into the total.

Those stats are HORRIBLE. They're a fucking nightmare. Crime stats, drug addiction, literacy, high school graduation, college graduation, average income, life expectancy, infant mortality, teenaged pregnancy... the stats there are BAD.

But if you exclude that segment of the US population and recalculate... the US stats are quite good actually.

Now here you're going to say "you can't exclude a portion of the system"... okay, but now we have to admit that the problem is CONCENTRATED in a specific segment. And rather than applying your solution to EVERYONE when the problem is not suffered by EVERYONE maybe you should instead focus on what the fuck is going on in those communities that makes ALL the stats so bad. I mean, can you blame the lack of socialized healthcare on the literacy and high school graduation rates? Kinda hard to do that isn't it?

So once you're doing that, you're going to have to focus on what went wrong in these communities because they actually used to be better than that. They've gotten WORSE over time... not better. And what you'll find is that they started to get bad when a lot of welfare programs were released that disincentivized work, disincentivized a stable household, undermined the quality of inner city public education, and a tediously long list of things that really hurt those people. And it was all government action. And it was all with good intentions.

And fucked everything up.

What public service in the US do you think your new healthcare system is going to resemble. Because I can tell you now, that it would very rapidly look just like the public education system unless you instituted systemic reform in government unions just as a start.

And absent that... your idea would endanger the health of my entire country for very little if any objective return.

Re:$805M budget

[tipo159]

This comment is modded Insightful? It is more like clueless.

The purpose of this campaign is right on the Kickstarter page (and it isn't to raise money that would otherwise not be in their budget):

Kickstarter gives a wide audience the chance to be a part of this project. We're inviting you to go behind the scenes and be a part of the process – from fundraising through conservation to display.

Lots of people want the opportunity to be involved with stuff like this.

Re:$805M budget

[thegarbz]

Why is that?

Maybe because the USA spend 10 times the amount of money on it's military than the combined total of the following 9 nations on the list sorted by spend, and many those other 9 are allies of the USA anyway.

I would be for cutting military spending and instead providing better healthcare. Where would I cut the military budget? Start with the over expensive and useless planes, the incredibly fat contracts given to useless parties, or why not actually try not waging war against someone for once in history?

I also like the comments you make about fighting multiple wars or helping injured victims of war. I wonder how many less Americans would be injured if the USA wasn't actually fighting wars? I mean it's not like anyone in their right mind would actually bright war to the USA, they'd be decimated in an instant even if they had half the budget they do now.

Re:$805M budget

[vux984]

No patrolling sea lanes? No maintaining an international military logistics network? No investing in air superiority? No protecting Japan? No protecting South Korea? No protecting Israel? No protecting Europe? No protecting Eastern Europe? No defense agreements in South America to defend country X if attacked by country Y?

Because if the US wasn't doing that the world would fall apart? Typical American jesus complex. What would the real impact be of not doing all that all the time?

And why, pray tell, is it on the American tax payer to fund it, exactly? And why *just* the American tax payers? Nobody else pays as much per capita as the USA does... why does the USA do it?

In a word: money. Big profits reaped by corporations both by having the force projection we have, and reaped by corporations actually providing and maintaining the 'war machine' itself. Between them its very good for business, especially since they were able to find a sucker to pay for it all: The American tax payer.

Privatize the profits, socialize the cost; the ultimate winning play in this fine republic.

Re:$805M budget

[Strider-]

Sorry... nationalizing stuff is not a panacea.

Who said anything about nationalizing anything? A real healthcare system doesn't have to be nationalised.

Take the Canadian system, as a prime example. As it is not something enumerated in either the constitution, or the British North America act before it, by default healthcare is under the jurisdiction of the provinces. Each province runs its own single-payer insurance system, and sets standards for care and outcomes. In turn, each province is divided into regional health authorities, which for the most part own and operate the hospitals in their region, as well as handle things like health inspections of restaurants, initial investigation of disease outbreaks, and so forth. In turn, unless they are on the hospital payroll (rare), doctors in turn are free to operate their practice as they see fit (private business, partnership, chain etc...) the only proviso being that they either have to be in the public system, or completely out of it, no double-dipping.

The net effect is that hospitals, and doctors are operated locally and in the case of hospitals, in a non-profit manner. This results in a reasonably efficient system that costs far less than the US system, while delivering similar or better outcomes.

Re:$805M budget

[Pseudonym]

I hope you caught that the word "simply" in my post was flippant.

My point is a simple one: compared to other countries, the US health care system does not get anywhere near the value for money that other countries do. It spends far more and gets far less in return.

You could think up many possibilities as to why this is, and I'm sure that a lot of it is waste due to medical businesses (e.g. insurers) being run for-profit. But I think it's pretty clear to all sane people that you don't just cut funding and hope everything works out.

One possibility as to why the US spends so much more is that the whole system is not geared to preventative medicine. By far, the cheapest time to fix a medical condition is before it becomes serious, and uninsured and under-insured patients tend to only present after a condition has become serious.

What public service in the US do you think your new healthcare system is going to resemble.

In the US? Don't know. I was thinking something more like the NHS or Medicare Australia.

Re:$805M budget

[rioki]

If you knew what you where talking about could have a point, but as it stands you sound like a shotgun polishing hill billy.

The primary problem with healthcare in general is that it is an inelastic market for individuals. That is if you need a treatment to save your life, it does nto mater if it costs $7 or $7000, you will find the money to pay for it; even if you have to beg on Facebook. The primary problem that insurances have in the US is that they are almost all small and have little bargaining power. This is different in countries that have socialized health care, it is one insurance and they have a huge bargaining power. The result is that in the US the healthcare costs are the highest world wide, by orders of a magnitude.

One of the valid solutions in the US would be if the insurances came together and bargained together. Alternatively a semi socialized approach may also work (like in Germany), you define by law a catalog of basic healthcare procedures and their costs. Then private insurance companies work within this catalog and provide discretionary additional services. For example tooth filling is covered by all at a certain rate, but if you like white filling that looks like your tough you got ti either pay extra from your own pocket or get an insurance that covers that.

I have seen 4 different health care systems in action and the US sucks the most.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

And if they US didn't those countries would have to spend more. So what is your point?

A country that is getting US strategic protection basically for free doesn't need to spend that money themselves.

Cite the percentage GDP spending of relevant non-first world powers.

First world is in the original context... aka US allies. Second world would be soviet allies and third world would be anyone else. That is what that term means.

So... cite non-US allies that have a relevant military force and cite the percentage of their GDP that they spend on the military. You'll find that they tend to spend more.

Your example is little more than pointing out that various first world countries save on their military budget because the US does it for them.

Yippy.

It was also deliberate. After WW2, the European powers were in ruins and it was agreed that the US would protect them while they rebuilt.

Your utter lack of knowledge of the subject and history renders your presumption to an opinion laughable.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

What did the world look like before the British Empire? Because that was what it was like before you had a great sea power patrolling the sea lanes and making it clear that anyone that fucked with shipping was going to get shelled.

As to why we have to fund it... basically because we agreed to and because no one else wants to do it.

A better question would be why don't we collect tribute.

Historically powers like the US do that. You provide protection or some other service and the powers that use it have to pay a tax and that tax subsidizes the actions by that power.

The British did that during their empire... so did the monguls... etc. We are unique in that we don't charge anything.

Our reasons for that are complicated and I won't get into it unless I I know you're asking in good faith. If you're just trying to be snarky then I won't waste my time.

As to US corporations profiting from US power... not disproportionately. Everyone profits from it to the extent that they have anything to sell that anyone else actually wants to buy. The US was a very profitable exporter prior to our expansion of responsibilities and suggesting that we're only profitable now because of them is not supportable.

You'd have to show instances of the US navy for example interdicting trade to profit US corporations.

We do interdict trade of course... though mostly in weapons and only against rogue states. Just because we would frustrate weapons shipments to Palestine or Iran doesn't mean we're doing anything to the trade of Mexico or Sweden or South Africa.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

The issue is very complicated. I think a more productive way of looking at it would be to break down the numbers into what is spent on various things and that would help us isolate where the costs are.

It is possible they're general. But I've never found an issue where that was the case. Typically what happens is that you have something in the stats that is HUGELY out of whack and when averaged into the total it distorts the statistics.

For example, lets look at what doctors make in the US:

Okay, wages for doctors range from 135 thousand a year to about 300 thousand a year for specialists.

Lets compare that to the UK... where they make about 50k to about 80k... in british pounds... so
77,000 US dollars to about 124,000 US dollars for specialists.

Point is the doctors in the UK make about HALF what they do in the US.

So that's one thing we can look at. Why are we paying TWICE as much for doctors as they do in the UK? Does that mean we're getting higher quality doctors, does that mean the UK is getting lower quality doctors? is there an issue with medical schools not training enough doctors in the US? Does the UK have a better program for teaching doctors?

Something I've noticed in the UK is they have a lot of imported doctors. People that grew up in India, went to medical school in india, and then immigrate to the UK to practice. I've been to a few UK hospitals and they're largely foreign born. Which implies the salaries being offered are below market rates for the UK.

That suggests that even if the US is over paying for doctors, the UK is likely underpaying.

If you'd like to talk about Canada...

They appear to be paid roughly what US doctors are paid.

You get the idea. You break it down. Simplifying everything to one number is not useful. You have no detail to form an opinion. To see that number and just say "well you should socialize your system" is simplistic. You don't know what is going on. The existing cost inflation is as likely to be caused by subsidies as anything.

We've seen that in the education system where every time university subsidies for student loans are increased the universities increase tuition.

The cost of university education has outpaced inflation. And the reason for it is that the government keeps giving kids zero interest loans and increasing the amount they'll give. The Universities just adjust the tuition so they take 100 percent of the loan + they take whatever the student or family might be able to afford on top of that.

We saw similar things in the housing crisis in that the government was giving cheap loans to buy houses. This caused market inflation because the cost of housing simply went up every time the government increased the subsidies. Why not increase the price of my house? If you've got more money to spend then I'll set my price at whatever you'll pay.

So you can't just abstract everything down to one number. You lose all the details.

As to what public service you'd like this new Health care system to resemble... you can't use another country as the model. Its like saying you want a US university system in Zimbabwe or an American news organization in China. These nations are all different and whatever you build in the US is going to be run by Americans and is going to be subject to American economics and is going to be subject to american local, state, and national politics.

So... find an analogue. What you'll find is that US services that are highly regulated tend to become heavily beurocratic, bloated, and inefficient... and often the quality drops. The reasons for this are mostly political. They tend to have employee unions which agree to deliver campaign donations and votes in exchange for lax auditing of their functions, over staffing their departments, and paying the union better than market rate.

There is a reason the most successful economy in the US is Washington DC. The government pays people very well and they don't fire people unless they're horrifically in

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's start with this:

                    http://www.worldgolf.com/courses/usa/colorado/coloradosprings/blue-at-eisenhower-golf-course-military.html

And work from there... nobody is suggesting cutting the muscle, but the fat is pretty freaking obvious.

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the Democrats just do anything, it's always the Republicans fault. The poor innocent Democrats who aren't rich and never waste tax dollars in anything.

Do you have any idea how stupid you sound when you always blame the Republicans? Who was in charge of the house, the Senate and the white house when Obama care was past? The Democrats moron. They also approved spending for the military and everything else.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

First, you had better sound pretty fucking clever by the time I'm done reading your post or I'm going to jam the aforementioned shotgun your ass.
https://youtu.be/F1SfzV67Bqw?t... ... sigh...

First, the hospitals do not bid rates generally. They only tell the insurance companies what their price lists are and that is the only place those prices are really negotiated. Lots of things are inelastic while also being subject to market forces. Food is a good example. Just because you need to eat doesn't mean you're going to buy food from just anyone. You know what the prices are of most retailers or have a reasonable estimation. And based on that and with general market competition you can control costs by shifting from different sellers.

If I needed a certain type of treatment... not right now... but in a week or two... I'd have time to shop around. And the medical system could offer rates just like anything else is offered with rates. The fact that they're not is one of the reasons the market has a hard time controlling costs. Lets say a hospital 400 miles away is willing to do an operation that would cost me 50k where I am for only 25k? Now assuming quality is comparable, I then do a cost benefit analysis where I calculate the cost to me of traveling over there and doing that, possibly staying in a hotel or renting a car, and then compare that against the cost of doing it where I am.

Lets say you need to get a lot work done and you live in New York where it might be expensive. But if you fly to Texas you can get the same thing done with the same quality for much less. Just as an example.

That drives down the price in New York because their high prices are causing customers to go somewhere else. And business being business they need to maintain competitiveness.

This notion you have that medical treatment can't be subjected to conventional market forces is in error.

The only case where you're going to be forced to use the local whatever is going to be if you have a medical emergency. OKAY... in that specific circumstance you've got me. But their business model probably isn't sustainable on nothing but the emergency room. So they have to bring their prices down regardless IF patients are informed of prices.

But they're not. Hospitals are one of a very few set of businesses where they don't even hint at what your costs are going to be until you leave. And even then you might not know for weeks after you left. I got medical bills from a visit two weeks after I actually went to the hospital. They said one number two days after I left... then a week later they give me another number and then two weeks after I had initially gone, I got a third number.

Where did any of that come from ? apparently three separate billing departments from a single hospital.

Think of any business where that would happen outside of an American hospital? There isn't one. No US business works that way except for hospitals and only in America so far as I know.

There are many problems with the cost structure of the US medical industry. But to brush all that off and suggest I'm a hillbilly? I assume this is because I don't goosestep to socialism? You call me a hippy, I'm going to call you a nazi. Suck it. But to say I'm ignorant because I don't share your slavish devotion to your absurd little ideology? You're more a bible thumper than I am sport. Its your dogma you're damning me with.

You're saying I don't worship your book... so I'm in league with the devil. And you call me the hillbilly?

You're a retard.

*jams it up his ass until it goes click*

*rolls eyes*

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

its worth mentioning that the US healthcare system is almost entirely private whilst a significant proportion of the countries you mention use public healthcare. The difference could easily be profit. even obamacare is basically private insurance.

Re:$805M budget

[quenda]

So why are you raiding the military budget?

Because it is far too big, and incredibly wasteful. So much is just political pork. I'm not just talking about the mythical $6000 hammer, but whole programs that should be scrapped, like the JSF.
US military spending is equal to the next nine countries combined.
Be careful. With such a bloated military, you run the risk of launching wars of aggression against distant countries that are no threat to the US, killing countless people, destabilising regions, and giving rise to devastating fundamentalist armies.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Nationalizing the insurance system is still nationalizing.

Re:$805M budget

[DanJ_UK]

Most Doctors in the UK do private referral work on the side too, once they've specialised / chosen their field coming out of medical school + their internship / mandatory A&E training.

Source: My father who just retired as an NHS GP and private Dermatologist.

Re:$805M budget

[vux984]

What did the world look like before the British Empire? Because that was what it was like before you had a great sea power patrolling the sea lanes and making it clear that anyone that fucked with shipping was going to get shelled.

I think there's been more than enough change in the world since then that we can't assume its going to look anything like that ever again. And again, safe shipping lanes in east asia... benefit american citizens in ways that are difficult to quantify. Yes, imports/exports... but access to cheap offshored manufacturing goods at the loss of local manufacturing and local manufacturing jobs. Market efficiency realized to be sure, but the benefit of that market efficiency is largely privatized while the tax payer funds the security enabling those profits.

Our reasons for that are complicated and I won't get into it unless I I know you're asking in good faith.

Yes. I'd be interested in your argument.

A better question would be why don't we collect tribute.

Tribute implies coercion and is rarely agreed to. A more constructive approach would be to negotiate funding... it amounts to the same dollars from the same places but is nonetheless significantly different. I completely agree countries that are hiring our security should be paying for their share of it.

I'd also stipulate that corporate interests benefitting from it should likeways fund it. If goods from china for company X flow to the US in shipping lanes protected by the US military, then company X should be paying their share of the cost. The cost of the goods goes up, the cost of the military to the tax payer goes down... so its a 'wash' right? Not quite... the higher priced goods are paid for in all ports of call... western europe, south america etc. So its not solely borne by the US taxpayer. Further, by having the cost of securing the goods reflected in the price of the goods, a market distortion is eliminated. Perhaps it is cheaper to manufacture things in the US rather than manufacture them in China, and then pay an aircraft carrier to guard the shipping lanes. If so we should be making the thing here.

Having the tax payer cover the security cost allows the business to artificially externalize a cost component of the goods. I'm not some free market extremist, and I do think government is in the role of security for its citizens. Securing a shipping lane in east asia? There are lots of good reasons to do that... but it shouldn't be paid for directly by the US tax payer.

You'd have to show instances of the US navy for example interdicting trade to profit US corporations.

I'm not thinking interdiction of trade per se, but rather more along the lines of my example of it amounting to a market distortion; favoring off shoring and corporate profits. The cost of securing those lanes should be in the goods that pass through them, not funded via a taxation back channel.

The US was a very profitable exporter

Key word is *was*. Today we are a net importer to the tune of 3/4 Trillion dollars*. Today its very profitable for other countries to export to the USA. Perhaps at one time it was sensible for the US citizens to secure the shipping lanes, but today, other nations should be paying to secure the shipping lanes they are using to profit from us.

Clearly the idea that the us tax payer should pay all costs of securing foreign profits is even more unsupportable than the idea that we should be securing profits for domestic companies.

* and its even more an issue because so much of our export is intellectual property, which doesn't get moved around in shipping lanes.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

The joint strike fighter was actually an attempt to save money. Did you know that?

As to the next nine countries:
percentage GDP is what is relevant actually... and by those figures you can see the US isn't exceptional.

What is more, our military is effectively NATO, the military of Japan, the military of South Korea, the military of Australia, and also the military of Saudi Arabia and Israel which is kind of a fun combination.

Point is that you can't compare the US against non-hegemonic powers. And even if you do, as a percentage of our GDP it isn't remarkable.

Compare to this:
http://www.ukpublicspending.co...

That's what the British empire was spending around 1905 on their military:
68.1 million pounds.
which is hilariously about
4,878 million pounds in today's money. It was about half the crown's budget.

Compared to GDP:
Public Spending Chart
Fiscal Years 1905 to 1910Year GDP-UK
£ billion Population-UK
million Defence -total
percent GDP Total Spending -total
percent GDP
1905 MW gdp 43.080 3.49 a 17.82 a
1906 MW gdp 43.459 3.16 a 15.18 a
1907 MW gdp 43.840 2.89 a 14.44 a
1908 MW gdp 44.225 3.00 a 14.78 a
1909 MW gdp 44.613 2.96 a 14.73 a
1910 MW gdp 45.005 3.03 a 15.95 a

Or around 1905 they had spending around 3.5 percent of GDP going to "defense".

Comparing the US to Sweden's military budget in 2015 is stupid. Compare the US to Sweden when they kinda sorta had an empire and then make sure you compare by GDP and total tax base. You'll find the US's numbers are probably low compared to what Sweden was spending when they were actually responsible for anything besides meatballs.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Well this is one of the charts I found with salaries and they all sort of agree with each other on pay scales:
http://www.empire-locums.co.uk...

What is more, you're saying doctors go private. Why do people use private doctors in the UK if the public ones are provided at no additional cost. I mean if you go private you're basically paying twice. You paid once in your taxes and now you're paying again upfront.

Why do that?

Is it is quality? Are the private doctors better?
Is it availability? The public doctors are all busy so you either have to wait until you die or see a private doctor?

Why do people go to private doctors in the UK?

Re:$805M budget

[TheRaven64]

As to the next nine countries: percentage GDP is what is relevant actually... and by those figures you can see the US isn't exceptional.

Okay, let's do that. The US is at 3.3%. Let's look at the rest. Here are the ones from the top 10 that are spending more as a percentage of the GDP than the USA:

• 3: Saudi Arabia 10.7%
• 4: Russia 3.7%

Now let's look at the ones that are spending less than half as much as the USA:

• 2 China 1.2%
• 6 France 1.8%
• 7 Japan 1.0%
• 9 Germany 1.1%

Notice how this list is longer than the first one? Okay, how about ones are spending 2/3 of what the US is spending per capita?

• 5 United Kingdom 2.1%
• 8 India 2.2%

That just leaves one that's spending less than the USA but more than 2/3:

• 10 South Korea 2.4%

Oh, and the UK is only at 2.1% because of strong pressure from the USA to commit to spending 2% of GDP on defence. The only countries that come close to spending the same percentage of the GDP on defence as the USA are Russia (with an economy in the toilet making it seem more) and Saudi Arabia (rich country in the middle of an unstable region, surrounded by countries that universally hate them). Russia has shrunk its spending (in inflation-adjusted US dollars) from $90.6Bn (2012) through $84.8bn (2013) to $70Bn (2014) as their economy contracted.

Or around 1905 they had spending around 3.5 percent of GDP going to "defense".

You mean in the period of military overspend by most European countries that was one of the major causes of the first world war? Great period to pick for comparison!

Re:$805M budget

[dunkelfalke]

Because it is defense budget, not offense budget, but all you do is to attack countries left and right because you apparently enjoy killing people.

Re:$805M budget

[nbauman]

And what you'll find is that they started to get bad when a lot of welfare programs were released that disincentivized work, disincentivized a stable household, undermined the quality of inner city public education, and a tediously long list of things that really hurt those people. And it was all government action. And it was all with good intentions.

Are you saying that the the center city neighborhoods throughout the country were filled with happy, hard-working black people until Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program came along in the 1960s and gave them government money?

You don't know too much about segregation in the U.S. Black people couldn't even vote in most parts of the formerly Confederate states until the Voting Rights Act of 1964, and even then they were often killed when they tried to register to vote. Black schools were far worse than white schools. When the courts ordered them to integrate their schools, they shut down the public schools entirely and opened private "segregation academies."

The federal government efforts (and money) to improve minority education had good results. Black (and hispanic) math and reading scores rose from 1971-2012, and narrowed the gap with whites. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo...

The reason the "problem" is concentrated in minority districts is that black people started out as slaves, and after they were freed, they were suppressed by the white power structure whenever they showed hard work and skill -- especially when they showed hard work and skill. Read Ida Wells, who was the subject of last week's Google Doodle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In 1889 Thomas Moss, a friend of Wells, opened the People's Grocery in the "Curve," a black neighborhood just outside the Memphis city limits. It did well and competed with a white-owned grocery store across the street. While Wells was out of town in Natchez, Mississippi, a white mob invaded her friends' store. During the altercation, three white men were shot and injured. Moss, and two other black men, named McDowell and Stewart, were arrested and jailed pending trial. A large white lynch mob stormed the jail and killed the three men.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. For a non-American, it is surprising to see how vigorously the American militarty is defended here. Healthcare... nah. Preventing genocide in Israel, wow! Which, btw, the rest of the world doesn't really percieve as "preventing a genocide", but rather as a combination of the US being a handpuppet of wealthy Jews, combined with invading Muslim because of territorial interests. I am not a Muslim nor a Jew, btw. Besides, why not do something against IS, if you're so concerned abouyt genocides?

Re:$805M budget

[nbauman]

We spend about 834 billion a year on government healthcare subsidies.

Actually, plenty of people do want to cut that budget, but can't for ideological reasons.

The US spends just over 17% of GDP on health care, which is a figure only exceeded by Tuvalu. Most developed countries (e.g. most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan) the figure is around 9-10% of GDP. Even France spends less than 12%.

So, yes, you could cut that figure by a third simply by building a real public health system.

For every dollar in premiums you pay your insurance company, they spend 15-20 cents in administrative costs and profits. (You can see that if you read an insurance company annual report on their web site. The "loss ratio," usually 80-85%, is the money they pass on to the doctor or hospital.)

Then your doctor gets 80 cents. He has to spend another 20 cents in administrative costs to deal with the insurance company. (Compared to less than 5 cents on Medicare.)

So if you just cut out the insurance companies, you'd save 35% right there. Other big expenses here are the cost of drugs, hospital services, and doctor services.

I don't know if Obamacare has helped or will help in any significant way. Given that the AMA supported it, probably not.

There was a good story in the Washington Post, based on a Netroots Nation meeting, which gave a reasonably good brief explanation of how Obamacare got here and why it will fail.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Liberal activists see Bernie Sanders as champion for causes failed by Obama
By David Weigel
July 20, 2015

Basically, Obama and the advisers he picked decided that the only way to pass a health care bill was to give the Republicans and the corporations everything they wanted. They struck a deal with the insurance companies, the drug companies, the hospitals, the doctors' organizations, etc. to give them everything they wanted. So you have to buy your Obamacare through a private insurer, instead of having the choice of a public option.

The problem with Obamacare is that the premiums and copayments are enormous. A single person making $27,000 a year would have to pay one month's income a year for the premiums. Then (depending on the plan) the insurance wouldn't kick in until she spent $2,000 or $3,000. Then she might have to pay 20% or 40% of the costs, until she reached the maximum, which is $8,000. It benefits somebody who has more than $8,000 a year of medical expenses.

In other words, you wind up paying twice as much as they do in Canada. And in this country, the burden falls most heavily on the lower middle class. It's a regressive tax.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

As to the world being different. Yes... it is different because it was changed. You're welcome.

Okay, as to why the US doesn't charge for the protection, the reasons were very much nested in the post WW2 world. We had just fought the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese. And then after the war, we were dealing with the Soviets that tried to exploit Europe being in ruins to basically make a huge land grab. And not only did Stalin do that but he tried to claim all sorts of stuff that he wasn't even close to and basically promised to convert the whole world to communism. And not the friendly academic pot head communism of "you know man, people should just like be awesome to each other"... but the USSR's version of communism.

Really there was nothing that could stop the soviets from expanding except the US. The british empire was trashed. The Germans were trashed. The Japanese were trashed. The world belonged to comrade Stalin and all that had to happen was the US do nothing.

Well, we came out of WW2 feeling like the mistake of WW1 was that the US isolated itself and didn't keep a hand in european affairs. That was just what we felt. So this was all to explain that we were going to do something.

As to why we didn't charge for it, the short answer is that we'd be paying ourselves if we charged anything at all. We were making big loans and gifts basically to the european countries at that time under the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe. And if we charged for the defense, they'd just take money out of that and send it back to us. What was the point.

So we gave it away for free on the notion that it would accelerate European recovery and that would over time net us trading partners that were worth a damn and they would be able to hold their own territory without us holding their hands.

Our policies since then have run very much on inertia. Arguments for why we do it today can be made but they're mostly reductive. It all boils down to "we do it this way because we do it this way." And we did it that way for the reason that the Europeans in particular could not pay at the time.

As to billing countries for passage... part of the problem there would be that it bore little difference from what was going on before. The north African pirates for example that we had to deal with shortly after the American revolution were prepared to allow US shipping through the Mediterranean in exchange for tribute. Pay the tribute and your shipping goes free through their zone of influence. Don't pay and they attack your shipping.

The British Empire's method of controlling things was to have monopolies. They dominated certain types of trade and forbid anyone from competing with them. And by exploiting that monopoly the naval operations were paid for effectively.

it wasn't as obvious as the tribute demanded by the Barbary pirates but it was there.

The US doesn't take a dime. If anything we get political clout from it. Which is sometimes worth a lot. We get free access to things, people consult us as to our opinions, and we can shut things down just by saying we don't like it. That is something that is bought with the US security apparatus. Absent that influence the US would be a less diplomatically relevant nation.

France says they like or don't like something... who gives a flying fuck... the US says they don't like it and it means something.

As to market distortions, you'd need to link that to US military activities which I don't think you can do. I think you're conflating a laundry list of things you don't like with US military spending. It does not appear to be a valid association. How does corporate profits or off shoring relate to US military spending? Many nations in Europe have off shoring and yet they have relatively insignificant militaries. You'd need to talk about something unique to the US since we uniquely have this power.

If you cite stuff that everyone does than it actually supports my position that we don't hoard the wealth for ourselves but rather share it arou

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

First this is a better ranking:
https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...

As you can see, the US is rated number 9 in the world. Not even in the top five. What you should know is that countries ranked highly on this list all have to take care of themselves. With no relevant exceptions, if the shit hits the fan... no one is coming to save any of these countries... they're on their own. And their spending reflects that.

You can't include first world countries in that ranking either except for the US because the US has treaty obligations to defend all first world countries. So naturally other first world countries spend less because we are obligated to protect them.

Its like would you build a pool in your backyard if your next door neighbor said you could use his anytime you wanted? Assuming that worked for you, then you'd just use his pool. Which is exactly what most first world countries do.

The only exception on the list might be Israel. The rest of the first world powers shamelessly mooch off the US.

Remember the recent Libya war. The French were much more gung ho about it than we were. We tried to stay out of it. But the europeans committed to it... and then they realized "oh wait, we don't have the logistics to support a military campaign even as close as north africa"... and that meant the US had to come to offer carriers, inflight refueling airplanes, and if we're doing all that we might as well just blow the shit out of Gadaffi's bullshit and end the whole farce as quickly as possible. The alternative was watching the Italians and French play with themselves.

Without the US, the combined forces of Europe could not take on so much as Serbia. Remember the Kosovo war? The combined forces of Europe could not breach Serbian airspace. Why? Because they had some old soviet AA missiles and the Serbs are tough fucking fighters. You want to defeat them... you need to do more than send strongly worded letters to them. And that required the US.

So what do you want here? You want the US to be as useless as the Europeans?

Look at this shit:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

I mean... are you fucking kidding me? Fucking broomsticks. Let me tell you, in some shit hole third world country they'd not show up to training with fucking broomsticks. But in Germany in the 21st century... this is what we have to work with. And you suggest the US spend like them?

Your entire argument is wall to wall foolishness.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

When you add up all the real spending for the military, we spend about $1.2T a year. Military spending is spread out into other buckets just to make it look less of the behemoth it is. For example:

That 420 billion of mandatory spending you scare quoted? A big heaping hunk of that is VA spending.

The department of energy? Most of their funding goes to maintaining the nuke arsenal.

The treasury? Much of that spending goes to pay military pensions.

etc. and so on an so forth.

As to where to cut? Easy. We can start by stopping the idiocy of:

* making the military purchase weapons systems it doesn't ask for or have a use for
* stop all wars of aggression
* stop making new veterans in wars of aggression.
* stop other useless spending like gold courses, etc. (already mentioned)

Do just those things and we could slash the military budget by 2/3 without breaking doing a single thing to degrade its effectiveness

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Actually there is no such thing as a defense budget in the 21st century. You defend yourself with offensive power. The US doesn't build armor around the US and neither does any other credible military power. You defend yourself by having forces that can engage enemy forces near your territory... and ideally preempt them and strike them in their own lands.

As to attacking countries left and right... no we don't. We're pretty selective about it and there tends to reasons for it that seem good to us at the time. Much of the reason people like you don't understand that is that the education in such matters is generally very poor and the US serves as a convenient scapegoat for a lot of things because we don't take retribution for being blamed.

Blame other countries and they get really upset and will find ways to hurt you. Blame the US and we generally ignore it.

Its why every shit hole dictator blames the shittiness of the country on the US. Why does the dictator rape and murder everyone? Because the US.

And the fact that the Europeans have started puppeting that is frankly more of an insult against to their intelligence than anything. They should really be ashamed of themselves. That said, many europeans don't think that way. I have a lot of euro friends and they take some pains to distance themselves from the drug addled college students that know just enough to say some surprisingly stupid things but not enough to realize how stupid they are yet.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

As to segregation... Was New York city or Detroit segregated?

Yes you have a point or no you don't have a point?

As to slaves... Chinese immigrants to the US didn't start off as much better than slaves and yet they never had these problems.

I'm sorry, your narrative is reductive. You need to be more deductive.

Solve the mystery. Don't just think like creationists, start with your conclusion, and then look for evidence to support your preconcieved ideas of things. Stop and actually look at what happened.

As to slavery, even if I completely agreed that blacks were dropping out of high school in the 21st century because of slavery in the 1860s... that would still suggest the statistics should be broken down to account for that. Simply conflating everything into a single number and comparing it against other countries is not reasonable.

All the US stats are terrible in the inner city. Just awful. But the stats in pretty much any other part of the country and the country generally excluding the inner cities is quite good. Our testing scores are good. Our economic figures are between okay and excellent. Our health figures are comparable to anywhere else in the first world or better.

But those inner city stats are so fucking bad that they pull the national averages down. And that's fine. They're americans and we nee to see that those communities are helped. But be that as it may, you can't conflate those cases into the national averages without making clear what is going on.

I keep seeing suggestions that if the US only did X our numbers would pop up. And the X never addresses that the problem is highly concentrated and specific to certain areas. And that the rest of the nation is actually doing quite fine thank you very much.

Re:$805M budget

[nbauman]

Here is the best model I can find for what you'd get in the US.

The VA hospital system. This is a medical system set up for US soldiers in the US. It is entirely operated by the US federal government and it is widely regarded to be some mixture of corrupt and incompetent. There have been quite a few scandals with it recently.

Mostly stuff about putting people on wait lists forever. A lot of soldiers die waiting for treatment in the system.

When I hear "lets socialize the US healthcare system"... I think of the VA hospitals.

I've studied the VA system, and they're getting a bad rap.

First, you have to judge them by their main purpose: When a soldier comes back from Iraq with a brain injury, their job is to keep him alive and get him functioning as well as possible. They do the best job in the world. There is no place in the world that can treat head wounds as well as the U.S. military. Nobody. Same with the guys who have a foot blown off by a land mine.

If some 60-year-old vet comes in with trouble urinating because of an enlarged prostate, they're going to take care of him, yes. But he may have to wait for somebody with a more urgent problem. Like a coronary bypass or stroke.

Second, Congress wanted to cut taxes. But they wanted first-class service from government agencies. They wanted everything but they didn't want to pay for it. So they ordered the VA to cut their waiting times. But they didn't give them the money to hire more doctors to do it. So what do managers do when you tell them they have to do the impossible or they'll be fired? As any MBA will tell you, they cheat. They fudged their appointment records, just as any private business manager in the same situation would do. (Hello Enron?)

Third, the VA system does some of the best medical research in the world. When they do a treatment hundreds of thousands of times a year, they do a study to find out which treatment works better, which hospital gets better results, and which doctors get better results. (No, they don't fire the doctors with worse results, they retrain them.) They do that for heart disease, stroke, cancer, eye disease, amputations, everything. I went to a lot of medical conferences, and they're always talking about "the VA study" in their field, which is usually the best study available.

For example, I just read a study about how the VA was trying to figure out how to give pain-killing drugs to vets in severe pain. If you don't give them enough drugs, they're in pain. If you give them too much, and if you give them opioids, they can die from an overdose. The VA doctors figured out how to optimize it.

So yes, if I had a heart attack outside a VA medical center, I'd feel comfortable that I was getting the best care in the world. I'd trust them to make a tough diagnosis, and to treat a serious, life-threatening disease. If you were crippled, I'd trust them to get you walking again, if anybody could do it.

Don't whine to me because you can't get an appointment this month. Tell Congress to give them enough money to hire more doctors.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

1. I don't believe that it is impossible to find equal or superior care for those sorts of injuries outside the VA.

2. All you're saying here is that the military budget got cut and there were consequences people didn't anticipate. I agree. What is more, why don't you think the same thing would happen if we nationalized healthcare. Government cuts spending... and boom.

3. As to medical research, it would be more accurate to say that funding for research through the universities is appropriated through the VA budget.

Re:$805M budget

[rioki]

DURRRR...

Please explain the following:

How can it be that the exact same hip replacement in the US costs 10x the cost than in Spain? It is cheaper to fly to Spain, stay a month in a hotel, get your hip replaced, run with the bulls, get injured, get your hip replaced again and still have spending money.

Just to ensure there is no confusion, it is the same operation with the same materials (even same brand) and a similarly qualified doctor. Also, yes your insurance will not cover the travel to Spain.

No system is perfect, but the US system is the worst*. You pay your last penny for medical services and you don't even get better service, in some cases even worse. Many people in the US don't even have dental coverage; WTF?! You don't realize how much you actually get ripped of.

* out of USA, Germany, France, Spain and UK

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem with govenrment spending is they have no ownership, no stake in the game as it were. It's not their money, it's not going to run out. They don't have to agonize over whether to pay the heating bill or get little Billy a pair of pants that actually fit.

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong: we Republicans have no use or need for more money. We have enough of it. No, what we want is to starve, torture and kill you. We hoard money not because we crave it, but because the more we hoard the less you can have. Without money you starve, you can't get healthcare, you can't even have a roof on your head. So we hoard money and siphon it into avenues that will never, ever benefit you. Because we hate you and we want you to die. That is the way of our kind.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

We never cut the education budget. The US spends far far far more per pupil then we ever have and far far far more than any other country as well.
Likewise we spend 20 TIMES more on the US military than the next country on their military.
That is why we say cut the military spending.

Re:$805M budget

[AmiMoJo]

And I should point out that the military is one of the few things the government does that it is supposed to do and it is one of the few things the world... especially our allies need us to be competent in.

No thanks. In fact, please stop. We don't need Team America World Police, that's something you use to justify intervention in your own interests.

Maybe sunset its guarantee to protect Japan? We could let Israel get genocided. Maybe let the Russians run wild in Eastern Europe. Possibly allow the North Koreans to invade and enslave the south koreans?

Israel can take care of itself. It has nukes and a powerful military. If anything, the US is primarily there to prevent Israel getting carried away.

I don't recall US troops doing anything in Ukraine to prevent the Russians annexing parts of it. South Korea can take care of itself too, it has an advanced military. The US is only there because it's as close to China as it can reasonably get, ditto for the bases in Japan.

What would you like to cut? Obama is talking about cutting the ability of the US to fight two wars at once.

Well, maybe if you didn't keep starting wars you wouldn't need that. Realistically, while the US has nukes and a powerful military there is very little threat to the homeland. Do you think China will invade and start WW3, resulting in both sides inevitably being reduced to radioactive wastelands? Large scale conventional warfare is over, because all large countries have nukes or are in NATO.

So just stop getting involved in other people's shit and you won't need to fight two wars at once. And hay, if in the future things change, ramp back up like you did in WW2.

Cut the drone strikes and intervention in Pakistan. Get out of the middle east. Stop waving your dick around off the coast of North Korea and just concentrate on assisting SK defence.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

As to the spanish option... I think most people don't realize it is an option. If they did, they'd do that. You already have people crossing the border a lot for medical care. Both ways. Houston of all places has a massive medical center that is largely that size because there are a lot of medical tourists that fly to the US from south america for medical treatment. Not hte poor south americans... the ones that can pay cash. They also get a lot of middle easterners there as well. They'll fly from saudi arabia to get a medical procedure and then leave.

Americans go south to mexico mostly for drugs... not just the recreational kind. The prescription kind as well. I think there was a similar thing going with people traveling to canada for that as well.

Anyway, the point is that if more Americans were made aware of that, they'd likely make those trips with more frequency.

Anyway, this discussion isn't going to be productive if your view on the whole matter is this narrow. You're not considering that people would very happily make these trips as is... they just don't realize it is a possibility.

The insurance companies should really encourage it. Some person needs a really expensive operation... insurance company says "if you get the operation in spain, we'll fly you out there, book an all expenses paid hotel for another family member, etc etc."

The people that use the most medical care are old people in any case. And they're perfect candidates to send on holiday for treatment.

The problem with insurance companies in the US is that they just PAY. They negotiate with the hospitals a little but the way insurance companies work is that when a claim is filed... they pay. They don't dick around or fight claims unless it is ridiculous. They just pay. And that means the hospitals can charge basically whatever they want and the insurance companies will just pass that on to the consumer in premiums.

It isn't the insurance companies jacking up costs. Its the hospitals. Its one of the reasons it is so sad to see private practices closing down because of the paper work generated by the ACA. The private practices are the cheapest medical options for most Americans. You private doctor gives you the treatment without all the overhead costs.

Re:$805M budget

[AmiMoJo]

I mean, can you blame the lack of socialized healthcare on the literacy and high school graduation rates?

Well, yes, obviously you can. Healthcare is a major factor in making people poor and unable to afford to get a good education. If people are ill and can't get proper treatment they can't earn as much money, or any at all. The medical bills drain their money. Then they pay less tax, so the public education system has less money, and can't afford extras to help their kids study at home or go on school trips or participate in sports.

It's a cycle. If you are poor you will probably need more healthcare. Manual labour, exposure to diseases and environmental hazards, poor diet etc. Then you actually get sick and it makes you even more poor.

now we have to admit that the problem is CONCENTRATED in a specific segment. And rather than applying your solution to EVERYONE when the problem is not suffered by EVERYONE maybe you should instead focus on what the fuck is going on in those communities that makes ALL the stats so bad.

One big problem is lack of socialized healthcare. The only way to pay for it is taxation of everyone, ideally through some kind of national insurance scheme so that they can make use of it if needs be. So the solution has to involve everyone.

Anyway, if it didn't include everyone people would just be screaming about special treatment and how it's so unfair.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC for reasons that will become obvious.

I don't think it's that bad, but consider the much-maligned Department of Homeland Security.

Though in my experience, it's much-maligned for precisely the wrong reason.

That's the most at-will Government organization in my experience because it exists on being purely reactionary.

What DHS does (at least the component I worked for) is react to a threat: it analyzes the event and comes up with strategies to prevent it from happening again...except for the fact that any serious terrorist that can do something newsworthy is already plotting to do something entirely different. So, another event happens, then a bunch of meetings happen to discuss what needs to be done about this new threat, rinse and repeat.

This is the danger of a Government that works on who demands what should be done now, now, now. There's no forward thinking, or planning, or accounting for intelligence. It's just what makes the public feel better, and in the current cultural climate, I'd be damned scared if an at-will funding program was enacted.

I agree that what we have now isn't necessarily the most efficient of processes (forward thinking in terms of practical matters doesn't really take place: take for example the idea that in Government, if you don't spend the entire year's budget, you get slashed next year because you're not going to need it all), but being able to raid the cookie jar whenever someone's pet project needs funding is a recipe for disaster.

Re:$805M budget

[cusco]

maybe you'd like them to not have the latest high tech stuff so when we go to war more of our people die

Yep. Get rid of the Joint Strike Fighter, first. Pretty much all of Lockheed's Skunk Works projects at this point. Most of the alphabet soup of intel agencies. The entirely illegal bio-weapons and chemical weapons programs. Ninety percent of the nukes, including **all** of the tactical ones. The Osprey and the Paladin. The very illegal domestic propaganda operations. The free weapons and ammunition to Israel, Saudi Arabia and the dictatorships of Haiti, Honduras and half of Africa, and the troops guarding pipelines and facilities for multinational corporations. All Blackwater and other mercenary contracts. Remove the mercenary scum guarding the embassies and consulates and put the Marines back there (I think that's still a Pentagon contract). Get rid of the expensive KBR no-bid contracts and the other leeches supplying services that the military can do better for themselves.

That's a small start, but mostly yes, we **DO** need more of our people dying if we go to war, because that's the only way that people will ever be convinced that war is a bad thing.

Re:$805M budget

[thegarbz]

And if they US didn't those countries would have to spend more. So what is your point?

Erm that is entirely my point. The USA outspends all of it's allied forces, and the allied forces together outspend everyone else. The USA could easily spend a quarter of the money, still be the dominant force, and with all it's allies still get to act as the world police. I'm not pointing out that others save their budgets, I'm pointing out that that due to scales of military the USA could too and it wouldn't make a lick of difference in the world, just back home where they could potentially have some extra cash to do things like ... oh I don't know, pay down it's national debt. But hey as long as we can continue to print free money who cares right?

Speaking of lack of knowledge, maybe you should take an economics course. But I'm sure the mighty guns will keep you happy when your economy eventually unravels.

$18,314,821,000,000 and counting. 'MERICA FUCK YEAH!!!!

Re:$805M budget

[DanJ_UK]

Those charts are more realistic in terms of salaries, the top end of which are more than double your initial quote.

Doctor's don't 'go private', they do private work as well as working for the NHS.

In the UK if you see a private doctor you still need a referral from your NHS GP, everything has an involvement with the NHS somewhere along the way.

Some private doctors may be better and more specialised in their fields but they'll be working from the NHS too mostly on consultant referrals.

One of the biggest and primary benefits of private medical insurance in the UK is the screening. For example, we have some very advanced technology and cancer treatment in the UK, but we have a trailing survival rate see here, because the amount of time and money to constantly screen everyone hasn't traditionally been prioritised or funded accordingly, leading to deaths from advanced stages of cancers that would otherwise have been easily curable.

This is changing slowly, the government just announced pumping an extra £400m into guaranteeing diagnosis within 4 weeks but that, IMO, will do little to help if you still can't get a GP appointment quick enough (there are sometimes waits of 2 - 3 weeks just to see a GP unless it's an absolute emergency.

The NHS is stretched to its limits, people come here on 'health holidays' for free treatment but that's also changing, you'll be required to provide your proof of residency / nationality very very soon.

Re:$805M budget

[DanJ_UK]

List of pro's and con's for private health insurance in the UK:

Note: all of this depends on the type of policy you buy.

Pros

Specialist referrals. You can ask your GP to refer you to an expert or specialist working privately to get a second opinion or specialist treatment.

Get the scans you want. If the NHS delays a scan, or won’t let you have one, you can use your cover to pay for it.

Reduce the waiting time. You can use your insurance to reduce the time you spend waiting for NHS treatment, if your wait time is more than six weeks.

Choose your surgeon and hospital. You can (in theory) choose a surgeon and hospital to suit your time and place – which isn’t possible on the NHS.

Get a private room. You can use it to get a private room, rather than staying in an open ward which might be mixed-sex.

Specialist drugs and treatments may be available. Some specialist drugs and treatments aren’t available on the NHS because they’re too expensive or not approved by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in England and Wales (NICE) or the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC).

Physiotherapy. You get quicker access to physiotherapy sessions if you have insurance than you would through NHS treatment.

Cons

You might get better care on the NHS. If you have a serious illness such as cancer, heart disease or stroke, you’ll get priority NHS treatment. NHS hospitals can be as good as or better than private hospitals.

It’s expensive – and the price will go up. A typical family premium (two adults in their 40s and two children under 10) can vary from £700 to £1,650 per year. Premiums will rise every year, and with age – so by the time you’re older, and more likely to need hospital treatment, you may not be able to afford it.

Chronic illnesses aren’t usually covered. Most policies don’t cover chronic illnesses which are incurable, such as diabetes and some cancers.

There may not be any local treatment options. If you choose a policy with an approved list of consultants and hospitals this may not include the expert consultant you want to see or a convenient location for treatment.

It's mostly about screening and being seen quicker, for anything serious you'll almost always get the best treatment on the NHS.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

cool story bro

Re:$805M budget

[nbauman]

First, the hospitals do not bid rates generally. They only tell the insurance companies what their price lists are and that is the only place those prices are really negotiated.

Virtually all insurance companies negotiate with all hospitals. http://www.npr.org/sections/he... (You can also look up Steven Brill's articles about the Chargemaster.) That's the way the free market works. If I buy ketchup from Heinz, they'll charge me $5 a bottle. If McDonald's buys ketchup from Heinz, they'll negotiate.

If I needed a certain type of treatment... not right now... but in a week or two... I'd have time to shop around. And the medical system could offer rates just like anything else is offered with rates. The fact that they're not is one of the reasons the market has a hard time controlling costs. Lets say a hospital 400 miles away is willing to do an operation that would cost me 50k where I am for only 25k? Now assuming quality is comparable, I then do a cost benefit analysis...

I've talked to doctors and economists about this. I've read their articles (and written a few myself).

Here's the flaw in your reasoning: "Now assuming quality is comparable"...

You can't possibly tell whether quality is comparable (unless you know as much about medicine as a doctor, and maybe not even then).

For a coronary bypass operation, some surgeons will have a death rate of (say) 1%, and some surgeons will have a death rate of 2%. How do you find out their death rate? Do you think you can call their office and ask their secretary? Try that some day.

Let's assume you can find out their death rate. In socialist U.K., they're required to post their death rates on the hospital web site, so patients can make their own choices. In the U.S., you can sometimes get Medicare data.

Are you going to pick the doctor with the lowest death rate, the way you'd pick a hard drive with the lowest failure rate? That doesn't work.

A British surgeon told me, "It's very easy for me to get good numbers. Just operate on easy cases."

Younger patients have lower death rates. Older patients have higher death rates. Smokers, people with lung disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and other diseases, have higher death rates.

Some doctors specialize in tough cases. So if one surgeon has a 2% death rate, and another has a 1% death rate, the 2% surgeon may be the one who does the tough cases, and the 1% surgeon may be a worse surgeon.

Some people say, "Well, we'll correct for all those risk factors." The problem with that is, there's no way to correct for all those factors. Do you think a surgeon can print out a list for you of all of his patients, with their age, lung function, kidney function, blood sugar, and everything else you need, so that you can compare it to all the other surgeons? Ask his secretary and tell me what she says. Doctors don't even agree on what factors are important, or how much weight to give them. How important is age, smoking, diabetes? Nobody knows.

Surgeons get the best results in patients who are absolutely healthy. That is, they get the best results in patients who don't actually need surgery in the first place. They get the best results with unnecessary surgery. That happens a lot, for example in carotid artery surgery, in prostate cancer surgery, in hysterectomies. The suckers don't know the difference. The surgeon says, "The operation was a success!" The patient says, "This is the doctor who saved my life," and recommends the doctor to his friends.

The best thing that could happen to you is to go to a doctor who examines you and gives you tests and says, "You know, you're healthy. You don't need this surgery." Of course, in the free market, surgeons like that will make less money. So the invisible hand will replace them with surgeons who operate on people who don't nee

Re:$805M budget

[dave420]

Nonsense. It's pathetic, baseless ass-delving like that which will ensure the US will hemorrhage money on its healthcare for generations to come. The US is not doing fine with regards to healthcare. It spends far too much and achieves far too little. You can argue about inner-city demographics skewing things, but that doesn't make as much of a difference as you seem to think it does. Of course anything called "socialist" is bad to you (except the socialised programs you happen to approve of - cognitive dissonance!), so you will rail against your own interests under the misguided notion you are fighting for the side of good.

You are arguing against the entirety of studies performed on the state of the US healthcare system. But I'm sure you know better, right?

Re:$805M budget

[dave420]

You are making all that up. Seriously. You make a couple of half-hearted observations and then scale those up to the size of countries, and then expect them to make sense. Absolutely incredible. You are so full of yourself I'm surprised you can breathe.

Re:$805M budget

[cusco]

No protecting South Korea? No protecting Israel? No protecting Europe? No protecting Eastern Europe? No defense agreements in South America to defend country X if attacked by country Y?

You've got some good suggestions there. If South Korea's oligarchs actually had to fund a military adequate to go up against the North they might actually be able to come up with a functional peace. Who are we protecting Europe from by the way? Morocco? Finland? Germany? As far as the Organization of American States mutual defense treaty, the only violators in the last 50 years have been 1) The United States (at least 6 times) 2) Ecuador (attacked Peru and immediately lost), 3) minor Argentina/Chile disputes (twice).

Re:$805M budget

[dave420]

This one post shows just how little you know of the systems you decry as being worse than the US, all without a single hint of irony. You just told everyone you have no idea, and still seem to think people should pay attention to you.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

As to segregation... Was New York city or Detroit segregated?

The answer to your question is...yes, yes, they were. And in fact, they still are. Just like cities in the South, such as Atlanta, New Orleans, Dallas, Miami...

Same with Boston, Philadephia, Pittsburg, Chicago, Los Angeles.

Turns out that state-mandated segregation isn't the only way it happens. And it's not just by race. You can find restrictive covenants that apply to the working class. Or just practices that lead to it being in effect.

You're correct that focusing on averages ignores the bright spots, but here's the thing. Nobody wants to fix the problems in the areas where it is concentrated. They never have. Doesn't matter whether they're black, white, Irish, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Native American or whatever. Heck, you can take a trip into some poor rural areas too, and see how they're really living.

It isn't just the inner city. That's where you're wrong. You're making the same mistake you think others are making.

Re:$805M budget

[dave420]

Other countries have inner cities, too, filled with scary minorities and spooky poor people as well. You are making lazy excuses for why it's someone else's problem. Grow the fuck up, please.

Re:$805M budget

[cusco]

Really there was nothing that could stop the soviets from expanding except the US.

Stopped reading there, because it's so absurd. The thing that stopped the Soviets from expanding was, of all things, THE SOVIETS. They had enough trouble holding onto a restive Eastern Europe, very, very few people in the Kremlin had the slightest illusion that they were going to be expanding much beyond that (they never even made a serious attempt at controlling the Dardanelles to protect their underbelly). The only place that fantasy was prevalent was in the Pentagon, where the generals projected their own power lust on their Soviet counterparts. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the Pentagon was perturbed that they couldn't find any plans to administer Western Europe, preferring to believe that they were hidden rather than that they never existed.

Re:$805M budget

[Archangel_Azazel]

Or we could just not pay Israel for a few days and have all the money for the suit we could possibly need.

Oh...right. Can't do that. They're Gawd's chosen people and we wouldn't want to anger him would we?

What ever.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

As to the JSF, yeah... that was actually an attempt to save money. back fired horribly.

As to the rest of the skunkworks... no... they do good work when they're not asked to build stupid shit. It isn't really their fault. I don't know how the project got so screwed up... it was sort of like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

As to the intel agencies... sure... so long as no one else spies or lies we don't need to have spy agencies.

Tell me when you've verified that and we'll terminate them.

what's your problem with the palidin... besides basically wanting the US to go to war with unsharpened sticks?

I don't get the problem with the Osprey either. It was expensive but it was also highly innovative.

As to the illegal domestic propaganda operations... no problem, make it illegal for politicians especially the white house to do that and you're solid.

If the white house can do it and the president is the commander of the military... then they can do that. There's your poison pill. Swallow it. You can't forbid the president to engage in that stuff only when he's pushing a pro war position but let him do it in any other circomstance. So you either cut off the president's ability to push propaganda which includes all the propaganda the government pushes for a host of programs you probably love... or your position is legally and ethically contradictory, hypocritical, and legally unsound.

Learn from your court failures and don't push legislation that contradicts itself.

As to free weapons for Israel... so you're cool with the jews getting genocided. I just want your signature on that death warrant... right here... and initial here.

As to Saudi arabia... who cares what the saudis have they don't do anything with it.

as to various other places, those deals are largely made for political and diplomatic influence. And they don't do anything with the hardware so I don't really care.

As to guarding pipelines... where do we do that outside of Iraq and Kuwait? And we only did that to stop saddam from blowing the shit up and ruining the local economy. You'd have us destroy Iraq's primary means of supporting itself? Why would we do that?

As to mercs... the companies have a right to protect themselves. If I think Americans have a right to arm themselves here then why would I tell a corp that it can't arm itself in the middle of a war zone? Your positions are largely irrational screes.

As to no bid contracts... I generally agree with you here. I can understand why a no bid contract would make sense in some cases. But it is over used. If I need something to be very reliable for example then i can understand them going for a no bid contract with a known quantity. If they're getting something sketchy then the contract should be bid out.

As to this idea about having our soldiers intentionally left vulnerable... Absolutely not. Put yourself in the place of that soldier. Would you want your country to send you to war with bullshit that was intentionally bullshit or would you like them to send to war with the best equipment they could come up with and afford?

I'll tell you what. *hands fellow box of rat poison*

You eat that and when you're dead we'll continue this conversation where you casually throw away lives to make a point.

You want to make a point by killing people. Kill yourself first.

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

This exact point was addressed by the very post you are responding to, but I guess you feel a need for using your poor reading comprehension to prove something about public schools?

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you write another 500-word essay, this time about the intellectual honesty in pointing to minorities and socially excluded groups, while at the same time ignoring the financial death penalties the US health care system sometimes hands out, and the poverty and social exclusion it contributes to?

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

As to no one wanting to fix the areas in the concentrated areas, that's not true. I do. Lots of other people do as well.

One of the first things you'd have to admit though is that business as usual ain't working. You can't just blame the political opposition either. Most of these places have had the party bigger and bigger subsidies and welfare programs for a generation.

That riot in Phili... Hard to blame the political opposition or some evil alien race. It was all in house and the tired old victim narrative doesn't wash.

IF people actually care. IF they actually want to make a difference. IF they want anything to change... then we need to change the way we're dealing with this issue. Because doubling down on failed programs is at best foolish and at worst the sacrifice of the futures of millions Americans for little more than short term political and monetary advantage. And that is monstrous.

You say "no one" cares... plenty of people care. Anyone that stands up and confronts this is ripped apart by the political machine.

Black families in DC petitioned for a school voucher system to bypass failed schools in DC that damn minority families in the inner city to substandard education.

Who shut that down? The black families didn't. They were very unhappy when the project was killed.

The Teacher's Unions killed it. And they killed it because vouchers have the ability to kill failed schools by letting families vote with their feet out of them.

And thus they demanded the voucher program be killed and their political allies obliged them in return for votes and campaign contributions in the future.

Which shows you exactly how much those people care about inner city families. Aka... less than they care about the sliver of union dues that goes to their campaigns and the reliable votes they get on election day so long as they shield the unions from any standards or accountability.

Re:$805M budget

[nbauman]

1. I don't believe that it is impossible to find equal or superior care for those sorts of injuries outside the VA.

I'd like to know where. All the major research is published by people from the VA (and they collaborate with the best people around the world). I read the studies and I really am impressed by the work of the VA.

Can J Surg. 2015 Jun;58(3):S104-7.
Cervical spine injury in dismounted improvised explosive device trauma.
Taddeo J1, Devine M2, McAlister VC3.
Author information
1The Maine Veterans' Affairs Medical Center, Augusta, Maine.
2The Canadian Armed Forces Health Services, Ottawa, Ont.
3The Canadian Armed Forces Health Services, Ottawa, Ont. and the Department of Surgery, Western University, London, Ont.

PLoS One. 2015 May 11;10(5):e0126110. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0126110. eCollection 2015.
Cognitive Improvement after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Measured with Functional Neuroimaging during the Acute Period.
Wylie GR1, Freeman K2, Thomas A2, Shpaner M2, OKeefe M2, Watts R2, Naylor MR2.
Author information
1Rocco Ortenzio Neuroimaging Center, Kessler Foundation, West Orange, NJ, United States of America; Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Rutgers University Medical School, Newark, NJ, United States of America; War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, Department of Veterans' Affairs, East Orange, NJ, United States of America.
2Department of Psychiatry, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.

JAMA Neurol. 2014 Dec;71(12):1490-7. doi: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2014.2668.
Dementia risk after traumatic brain injury vs nonbrain trauma: the role of age and severity.
Gardner RC1, Burke JF2, Nettiksimmons J3, Kaup A4, Barnes DE5, Yaffe K6.
Author information
1Memory and Aging Center, Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco2Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California.
2Department of Neurology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor4Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Affairs Center for Clinical Management and Research, Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
3Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California5Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco.
4Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California6Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco.
5Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California5Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco6Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisc.
6Memory and Aging Center, Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco2Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California5Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of.

Ann Biomed Eng. 2015 May;43(5):1071-88. doi: 10.1007/s10439-014-1171-9. Epub 2014 Oct 25.
Head rotational acceleration characteristics influence behavioral and diffusion tensor imaging outcomes following concussion.
Stemper BD1, Shah AS, Pintar FA, McCrea M, Kurpad SN, Glavaski-Joksimovic A, Olsen C, Budde MD.
Author information
1Department of Neurosurgery, Medical College of Wisconsin, Clement J. Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Milwaukee, WI, USA, bstemper@mcw.edu.

2. All you're saying here is that the military budget got cut and there we

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm responding to this because it wasn't a troll question... I also felt answering it would get people to think about an issue for more than the .5 seconds they normally do which invariably leads to no actual thinking ever happening in the first place:

To be fair, he's saying that the DoD "Over Spends" so much on paperclips that you could raid the DoD budget indiscriminately and pay for the suit restoration.

here you might say "well, why do you say over spend"... because otherwise you're saying that the government is spending X on paperclips and doesn't need to because apparently they either buy too many or they aren't using them for anything.

Here is what you use paper clips for... to hold bits of paper together. So if you're using them... then what are you going to do when you don't have them?

  Staples? Folding the sheets just so? Maybe putting them in a folder?

And that causes your staple budget to go up... and that ignores that there are feature differences between staples and paperclips. Paper clips don't damage the paper when you use them which means you can separate out individual sheets or add sheets. Or folding... doesn't work as well as paper clips which means close efficiency from whatever that does. Or folders means you're now spending more on folders which are more expensive than paper clips per unit and are basically a superior version of the same thing at a higher cost.

I know I sound autistic going through this but details matter. The context of the statement was that there was so much fat in the military budget they could just bill it to the DoD. Now I'm sure the DoD does waste at LEAST half a million a year on all sorts of stupid shit. But every branch of government does that as well.

Obama and his wife took two separate government secret service protected planes to go to Los Angeles on the same day. Now, if they had shared the same plane that would have saved money. But they didn't. They chose to take two planes because "reasons". And I'm not beating up on Obama for that. you see it in every government department. They do stuff like that all the time.

The US Federal government got in trouble recently for running the sprinklers too long in California. They have a very bad drought there and for that reason they're being asked to not run the sprinkers for more than 6 minutes a week. Instead they're running them for about 6 hours a week.

Typical stuff. The city hall of San Francisco dumps about half a million gallons of drinking water down the drain every day to run water boiler heating system for the building. Again... in a drought. Never mind that they could recirculate the same water every day for at least a year at a time without any problems.

Its typical.

So if you want to raid a budget... I'd like people to stop picking on the military as if they're the only ones that do retarded shit on a regular basis. They ALL do it. Raid the general fund if you're going to take money out.

This would properly be filed under the "discretionary non military" fund. ANd that make up about 420 billion dollars of our annual budget every year. So add it to that.

How about a stapleless stapler?
https://www.google.com/#q=staple+less+stapler

Re:$805M budget

[nomadic]

Because the military budget is particularly notorious for hugely expensive, discrete items, based purely on porkbarrel projects and pseudo-macho posturing by Congressmembers even when the military leadership tells them the spending is unnecessary.

"Where would you like to cut the US military budget? Maybe cut their medical care? That's a popular one."

Popular? Among who? Who exactly has argued that military medical care should be cut?

"Or maybe you'd like them to not have the latest high tech stuff so when we go to war more of our people die"

Maybe we stop letting chicken hawk congressmen decide what's necessary, and let the career military leaders do that?

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

You care? Well, you can certainly claim you do. So can others. Lots of people claim lots of things. Doesn't make them true.

So pardon me if I take your words with substantially more than a single grain of salt. There's a lot of reasons to doubt.

For example, you seem to want to belabor on and on about welfare and subsidies, which is a common narrative. You probably started hearing about that after the Great Society became a political target, treated as a failure and a waste. (Though, of course, we could say it dates back to the FDR-era programs as well, and they did have their failings to be sure). But they have not remained unchanged, have they? What do you want to consider about the Reagan-era reform? Or the Clinton-era reforms? Or the Bush-era reforms? They all claimed they were going to fix the system, they were going to deal with abuses.

We've had changes. Maybe those changes messed things up worse by accident. Maybe those changing things were just looking out for their own interests.

As for DC, that city is ultimately governed by Congress. Where do they send their children? Bet it's not in public schools in the district. Oh yeah, that shows how much they care.

About their own children. Not anybody else's. And yet here you are, blaming the teacher's unions. Who are at least honest, and know their interests.

One of their president's stated that he was lobbying for teachers, because that was his job, not to represent the students. This is portrayed as some vicious statement, but it's a clear intent of his advocacy.

Nothing more than honesty. Yet the teacher's unions are blamed for so much. So is the Federal Department of Education for that matter. Why not blame the local school boards? The state education establishments?

Where is your recounting of what they've done? Or those who made NCLB and Common Core?

Or are you not going to give a thought to the misdeeds of those who support the alleged vouchers and privatization schemes?

Where can we find your lamentations about the cheating scandals in Atlanta? About the failures of the McKay vouchers in Florida? Michelle Rhee and Tony Bennett (not the singer) have their own failings, why not complain about them?

Turns out what people care about is getting their share of the money, and yes, it turns out school privatization and high-stakes testing is a good way to get it by the truckloads.

And reliable voters buy into that story too, and turn up on election day, even though they're getting short-changed on the deal.

Re:$805M budget

[Ranbot]

From the article:
"The Smithsonian’s federal funds—about 70 percent of its resources—are restricted to safeguarding collections, research and the costs associated with operating and maintaining the museums. But exhibitions, public programs and the recent digitization of the collection have largely been privately funded."

In that context, online crowdfunding is completely in line with the Smithsonian's standard operations. Furthermore, people donating know exactly what their donations are going towards, instead of a check that just goes into the Smithsonian general fund.

Re:$805M budget

[pnutjam]

1. Your the only person who cares about your opinion.
2. VA gets their own budget and he was referencing an unfunded mandate.
3. bullshit

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Your reasons for doubt are little more than your own belief that you KNOW me through a few internet posts. Forgive me if your opinions as to my nature are... dubious at best.

As to old welfare programs dating back to FDR... yes... most acknowledge old FDR make the depression deeper and longer.

Did you know we had an economic crash before the great crash... and that crash was just as bad but wasn't followed by a depression?

Do you know what the solution of the sitting president of the day was? I'll have you look that up. But you can of course guess it wasn't FDR's idea.

Some ideas have a track record of working and others have a track record of turning everything to shit.

The fact that you regard my belief that we should abandon policies with a proven track record of destruction and dysfunction doesn't undermine me but you. *wink*

As to congress sending their children to private schools... of course... Both parties do that. Because while someone seems to think the dirty unwashed masses shouldn't have choices they are damn well going to make sure they have choices.

You think this undermines me? You're giving evidence in my defense.

As to blaming the local school boards... etc... sure. Blame the whole thing. Why would you think a slash and burn policy would be antithetical to my position? I would go through the system and systematically sever all interconnections between the institutions so they couldn't put pressure on each other. Then I'd compartmentalize funding so that if a student leaves a school that school loses money.

Then I'd see that anyone could set up a school anywhere in the US and accept students there and collect the assigned vouchers. And before you say "what about standards etc"... by all means... make the teachers and the little voucher schools go through some sort of certification program. Test them using standardized methods or whatever else you like.

Test them to destruction if you want. Just apply the same tests to the establishment schools as well. I'd be very surprised if the establishment schools could jump through all those hoops on a limited budget any better than the voucher schools. And that will keep the whole thing honest. The blind lady's blade has to swing which ever way the scales tip. Guarantee that, and you can set whatever standards you like.

As to common core... My issue with that is less that there are national education standards than that the government were so specific about it. The precise method and theory of the education should not be specified. Let different schools teach differently. Your method might be better than some but there has to be something better still and how will you ever empirically find it if you don't let people try.

There are quite a few specialty schools that have learned some interesting things. There is an all boys private school for example that weighed in on some of the problems other schools were having educating boys. Were you aware of any of that? Doubt it. That sort of thing is happening all the time. Its ignored. Anything that doesn't service the narrative that supports the establishment gets memory holed. Imagine what that could do for the inner city students... mostly boys that are failing so horribly. Maybe shifting to the strategies this other school figured out would address the problem to some extent. You'll never know. No one is even allowed to try. Schools with 60 percent drop out rates and they can do nothing but suffer.

As to scandals with vouchers... a wash, dear one... the scandals in the existing system are legion. For every official incidence of fraud you can find with the vouchers you can find frauds so common and systemic that no one even talks about them anymore. They're like the inner city murder rates... they don't even make the newspapers most of the time. Bodies left to rot on the street every day. EVERY DAY. And where is that reported? It isn't because it isn't news. It's boring. And that's where the scandals in the establishment education system reside. They're trite. Its like saying the sun rose in the east and set in the west. Not worth mentioning.

Re: $805M budget

[loufoque]

Because unlike other budgets, the military is useless. We need healthcare, not weapons of death.

Re:$805M budget

[pnutjam]

Thank you, it's not just inner city, and it's not just non-whites. It's the poor and disadvantaged everywhere. Your Asian success stories are as much about tight-knit social structures and 'cronyism' as it is about high standards and parental ideals.
The US poor have been pitted against each other and had suspicion bred into their bones.

This is on a different topic, but you should read it to better understand some of the issues:
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

Re:$805M budget

[pnutjam]

We are not trying to stay ahead of the rest of the world. We are desperately trying to catch up to the Alien powers that have been in contact with the US since Roswell. We are treaty bound to accelerate certain forms of research so we can take our place in the interstellar realm.

Maybe I've said too much...

Re:$805M budget

[cnaumann]

Of course they could. But they also want another half million dollars. So they put up a high priority project that should have strong public support.

Even notice that when NASA budget is threatened they say shit like "There goes the Hubble Telescope" or "There goes the Mars Rovers"?

It is the same kind of crap.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

My reasons for doubt far transcend you personally, and extend into the experience I have had with human beings in general.

Sorry, but you're not getting treated as a miraculous exception, because as you said, if all I have is a few Internet posts, that's not much to go on. Treating your words as if you care as being the actual truth would be the dubious decision, what with your nature not being effectively demonstrated.

And so far, you're not actually countering the concerns I have, but reinforcing them. For example, bringing up FDR and deepening the depression for whatever reasons, yet no mention of Reagan, Bush, or Clinton and what happened with welfare programs under their auspices.

Why ignore what they did, when we're talking about welfare, but instead digress into economic reforms? You can lament about FDR, Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, and even Woodrow Wilson till the cows come home, but then you can lambaste James Buchanan as well.

Meanwhile, ignore the failed reforms under Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes.

See you seem to want to think reform hasn't happened, that all that has been done is pour money into the system. You'd be wrong on that.

Your own silence is what undermines you there. It echoes quite resoundingly. Because you know what there is also a track record of? People coming up with their own stories about what happened in order to advance their own agenda. Yours is actually a rather standard one, nothing new or insightful to it.

And no, I won't treat you as different on that regard until you demonstrate otherwise.

You're playing the same old song. Let's hear a new one out of you.

Much like say, I don't treat the Congressional legislators (and others) who send their own children to schools they do like, while pretending to care about others. They're doing nothing they haven't done before. They aren't interested in solving the problem, they barely touch on the issue of how DC is governed, and just pretend that the most recent Amendment did anything.

Nothing new to that.

Hence my own doubts about your purported plan for school reform. You want to purge all the system, and hope your idea works, but somehow I have doubts. And FWIW, I also reject the standards idea you profess. I wouldn't even bring up that issue, as I actually consider the pursuit of those standards to be counter-productive, a means for further exploitation, not less.

But hey, at least you're not quite silent on the local and state school board issue.

You've at least given some credence to it being a problem. Now you just need to go over the other side's issues. Then maybe you'll realize TANSTAAFL. It isn't Lady Justice you have to worry about. The problem is your fellow human beings. Who will be just like you.

And no, I can't say I'm specifically aware of your vague assertions about an all-boys private school weighing in on something, it being a rather non-descript statement of yours, but yes, I am cognizant that private schools, both sectarian and not, both mixed and single-gender, do participate in the discussions of education policy.

Sometimes they give useful input. Sometimes they do not. Go figure.

And actually, no, scandals about the education establishment are salacious news, they get blown out of proportion, and treated as a major magnet for argument and hysteria. It's a lot easier to sell a story about a school being a pit of despair that deserves to be ruthlessly purged than get a good discussion going about resolving problems.

And that's without even counting the occasional case of sexual interaction, though that too covers up much on its own.

Re:$805M budget

[dunkelfalke]

You of all people call others uneducated and not realising how stupid they are? Oh the irony - many people, me included, have pointed out the utter wrongness in your answers often enough. Being that dense is quite an achievement.

Merkins like you invent yourself an enemy and then go bomb them because your culture is generally very violent, not because of some noble reasons. And don't shift the blame to others. In the past 50 years USA has started more wars than anyone else by a huge margin and also has killed more people than anyone else. But apparently for the likes of you brown people don't count even though, for example, you have killed more Iraqis, than Saddam Hussein has. Congratulations, you are worse than a bloody dictator.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to understand, just come up with radical changes that must work because that's the only method we know!

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

they spend 15-20 cents in administrative costs and profits. (You can see that if you read an insurance company annual report on their web site. The "loss ratio," usually 80-85%, is the money they pass on to the doctor or hospital.)

Then your doctor gets 80 cents. He has to spend another 20 cents in administrative costs to deal with the insurance company. (Compared to less than 5 cents on Medicare.)

So if you just cut out the insurance companies, you'd save 35% right there

The implicit assumption is that government administrative costs would not change when the incentives are changed.

Re: $805M budget

[Coren22]

Price Range Weekdays $68
Price Range Weekends $68

Seems like possibly it is supporting itself, while providing entertainment and a few jobs. Why would you cut that? Do you understand that military is on call 24/7? Would you prefer they went farther away from base to find the same entertainment?

Re:$805M budget

[painandgreed]

The Smithsonian has a $805,000,000 budget.... surely they could scrounge up 0.06% of their annual budget to pay for it themselves since preserving significant artifacts of USA history is pretty much exactly what taxpayers are paying them for.

Well, the Smithsonian has a gift shop, probably does fundraisers, has publicity programs, and does collection of data of supporters. Like it or not, Kickstarter is a tool that does all those things. Go look at the Kickstarter. This is not so much as a plea for money but a publicity event to sell merchandise that will raise that money while also offering a chance to collect a list of people interested in their endeavors. Very early on, Kickstarter ceased to really be a way to kick in money to a desired goal and became a method of selling stuff to make money to fund that goal. Sometimes that stuff is the finished product that was the goal and KS is being used to raise funding, but just as often if not more so, the stuff is related merch separate from the end goal and people are kicking in just for that merch. I've seen bands raising tour money by offering the same stuff they sell at their concerts for the same price. It's a way to sell stuff you'll try and sell anyway through a publicised site for a limited amount of time.

Re:$805M budget

[tlhIngan]

You could think up many possibilities as to why this is, and I'm sure that a lot of it is waste due to medical businesses (e.g. insurers) being run for-profit. But I think it's pretty clear to all sane people that you don't just cut funding and hope everything works out.

Actually, a lot of it IS dealing with insurers.

In a single-payer system like in Canada, you bill the government for every patient. In out, easy. It's estimated the paper handling costs for this are around $20K or so per year for doctor's office - be it a single doctor, a partnership, or whatever. Just a standard doctor's office.

But in the US, where you have to deal with non-payers, and dozens of insurance companies each with their own idiosyncrasies in billing and what is actually covered, it takes roughly $60-80K to deal with all that paperwork.

So yes, there's a lot of waste in the system, and it's not just because insurance companies are making a profit (guess what - in Canada, you can by extended health insurance that covers above and beyond what is "free" - e.g., vision and dental care, private or semi-private wards at the hospital, etc).

Re:$805M budget

[Malizar]

Basically, Obama and the advisers he picked decided that the only way to pass a health care bill was to give the Republicans and the corporations everything they wanted. They struck a deal with the insurance companies, the drug companies, the hospitals, the doctors' organizations, etc. to give them everything they wanted

The only problem wit this line of reasoning is that the Democrats had a majority in both the House and the Senate when the ACA was passed, it is 100% theirs, they pushed it through over the objections of many Republicans. They did not need to placate the Republicans to get their cooperation, and both parties are in bed with the corporations. Sorry, this lemon is 100% on Obama and the Democrats. Not to say the Republicans would have done any different or better, just that they were not an issue in this case.

Re:$805M budget

[DNS-and-BIND]

You know, I was ready to read your comment until the bigoted attack against lower-class, powerless people. That sort of shit makes me hate you. Get back to your luxury apartment and plastic surgery, you classist right-wing fuckbag, and never post on Slashdot again.

Re:$805M budget

[KGIII]

Every time the US has stopped babysitting Europe they have bombed themselves into rubble and then demanded assistance from others. What makes you think that this has changed?

Re:$805M budget

[KGIII]

I suppose we should just let you keep bombing yourselves into rubble and then paying so that you can repair your country after you have done so for the umpteenth time. Or we could let you behave like children, while still protecting you, and save some money from having to pay you to rebuild your own country after you've bombed yourselves into rubble yet again. No, I think it best that we take away your toys and do the heavy lifting on your behalf because you have continually proven that you are unable to sit at the adult's table and behave. We let you pretend, though. Don't worry - we've got you covered.

Re:$805M budget

[Solandri]

Basically, Obama and the advisers he picked decided that the only way to pass a health care bill was to give the Republicans and the corporations everything they wanted.

Riiiight. Which is why every single Republican Senator and Congressman voted against it.

What really happened was the exact opposite of what you say. Obama and his advisors crafted a heath care bill which was so liberal, not only did it lose all the Republicans, it was in danger of losing a good chunk of the moderate-center Democrats as well. All the compromises you claim were made to appease Republicans, were in fact put in to appease moderate Democrats. Most of them didn't like it either, but were under enormous pressure by the far-left wing of the Democrat party to get this passed while they still had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (10 months from 2009-2010).

You can't blame this one on the Republicans. Its legacy will rest entirely upon the Democrats because it was 100% Democrat-drafted, passed, and signed.

Re:$805M budget

[cheater512]

USA! USA! USA!
We're number #1!

The world would actually prefer it if most of the above was not the case.
And there would be a massive saving to the US tax payer as well.
You are under no obligation to do any of that.

(I'm an Aussie)

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy them a friggin' Wii and let them be happy with it.

Re: $805M budget

[Coren22]

That goes right along with you never leaving your parent's basement right?

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

Cut the mandatory spending. Most of that is just pork now. Cut the military. We have multiple bases open solely because a senior Representative has it in his area. We have a navy that alone could take on most (if not all) of the world, in any location. We don't need to "project power" everywhere in the world. We have military bases in Germany to prevent East Germany from invading West Germany. How's that working out? Or the F-35? Shoulda just bought more of the existing planes, than make a new one that's jack-of-all and master-of-none.

As for health care, we spend more per person of Federal dollars on health care than places with "Free" health care for all pay. So we'd get more and pay less if we abolished Medicare, Medicaid, ACA, and all that, and just went to a single-payer system. About 50% of the cost of health care in the US is profit for private companies. Single payer non-profit would cut health care costs in half the first day.

Though, if I were president, I'd abolish the Air Force, Army, and Marines. Recall all troops and set up the "military" for the sole purpose of defending the territories of the USA. Use the militia as the founders intended. We have more private guns in the US than the Chinese military. If we need to send troops to Iraq, call up the National Guard, and send them.

All we'd really need to do to "make" a few hundred billion dollars, is trim the nuclear arsenal to the ability to destroy the Earth only once.

The question isn't "what do we cut". I could go on for hours on all the ways we could cut costs (and none of them are done with privatization). The question is, will those who lose profits from bad government spending ever allow anyone to change it? That answer is "no" so where to cut doesn't matter.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

Something I've noticed in the UK is they have a lot of imported doctors. People that grew up in India, went to medical school in india, and then immigrate to the UK to practice. I've been to a few UK hospitals and they're largely foreign born. Which implies the salaries being offered are below market rates for the UK.

That suggests that even if the US is over paying for doctors, the UK is likely underpaying.

I don't follow. That there are more "dark" doctors than white means that UK is underpaying? If they were underpaying, and the US is overpaying, why aren't there more "dark" doctors in the US, moving there for the increased pay? There has to be something else at work. Such as the AMA's stranglehold on doctors, trying to artificially limit the number of US doctors to prevent competition. If the doctors in the UK are underpaid, then those moving to the UK should have instead moved to Australia or elsewhere where doctors are paid between the UK and US numbers.

The Universities just adjust the tuition so they take 100 percent of the loan + they take whatever the student or family might be able to afford on top of that.

You mean the states cut education funding to take as much student and federal money possible, with no thought as to how that affects the residents.

If what you said was true, as money for education was easier to get, universities would increase income, as they collect more. But the numbers I've seen indicate the income is stagnant. The source of the income for universities has shifted from state programs to federal programs, but the total income hasn't. This means that the states have given university funding to the feds. If it was the universities being greedy, they'd be making more, not the same or even less.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

Why do people go to private doctors in the UK?

I find it amusing that you are so sure that the US system is better than the UK version, despite the US version being more expensive and not having patient metrics supporting any real difference in quality.

But the answer to your question is:

"choice is allowed."

It doesn't need to be more than that. If you give someone the choice, they are free to take it. If their opinion is that NHS sucks, they are free to go elsewhere, even if their opinion is unfounded and factually false.

Some don't want to wait for elective surgery. Others want specific drugs. Third opinions, and other reasons.

There are a wide variety of reasons why someone turns down a perfectly good "free" choice to pay for a second.

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

that's fantastic that it's supporting itself... I guess that means it's a profit center and that USMIL is doing this to help cover it's costs... sort of like a kid with a paper route

if golf was mandatory then sure, let's optimize the distance travelled... but it's not, golf is optional. Is there a ferris wheel on base for people who want that kind of entertainment conveniently located?

services like golf courses should be provided by private companies, especially self sustaining ones. why is the USMIL denying a private corporation the opportunity to make money providing golf courses? because they hate capitalism?

and I can assure you, in a organization like that there is probably a report about the condition of the 14th fairway that meanders (at great expense) all the way up to an office in the pentagon where some one-star oversees all the USMIL golf courses world wide

I propose that this course be used for mortar practice, new bunkers every day!

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

fellow said all the doctors go into private practice once they cut their teeth in the business. That implies a private sector medical business that as roughly the same size as the public one.

I asked why people go to the private doctors.

As to assumptions... you're the one assuming. I didn't say the english doctors were worse. You simply didn't know what to say to arguments and so tried to strawman me into an argument you feel you can fight. Why would I help you do that? Dishonest fucks can fuck themselves... no?

So why don't you ask me why I said something I actually said, ehm chump?

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Most of the mandatory spending in that category is going to education subsidies.

So you want to cut those are did you accidentally blow your leg off by stepping on another rhetorical land mine?

Its a rhetorical question of course... you have no legs now. Adorable.

While there is pork spending in EVERY budget category it is important to remember that every segment of the budget is an umbrella of a lot of things. And just indiscriminately cutting anything is going to involve drownding a lot of kittens. Anyone that touches these things tends to be branded a bad bad man. Every time the republicans try to cut the budget... that is their general solution to budget problems... they're labeled monsters. The democrats like to address these issues with tax increases... You tell me which one you prefer...

Just know that you're either going to be labeled a monster that wants to hurt children a spendthrift. You tell me.

Re:$805M budget

[nbauman]

Basically, Obama and the advisers he picked decided that the only way to pass a health care bill was to give the Republicans and the corporations everything they wanted.

Riiiight. Which is why every single Republican Senator and Congressman voted against it.

If you read that Washington Post article I linked above, you will see that the complaint of the progressives is that Obama gave the Republicans everything they said they wanted, but they still opposed it. The progressives thought that Obama was making a stupid, unnecessary compromise that wouldn't even work, and they turned out to be right. Even when Obama gave away the store, the Republicans still opposed him in every way they could.

What really happened was the exact opposite of what you say. Obama and his advisors crafted a heath care bill which was so liberal, not only did it lose all the Republicans, it was in danger of losing a good chunk of the moderate-center Democrats as well. All the compromises you claim were made to appease Republicans, were in fact put in to appease moderate Democrats. Most of them didn't like it either, but were under enormous pressure by the far-left wing of the Democrat party to get this passed while they still had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (10 months from 2009-2010).

I don't know where you get your idea of "far-left wing." I went to City College of New York at a time when I could sit at one lunchroom table with the Communists, another table with the Trotskyites, and another table with the Socialist Workers Party. Those were the people who were supporting Fidel Castro, fighting against the Vietnam war, and sitting in with Martin Luther King (and getting arrested in the process). So maybe you could call them far-left.

The left wing of the Democratic Party in Congress is probably represented by the Progressive Caucus, which includes Bernie Sanders and John Conyers. I don't know why you call them "far" left, unless it just makes you feel good to throw out inflammatory adjectives.

The Progressive Caucus supports a single-payer, Canadian-style system, where the government replaces the insurance companies, and negotiates with drug companies. That's not Obamacare. The Progressive Caucus members weren't even allowed into Obama's White House Health Care Summit in 2009, until they complained. Obama first promised them a single payer option, and then took it back when Karen Ignani, head of the insurance industry lobbying organization, threatened to pull another "Harry and Louise." Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, was always hostile to the Democratic left and in one famous incident called them "fucking retarded." (Which you can look up on Google.)

You can't blame this one on the Republicans. Its legacy will rest entirely upon the Democrats because it was 100% Democrat-drafted, passed, and signed.

Obamacare was modeled on a Heritage Foundation plan. I can blame it on the conservatives, Democrat and Republican:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Busin...
The irony of Republican disapproval of Obamacare
The Democrat's version of health insurance would have been cheaper, simpler and more popular. But we enacted the Republican version. So why are they so upset? Because it an achievement for the Obama administration.
By Robert Reich October 28, 2013

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the...
The Heritage Foundation disowns its baby

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

You've decided there is no right answer, so anyone who doesn't agree with you is wrong, by definition. You are on a discussion site looking to lecture, and attacking anyone who tries to enter into discussion. That makes you a troll.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

So why don't you ask me why I said something I actually said, ehm chump?

I didn't ask you why you said anything. That you imply I did makes you a liar. Quit lying, you lying liar.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

And in some cases they're not even included in your statistics. Some countries don't count their slums at all. No stats even attempted. Murder rate, literacy rate, infant mortality... not recorded.

I don't know if anyone in europe does that but it is quite common in south america to not count problem areas at all.

Regardless... you have to concede that the problem is not general but is a result of averaging highly concentrated problem areas into general statistics.

Conflating those stats with the whole country is one of the reasons things never change. How can you fix a problem if you don't even admit what the problem is in the first place?

As to someone else's problem... I said nothing of the kind. I merely said that if you actually care, then you'll focus your efforts on where the problem is instead of wasting your time and energy reforming portions of the country that don't actually have a problem in the first place.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Davey Davey Davey... what is up with all these unqualified posts here? You know when you do that it is impossible to prove you wrong... and also impossible for you to right... right?

You say these things... no basis... logically aduittable argument... no basis of information... just... insults.

one would think you were afraid of me, Davey? Think you'll get eaten alive so you'll just make non-falsifiable arguments that can't actually be disproven?

Davey... come on... You can be better than that. Don't post like one of the AC trolls. We're better than that, no?

Try again.

As to being full of myself... its true sadly... its very depressing... it comes from being surrounded by morons... I'm not a genius myself... but all things are relative. Its a little like that guy "not sure" in idiocracy. A genius... no... but he knew that you don't water plants with energy drinks.

I also love myself some starbucks... because they give handjobs.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

I agree we spend too much and get too little. But unlike you, Davey my boy, I don't just take the average figure and lower it to some arbitrary goal like a complete and TOTAL fucktard. Instead, I want to go through the components of that cost and figure out WHY it costs more.

So apparently we pay our doctors TWICE what they're paid in England. I found that fairly easily.

I also talked about how there isn't cost transparency at hospitals or really any quality rankings of them.

how can a market operate if you don't know what a good or service costs and can't evaulate the quality?

I talked about how US drugs are more expensive than foreign drugs... basically arbitarily. And that is something we should look at... possibly getting US drug manufacturers to produce more. One idea I like is forbiding drug inventors to make the drugs themselves or to give exclusive licenses to anyone.

So if Drug company X comes up with a drug... they profit entirely by selling the license to manufacture the drug. Thus if there is high demand... any company can step in and produce the drug. This would likely control cost inflation better.

Another thing that needs to stop is that doctors of all kinds need to not get a kickback for proscribing drugs.

that is, if I proscribe a 1000 dollar a pill drug... I shouldn't get anything more than if I proscribed you NOTHING.

The prescription system also needs to be reformed to permit longer term proscriptions. If an old guy is on heart meds why is he going to the doctor four times a year to get his prescriptions renewed? That's dumb. At the very least give him a life time prescription.

You're not half as clever as you think you are Davey... and I'm not half as dumb. *wink*

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Where did we use it recently to intervene for our own interests? Tell me more... I'd love to hear your ignorant babble on the issue. :)

As to Israel's powerful military... that relates to the weapons we both give, sell, and sell at a deep discount to them.

As to Ukraine, the only thing holding Russia back at this point is the US. Putin goes far enough to get something but no so far that the US will send troops.

Remove the US from the equation and the amount he can take before he gets a response increases to what it would take for France to go to war with Russia.

How much of Eastern Europe would have to fall before France got involved?

Exactly. You are on ignorant little monkey.

As to starting wars... which war do you think we started? Lay a few at our feet. I'm curious where you think the US started out as the aggressor. the only example I can think of off the top of my head in modern memory would be the second Iraq war and that only happened because of worries about nuclear containment.

Which is an issue so serious that it is baffling you people are ignorant of it.

As to what we should do... we're not your slaves. Tell you what... why don't we just leave... pull out EVERYWHERE. Leave NATO... Leave Israel to fend for themselves. Leave china to do whatever it wants. Just go home and let you morons eat each other.

Do you realize my nation is bordered on two sides by great oceans and all our American cousin nations are either harmless or friendly? We can pull back to our island and watch you idiots burn.

*gets extra big bucket of popcorn with extra butter* :-D

My grand father's generation went to war out of a sense of fear, horror, and rage.

My father's generation went to war out of a sense of honor, duty, and obligation.

My generation grew up listening to you ingrates and frankly we're increasingly happy to just go home and masturbate to the carnage on tv.

We're pushing Japan to rearm so they can take over.
We're pushing for the middle east to take care of its own security situation.
We're trying to get the eastern europeans ready to face off against the Russians man to man because god knows the western europeans are eunuchs.

And once that is in place... We're going bounce. You morons think we want to be the world police? You think we like this? We hate it.

Our grandfathers went in because they saw that left to their own devices the europeans would destroy themselves and were incompetent to take care of their strategic affairs.

Our fathers went in because we felt at the time that if we didn't do it than the world would fall to the soviets and that would be our fault as much as theirs.

My generation is tired of this... we're done with you. You hate us? Fine. Have fun with the various psychopaths of the world. And expect that without the US making military buildups pointless... powers you thought of as harmless will quickly have militaries that you can't handle.

Europe couldn't even handle Serbia by itself during the Kosovo war. Do you even begin to realize how pathetic that is? And more recently the combined forces of NATO without the US couldn't handle Libya.

But it gets worse:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

Tell me more about how much money you're saving... :-D

You learned NOTHING from WW2. And your weakness proves it.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

"The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action."
Frank Herbert

your agenda is showing... you'll need to work harder to make that less obvious. Just fyi, paaal. :D

A socialist saying the solution to all problems is more socialism. Fucking shocking.

Solution to a problem with a general break down in inner city minority ghettos?... National healthcare for everyone.

Of course.

You're a clown. And an evil one at that because your agenda uses the suffering and misery of people but you don't actually care about them. You're a fucking parasite that feeds on the misfortune and despair of those around you.

You love it. Everyone is a victim. And the solution to everyone's problems is to give you more power. What could possibly go wrong with this little idea?

I mean, if all you want is round the clock blowjobs and cushy make work jobs for you to pretend you do anything useful while oppressing the rest of society... then sure. Mission Accomplished. But if you actually want to help anyone, then you'll focus on the problem and talk about the problem and try to address the problem.

Socializing the healthcare of cattle ranchers in South Dakota helps this situation how?

You say you just do that because you need the money? Why not just have the cities levy the tax sport. Its in their territory that all this is happening in the first place.

The Suburbs and Rural areaas don't have these issues at all. At all.

So tell you what... levy your tax there. Let new york put a 10 ten percent income tax on everyone that lives there and bingo. There's your money.

sure people might leave the city... but think of it this way... now you don't have all those congestion problems and you can start moving those people into nicer housing. Who knows... property values might fall which would be a good thing.

Short of any kind of focused response to a concentrated problem... your solutions smack of exploiting a problem to push a preexisting agenda.

I don't think you care about the poor. I don't think you care about minorities. I think you find them useful to use as a bludgeon against your rivals. And that hurts no one more than the people you presume to help. Because the last thing they're going to get with you doing that is effective attention. Anything directed at them will be misdirected and stolen by people like you to serve your desires.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

"I find it amusing that you are so sure that the US system"

This was your strawman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

... no. Break down the budget. We can talk about what each thing we do costs and then you can tell me what you want me to cut.

Who gets fucked? Do we fuck Europe? Fuck Eastern Europe? Fuck Israel or Saudi Arabia? Fuck South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, or Australia? Who do we fuck?

You don't just take the full budget and sight unseen cut it.

You have to go into the projects and programs and tasks and tell me what you don't want us to do anymore.

I can give you one that I think we could probably scrap... the JSF could be scrapped.

We can't get the money back already spent on it but we can stop dropping more money down that pit.

Now. I'd also scale back or get rid of the DHS.

What do you want the US to not do?

A lot of people want the US to deal with ISIS for example... europeans are asking us to do that. They say go to war as often to us as they tell us not to... without irony or self awareness.

And if we go to war with ISIS that will cost money. Could Germany fight Isis or England or France? Nope. They can't even fight some shitty band of barbarians in the desert.

But we can... Tell me. What do you want the US to stop doing. Forget the money. You don't even begin to understand what that means.

As Cicero said "The Sinews of War are Infinite Money.". To retain an ability to go to war we need to spend more.

What is more, you mostly talking about our spending in absolute terms. In relative terms our spending isn't even that much by european standards.

The UK spends something like 2.2 percent of their GDP on their military and the US spends about 3.5 percent.

Are you really going to bitch endlessly about a 1.3 percent difference?

Fuck off.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

If you deny that, then how do you think the US system rates vs the average of industrialized nations? How about the UK specifically?

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

as to insurance companies negociating with hospitals... first that is not a general release of pricing is it?

And second, the big problem with the insurance system is that it is no one's money.

The insurance companies don't really care what they pay the hospitals so long as all the other insurance companies have to pay a very similar amount. it isn't their money.

It's YOUR money. if the hospitals raise prices then the insurance companies raise premiums so they don't have to actually pay more because it isn't their money.

And the patients don't see it as their money often as not without high deductables because they think its the insurance company's money because the costs of the insurance are already set and won't change based on whatever they decide to do in the hospital on any given day.

So the costs are hidden and no one thinks of the money as theirs. This is a situation RIPE for problems.

Now here are some ways to fix this.

1. Have the hospitals disclose rates on their website in a comprehensible and comprehensive way. Here someone will say it is complicated... everything is complicated. And yet any businesses will average the costs so that they can form a simplified price list that they're happy to collect on average because over all their customers it works out to a decent profit.

2. Instead of having the insurance companies paying the hospital have them pay the patient. That is... you break an arm, and the insurance company has a certain amount of money that they just give you if you did that. If you spend less fixing your broken arm than the insurance company gave you than you personally are rewarded by keeping a bit more of your own money. And if you spend more than you have to pay more.

I can go on but just doing these two things would hugely control costs. Patients would be able to send market signals to the hospitals on a patient to patient basis. This would improve the efficiency of medicine hugely.

As to the flaw in my reasoning that all quality is basically equal... its less of a flaw then you think. When you have a problem most people just go to the nearest medical provider and get treatment there. You have to do quite a bit of research to figure out if one doctor is better than another and even then it is very subjective. The reality is that whether or not all medical care is actually equal, it is treated that way by the market in most cases. And thus from the market's perspective, it is generally considered to be equal.

As to manipulating statistics such as death rates etc... of course. Anyone that understands statistics understands that you can't understand the number unless you understand the methodology under which it was collected, calibrated, filtered, and executed.

This is why I have to take so many statistics so lightly. The methodology for so many of them is either unknown, intentionally hidden, misrepresented, or so complicated that I can't actually understand it. And if I can't understand the methodology than the number outputted by the system is likewise something I can't evaluate.

Two statistical studies could be talking about something and one outputs a number of X and another outputs a number of 2 * X... which one is right? Without understanding how they got to those numbers there is no way to know what any of it actually means.

Disclosure of that sort of information is frequently garbage.

You sloppy statistical methodology in journalism, government, and even academia. Mostly in the soft sciences but occasionally in the moderately hard science. You rarely see it in the actually hard sciences. Bullshit math is too easily detected in hard science.

As to Krugman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Krugman has no credibility on so many issues and he's mostly an ideologue at this point. He writes too many editorials to be anything else.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

The issue with not being able to get prompt scans is an issue we've heard from the Canadians. There are quite a few hospitals in the US that actually have a majority canadian patient list. And mostly as you say it is screening. MRIs etc.

That situation is one of the many reasons we look upon the calls for socialization with skepticism. If its so great we ask... why are the canadians coming over here to get this service and sometimes even treatement.

A big thing as I remember was the distinction between heart port and open heart surgery. I don't know if this is still the case, but the US adopted and trained people to do heart PORT surgery before anyone else. I think we developed and it naturally was adopted in the US first. It is apparently more expensive mostly because it requires different tools and retraining. Though the actual costs once that is taken care of are less than open heart.

The issue is that open heart involves cutting the rip cage open to get access to the heart. While heart port surgery sends fiddly little tools in through the gaps in the rib cage. Recovery times for open heart are at least a month or more. And heart port surgery has people out of the hospital in days.

Point is... there was a time when if you wanted heart port surgery you had to go to the US to get it. And that meant higher survival rates, quicker recovery times, fewer lingering problems because of the trauma of the open heart operation. Etc.

I believe there are a lot of things the US medical system does that are innovative. The robotic surgery projects are mostly in the US. We're working with gene therapy treatments. We are grafting electronic sensors to human nerves to allow direct brain interfaces with sensors and servos.

Is the socialized care better? I think it is contextual and depending on how you frame the question you'll get different answers.

As to the cost differences... I think a lot of that is the result of the way the medical industry is regulated in the US and less that we're not socialized.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Color the skin doesn't matter... that they the native doctors are being squeezed out by cheap imports is... we're seeing the same thing without H1B visa thing which we talk about all the time.

I also compared what you pay your english doctors to what we and the canadians pay ours. You pay half what we do. Half.

Now, if you are an english doctor, can just immigrate to the US and make DOUBLE. So no... you are underpaying your doctors or the US and canada are over paying ours.

Its one of the two. And that has to have some relevance to what we spend on healthcare. Unless you think labor costs being DOUBLE or HALF has no baring on anything.

You're not half as clever as you think you are... Just fyi. You keep coming off like you're sharp as a tack... but you're a dull one... or at least all your posts thus far have been indications of such.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

No you little strawmanning shit. This is the third or forth time in a row you've strawmanned me.

What I did say was that it is more complicate than that and you can't just take the budget of an entire department and say "reduce spending by X". You have to look at what they do, what you want them to do, what you don't want them to do, what all of those things cost, and then you can cut the things that you don't want them to do and reduce their budget by associating the thing you told them not do that was costing X with the money you're taking out of the budget.

THAT is how you do it if you're a human being with a functioning fucking brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

As to the oligarchs of South Korea... can you justify that statement... on what basis do you say they are an oligarchy?

As to Western Europe... its so deeply in our shells of interlocking protection that it is little more than a credit to our defense that they don't even think there is a threat. How many thousands of years of war did Europe endure... against themselves and against anyone that could reach their territory. And you think that's all over now? Peace forever?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If we hadn't backed europe during the cold war stalin would have grabbed greece and then continued working his way west. Churchill didn't beg the US for help for nothing.

You say we're all done now because the USSR is done? You said the same thing after the Germans fell the first time. But you know what... I'm sick enough of the entire issue to just agree with you out of spite.

There we go. That's where we cut the budget. Leave NATO and abandon western europe entirely.

You've convinced me. We can save money there. Brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

We'll keep the faith with England... they're still trying... but large portions of Europe are unworthy of having American blood spilled in their names.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Ignorance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Had the soviets been strained to expand they would not have engaged in a program to expand communism globally.

The cold war would not have happened. It did because the soviets wanted to expand and the US contained them as best as we could.

That was the cold war.

A decades long international siege.

If you don't want to inform yourself that is your own prerogative but it undermines your credibility to claim an opinion of any note.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

No, they're not the VA... That's just government funding through the universities that uses the VA as test subjects.

The VA is involved to the extent that they provide people with those injuries along with the funding from the federal government to do the work. But the actual brains are supplied by the universities and the private medical firms.

I grant that FEDERAL FUNDING is important for that research and that wounded solders from the VA are vital to the research. But that's your contribution here. Money and damaged people.

As to adequate funding being all you need... then why is the public education system so shitty? It sends more per pupil than most other countries and many of the places with the worst problems in the US system spend even more per pupil.

The money is meaningless without accountability, flexibility, competence, and integrity.

We know the VA has accountability issues.
We know they have flexibility issues.
We know they have competence issues.
And we of course know they have integrity issues.

So given that we can't audit what they're doing because they falsify records, they are tend to not change things unless forced to even though it is against the interests of their patients, we know that at the very least their managers have competence issues, and their integrity is very difficult to defend... you think I'm going to feel good about not only just handing them a blank check but also running the entire national healthcare system under the same regime?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Every department is guilty of it... the noterity is a product of the media emphazies a common issue in the government in some things and burying it in others. If you dig into any department you find this. The waste is predictable more by the size of the budget than by what they're doing.

You can expect a good 20 percent bullshit in every department at a minmum. But cutting their budget by 20 percent won't have the bullshit cut first. Rather, vital services will be cut first as a power ploy and revenge tactic by the institution. This is why cities that have budget shortfalls cut education and police. Not because they can't cut something else that people won't mind or that should have been cut in the first place. But by cutting police and schools they can create a media firestorm that will get people to agree to higher taxes to save the children etc.

And every federal department is the same way.

Which is why if you want to control spending in them you have to get into the details and not cut the general budget but cut a specific program that you think needs to be axed.

If you're not doing that then you've very little that is constructive to contribute to the situation because any cutting that does not involve discrete and specific attribution will result in vital services getting prioritized for cuts or things that are not wasteful being cut while the pork is left untouched.

In the last general budget dispute in the US, the US president ordered park rangers across the country for forbid Americans from entering national parks. On the argument that this would save money. He went even so far as to bar people in Washington DC from seeing capital monuments because they're in the same general department.

It was a transparent political ploy that mostly backfired. I think we had some park rangers pull guns on a bus load of old people because they wanted to take pictures at a park.

Not only did this order not save money, it cost money... a lot of money. Why did Obama do it? To make a dishonest political argument. And I'm not saying this to attack Obama. I'm saying it because this is COMMON. It is typical. It is systematic. It is endemic. This is what we get all the time whenever we try to have cuts.

Which is why general cuts are stupid. You cut specific programs. You scale back government responsibilities. You cancel purchases... or shut the fuck up.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

The "world" as you term it is mostly holding that opinion out of a mixture of ignorance and envy.

The Aussies would be in some trouble without the US there to add steel to the status quo that you depend upon.

The Aussies have to my knowledge never had to defend themselves alone. You went right from the shelter of the British Empire to our tender embrace. Care to imagine what facing off against the Imperial Japanese alone would have been like without the US or British to give you a hope in hell?

I don't say any of this to be mean or to upset you. I just find it very hard to take such opinions seriously when they do not have any grasp of the issues or the stakes.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

It depends entirely on how you frame the question. In certain contexts either system is superior. You can't say either one is objectively superior to the other in all contexts.

This is an over simplified argument you're pushing which has no utility in a real discussion. it is little more than a political talking point used to validate a given bias. I could share my own biases in this matter but they'd be equally meaningless and inaccurate.

My superiority to you in this matter is that I know what I don't know and I know better the problems with framing the question. You believe you have the answers and you believe your simplistic question has no flaws in it. This is obviously ignorance on your part.

Be more emotionally detached. Don't be such a drama queen. Think the issue through. You're not. And it is poisoning your ability to speak on this issue intelligently.

If there is a specific aspect of the US system you wish to talk about then we can do that. If you try to talk about the US generally, I will break down the issue into specific and then discuss them separately so we can get some idea of what is going on.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

You are wrong. You are lying. I didn't strawman you. I stated my opinion. You don't like it, so you ignore it, and whine about some rhetorical games you declare you were playing against me, and that you win because you said "strawman" first. Good for you. You win the Internet. Feel better?

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

I also compared what you pay your english doctors

You are a lying asshole again. I'm not in England. I never stated where I was. You are being an idiot and making up strawmen. Does it make you feel better? Or do you need to kick more kittens?

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

My superiority to you in this matter is that I know what I don't know and I know better the problems with framing the question. You believe you have the answers and you believe your simplistic question has no flaws in it. This is obviously ignorance on your part.

I have lived under multiple systems. How many countries have you lived in as a permanent resident or citizen?

You seem to be making up a new logical fallacy. The appeal to ignorance. "Since I don't know, you can't know, so the more sure you are, the more that proves you don't know what you are talking about."

I don't need to have a huge in-depth discussion on which top 20% you'd take from every possible medical system. They all simplify to the US or UK systems. Multi-payer with (or without) government subsidy. The single payer with (or without) government subsidy. It is a dichotomy. Unless you can point to a system that is both. Is there such a system, that is both single-payer and multi-payer? If not, then one *must* pick one as a starting point. The question isn't about subsidy, other than pointing out that those who have highly subsidized systems pay less with single payer than multipayer. But it's not a discussion about the level of subsidy, just a point of difference between single payer and multi-payer.

Be more emotionally detached. Don't be such a drama queen. Think the issue through. You're not. And it is poisoning your ability to speak on this issue intelligently.

You sound like someone who deliberately creates drama, just to complain about it. I'm speaking intelligently on the issue, and you refuse to listen because I'm not saying what you want to hear. Then you blame me for you inability to follow along.

Re:$805M budget

[Richard_at_work]

In the UK if you see a private doctor you still need a referral from your NHS GP, everything has an involvement with the NHS somewhere along the way.
 

You only need a referral from your NHS GP if the NHS is paying for your treatment - if you are paying for your treatment you can go to a private GP and a private hospital and not involve the NHS at all. You do not need a referral from your NHS GP for completely private work.

Source: my wife, who is a practising GP.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Nothing but non-falsifiable arguments and ad hominem?

Are you afraid to match wits with me so you only make statements that cannot be proven right or wrong? Or are you so emotionally twisted up that you can't think straight? Or is it that YOU are so ignorant that you don't realize that you're making non-falsifiable statements that are by definition incapable of being valid logic?

A non-falsifiable argument is a fallacy by definition, fucktard.

Try again. This time with less stupid.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

1. Your opening argument is that you don't value the opinions of other people and therefore have no interest in their commentary?

Why are you posting here if you're not interested in the opinions of others? What you're telling me here is that you're a confused individual that probably shouldn't be posting. Or made a stupid insult that you didn't realize had self destructive consequences. You tell me.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

The only problem wit this line of reasoning is that the Democrats had a majority in both the House and the Senate when the ACA was passed, it is 100% theirs, they pushed it through over the objections of many Republicans.

You're thinking it was a majority in lockstep. In reality, Democrats have their own conservative members, and their centrist members, and their moderates, so those members pushed for a plan that would be acceptable to Republicans. Who still managed to try to keep their hands clean.

Except they also lost, because now NOTHING they can propose will be workable, or be different from what the PPACA act does. That's why they've not offered another plan. They know they don't have one. Instead they fume and rant over it, but offer nothing, and just chip away at the edges.

They have nothing. No alternative. So all they can do is pretend they're going to repeal it, but they can't, and they hope to lose the next Presidential election so they don't have to try.

Not to say the Republicans would have done any different or better, just that they were not an issue in this case.

They were, you know nothing about politics if you think otherwise. And for that matter, many of the amendments were proposed by Republicans, including Chuck Grassley's, which now David Vitter is complaining about strenuously. Because it's evil or something.

Whatever.

Re:$805M budget

[nbauman]

No, they're not the VA... That's just government funding through the universities that uses the VA as test subjects.

The VA is involved to the extent that they provide people with those injuries along with the funding from the federal government to do the work. But the actual brains are supplied by the universities and the private medical firms.

That's not true. I've read the studies. I've talked to the doctors.

What do you know? Have you read the studies?

Re:$805M budget

[pnutjam]

Your opinion holds no weight in this argument. You stated:

I don't believe that it is impossible to find equal or superior care for those sorts of injuries outside the VA

, in response to:

I've studied the VA system... ...First, you have to judge them by their main purpose: When a soldier comes back from Iraq with a brain injury, their job is to keep him alive and get him functioning as well as possible. They do the best job in the world. There is no place in the world that can treat head wounds as well as the U.S. military. Nobody. Same with the guys who have a foot blown off by a land mine.

Your opinion, in this case, is only relevent to yourself.

Re:$805M budget

[cthulhu11]

I have a buddy who served and was wounded in the Gulf. The VA mostly gives him runaround, like only scheduling appointments on the other side of the regional large city, 100 miles from where he lives. Because his grandmother lived there 25 years ago. He's been fighting for two years to get his disability percentage raged. In the meantime he can't work and has been camping out in my garage. There are advocates in theory to help with the VA process, but they're uniformly worthless.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Or we could just let them get genocided and masturbate to the news footage of them getting skull fucked by barbarians.

The pro Palestine lobby is adorable. yes yes... the jews are the evil ones... lets let Hamas run wild.

What could possibly go wrong there?

You're too dumb to breed.

Re:$805M budget

[cheater512]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There were no US forces in Darwin in pretty much the only real attack we've ever seen.

Or rather there were 10 P-40 Warhawks there purely by coincidence with crews who were untrained, and a single Destroyer which got sunk.
The US was not there to help defend Darwin at all, just as a convenient place to stop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
When Japanese midget subs were in Sydney Harbour, there were two US ships there. Again using Sydney as a convenient port to stop at. They didn't help dealing with the subs at all.

The US hasn't ever defended Australian soil.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Non-falsifiable arguments and insults, Davy.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

You think if the US just stayed in the Americas you'd have stayed free of Japanese domination? Are you THAT naive?

I have no doubt you fought small probing incursions by the japanese all by yourself. And nothing I have said is to suggest your people were without honor, valor, or duty.

However.. you lacked the numbers, the ships, the logistics, and the technology to repel the Japanese.

You did not have a heavy military industrial complex in Australia.

How many war ships did your country build?

How many tanks?

How many battalions did you field?

How many heavy bombers?

How many fighters?

How many close support bombers?

You think Australia during WW2 would have stood a chance against the Imperial Japanese military? With WHAT?

The US was having trouble with the Japanese for the first couple years of the war and our economic, industrial, population, and tech base so completely dwarfed anything Australia had then or now that it isn't worth citing numbers.

And to take things into the 21st century... Why does China need to care about Australia's opinion about anything? You and what army? The US pulls out of east asia and Japan is going to rapidly rearm, the other allies in the region are going to start to fracture their alliances because they all trust the US more than they trust each other. Everyone hates the Japanese for historical reasons even though its a stupid position to take in the 21st century. The South Koreans will probably cut a deal with the Chinese in return for the Chinese putting pressure on the North Koreans to behave themselves which is the entire point of the North Koreans even existing as a nation in so far as China is concerned.

Taiwan will get blockaded and forced to surrender to the Chinese. The Chinese don't even need to invade. Blockade Taiwan and they'll probably start to starve. A lot of island countries are net food importers. The UK is the same way. You blockade England and they have to surrender or starve.

Will the Chinese invade Australia? I doubt it. However they will dictate to you the policy in the region and they could very well make you pay tribute which you'd have no option but to pay. That would of course go for New Zealand etc.

China would form closer contacts with Russia and collectively they'd dominate asia with the exception of a few pockets of resistance. India has some stones. They could probably force other powers to leave them alone. The whole situation would likely cause unpredictable things to happen in the islamic countries. They are inclined to unite into a largely unitary empire. They all remember the glory days of the Ottomans and seem to want that to come back... this time with nukes and suicide bombers.

So anyway... welcome to your new glorious multipolar world. Have fun. I'm going to be over here in the US giggling.

Re:$805M budget

[cheater512]

You do realise that 46% of US debt is controlled by foreign countries? And $1.2 trillion of that is controlled by China.

They kinda own you. They pay for your military.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

You have that backwards.
https://youtu.be/B3lsJmwNO40?t...

Loaning the US government doesn't give you leverage over the US. It gives the US leverage over you.

How do you not know this?

1. The US repays the loans in US dollars. The US dollar is a fiat currency which means if we want more dollar we can just print more. The currency is backed by nothing but the US Federal Reserve's intention to keep inflation manageable.

2. US bonds are not demand loans. That is, you can't demand that the US repay a loan suddenly. The repayment terms are hardwired into the bond itself. Thus, repayment occurs after 10 years or 5 years or 1 year. But not before. So whomever you sell it to or buy it from... it doesn't matter to us because either way we're going to repay that bond when it matures and not before.

3. Holding US debt means the value of your investment is dependent on the value of the US dollar. If the value of the dollar goes down for some reason then the value of your bonds goes down as well. Thus it is in your interest if you own US debt to not undermine the US economy or the US Federal Reserve will print dollars to cover any shortfall required to pay off debt.

4. US bond interest rates are currently set BELOW projected US inflation. Thus other countries are basically paying the United States to loan the United States money. That is... after the bond has matured and we've paid it back, we've made a profit on the loan... not the person that loaned us the money. This is not always true. There are only a few countries in the world that can sell bonds with such a low interest rate. The US and Germany are two of them. It would actually make more sense if we funded our entire government with debt at these interest rates and then just used the taxes to pay off the loans when they come due. That is because again... the interest rates are very very low.

5. This low interest rate is a reflection of demand for US debt. That means, if you don't buy US debt then someone else will and we won't care. Which means... the Chinese for example can't hurt us if they decide to not buy our debt. Worst case, our interest rate will go up slightly to attract more buyers. Which generally won't matter to us.

6. The Chinese economy is having serious problems right now and they are in no position to be causing problems. The US can do just fine without Chinese manufacturing. At most they lower what we pay for certain consumer and industrial goods. However, China cannot survive without the US market to sell to.

7. The US remains the global Reserve currency. We've been that since WW2 and nothing has really changed. This nonsense in Europe with Greece as well as economic turmoil in China and other assorted nonsense makes people worried about the stability of the global market. That worry translates into conservative economic practices which means people squirrel money away in the American economy. The Chinese people for example are buying up US assets. US land, US housing, US... stuff. And the reason for that is that it is a hedge against problems in China. So wealthy chinese people feel safer putting a significant amount of their net worth in the US than keeping it all in China. Americans feel no such anxiety. we are not squirreling our money away in China. We are keeping it in the US. Which means there is a net transfer of wealth from China to the US. When the chinese buy something in the US, they give us money and get in return ownership of something in the US. But the value of that thing in the US is subject to US markets. So if they buy some land their investment only holds value if the US real estate market holds stable. We saw similar things from the Japanese in the 1980s. They were running all over the US buying stuff because people in their economy knew the wheels were about to come off.

Long story short... no one has us on a leash. Rather, we profit from the entire situation.

The funny thing is the US is being paid... but what you do

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Also perhaps of interest to you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Gainsaying the US military support you get is not in your interest if you are a first world power. The Europeans especially are fucking themselves in the long run. They're so fat and so happy and so f'ing helpless. They don't even know how wide open they are if the US walks.

Re:$805M budget

[DanJ_UK]

Interesting, I had to get some tests done and I was required to get a referral from my GP.

Re:$805M budget

[DanJ_UK]

Thinking about it it's down to the fact private GPs won't have your medical history / records.

Re:$805M budget

[DanJ_UK]

Do I need a GP referral for a private consultant?

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

... I didn't lie. You are defending the socialized systems and saying they're better.

Either cite the country you're representing or I can pick any of the socialized countries at will for you.

You can't blame me if your own vagueness makes it impossible to know what you're talking about half the time.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

I was tempted to insult you but there's little point anymore. Any further comments along those lines would be redundant.

I'll just point out that you didn't answer my question or show any deeper thinking. So your comment is not actually a response and thus is not constructive to the discussion.

If you want to have a discussion then you have to be prepared to actually answer questions and demonstrate good faith to the extent that you are legitimately trying to give reasonable responses. You're demonstrably not doing that. So yet again this behavior from you leads no where profitable.

These discussions would be vastly more interesting for BOTH of us if you made an effort to make a constructive contribution to them. You don't have to agree with me. But you do have to try to make sense. And you don't.

You keep your comments as vague and non-falsifiable as possible so that it is impossible to even figure out exactly what you're saying much less prove any of it right or wrong. You don't address what anyone is telling you but instead strawman them endlessly. And none of your ideas are your own. Its all patient talking points that a political chat bot could output. And from this you presume superiority?

Feel about yourself or me whatever you like... I don't really care... but it is deeply depressing that you think THIS constitutes any kind of discussion.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

I'll just point out that you didn't answer my question or show any deeper thinking.

Just glancing to the most recent (not to look through all posts on this and other threads), you asked no question. As such it would be silly for you to expect an answer. And "deeper thinking" indicates "agrees with me". For it looks like that's what you mean.

If you want to have a discussion then you have to be prepared to actually answer questions and demonstrate good faith to the extent that you are legitimately trying to give reasonable responses.

You don't ask questions, then complain I don't answer them. I ask them of you, and you don't answer them. That's how you have a discussion. You are also very adept at hinting at an obvious opinion, then claiming "strawman" if someone points to it and says you look like you are supporting it.

You are playing rhetorical games, and not discussing anything.

And from this you presume superiority?

A question? I'll answer all your questions (though some with answers you don't like, so you'll later assert they were never answered). I presume superiority from the fact that you have implied (not stated, as you never state anything, in your pointless rhetorical games) that you've only experienced one system your entire life, so all you know of the other systems is what you've picked up through assumption. I've lived under multiple different systems. My demonstrably greater experience is what I base my superiority on. What do you base your superiority on?

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

You brought up UK. I never did. Don't blame your error of stupidity and assumption on me not giving my home address when applying for the right to respond to your inane and stupid lies.

Either cite the country you're representing or I can pick any of the socialized countries at will for you.

Talk about whatever country you want to. I never have, nor would want to constrain you in any way. That would just give you another excuse to "win" the argument without have even said a single coherent thing about it.

I'm just saying that you shouldn't tell me where I live. That's irrelevent to the discussion at hand, anyway. Keep to the facts, and don't make it personal. That's what your lie was.

You are defending the socialized systems and saying they're better.

You wrongly stated that I lived in the UK. Since you can't tell the truth for that point, how can we believe you can do it for any other?

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Then it is my opinion that you think you're a pretty pretty princess and that your entire position is that everyone should have a magical tea party inside your own ass.

Sorry, chump.. .the "its just an opinion" ploy is bullshit when you're using it to say what I believe or what I have said.

If I accept that, then it lets you misrepresent anything I say as anything you want under the guise of "its just an opinion".

No. Its strawmanning, shithead. Textbook strawmanning.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Evasion.

So I am locked to the US and you can cite any socialist medical system collectively without a problem. But if I reference any of them specifically for comparison then I'm a liar?

Rejected for logical inconsistency.

I am already being held to much higher standards in this discussion than you are. And that's fine... I don't mind because I'm so much smarter than you and so much better researched that it isn't hard for me to play with a handicap. But that handicap is one that only exists because I don't mind it. The instant I decide it is inconvenient to what I'm saying, I'm going to ignore it because it isn't binding on my behavior.

You're not being held to any kind of standards at all. None.

So sure... I'll accept some standards on myself... I'm better than you... But I'm not going to let you simply win by allowing you to arbitrarily tie me up with rules that you're not following. I'll follow any rule you follow. And I'll follow any rule I think I should follow. And I'll follow any rule that doesn't inconvenience me.

If you're not following a given rule. If I don't think I need to follow the rule. And if it is inconvenient for me to follow it... then I'm not going to follow it.

You could win ANY argument simply by forcing your opposition to follow a bunch of arbitrary rules that you're not subjected to. I could beat Michael Jordan at basketball if he had to walk on his hands and dribble the ball with his feet. Best player in the world... older now... but I have always sucked at that game. And I could beat him if he were handicapped that hard.

So, no fuckface. I'm not going to let you control the way I construct my arguments or conduct myself arbitrarily especially when you're not following any of those rules yourself.

Eat all the dicks. All of them.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

I actually challenged you quite directly to form a more nuanced argument that wasn't just a childishly simplistic cookie cutter political talking point you memorized and then vomited at me like some sort of revolting parrot.

Was that not completely obvious?

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

You are lying again. I didn't do that. You just go bat-shit insane if someone disagress with you. I gave an opinion that contradicts yours, and you went off your meds.

So you want to cut those are did you accidentally blow your leg off by stepping on another rhetorical land mine?

That's you sticking to facts, and not going into strawmen or ad hominem. You have never discussed facts. You just insanely rant about how I'm wrong and you are right, without referencing why, or even the topic at hand.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

Evasion.

Yes. You could have stopped there, after you described the entire content of your post in a single word.

So I am locked to the US and you can cite any socialist medical system collectively without a problem. But if I reference any of them specifically for comparison then I'm a liar?

Oops. You are lying again. I never evaded anything. I never "locked you in" to any system.

I simply pointed out your lie when you stated I was in (or from) England.

That's a lie. You can talk about the UK all you want. But stop asserting that I'm there, and I'm defending it because it's "my" system.

In other words, stop lying, and I'll stop calling you a liar.

If you're not following a given rule. If I don't think I need to follow the rule.

Ah yes. So you'll lie to prove a point, and it's my fault for being lied to. I'm glad that you don't feel bound by any rules, such as "politeness" or "basic decency".

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

Yes, you said that you didn't like my answer, so you consider the question unanswered. Then started ranting how I don't ever answer questions because I've answered all your questions. Just not with the answer you wanted to hear.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Nope, that's literally what you did and its super obvious.

Look, shit for brains, if you want to have a rational discussion then you need to not rely utterly on the most stupid text book logical fallacies imaginable.

Strawmanning me is not acceptable. It will not sustain a position. So you can either clean your act up OR I can just treat you as a safe target to practice my smack talk on. Because you have literally no value besides as a dehumanized punching bag if you decide to conduct yourself with no integrity at all.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

What are you even talking about anymore? Are we talking about healthcare or are you so afraid of the actual argument that you have to cloud the issue with your endless stream of bullshit?

You're a liar, a coward, and an idiot.

Here are you options. Talk about healthcare or I am rhetorically just going to urinate in your face. You're not worth any more respect from me than that if you can't even be moderately honest.

I already see you're afraid and it is obvious to anyone you're a fool. BUT... we can continue and I will be polite to you if you JUST conduct yourself with a LITTLE integrity. Just a bit. If you can't even do that... then you're nothing but place for me to dispose of my waste.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

You are arguing about anything that distracts from your arguments. You know you are wrong, so you attack the person. Health care in the UK (your example, not mine) is cheaper and "better" than the US. It's mostly free for the users, and cheaper for the government. We spend more in the US and get less. That's prima facie proof that the US system is inferior. And that's the point you claim is "nuanced" or whatever your lame excuses are to not discuss the facts.

You attack me, my heritage, or whatever because your example of the UK shows how wrong you are in your opinions on health care.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

Because you have literally no value besides as a dehumanized punching bag if you decide to conduct yourself with no integrity at all.

Then stop lying you lying asshole. I was sticking to facts, and you didn't like them, so you launched into a personal attack that you haven't let up on . And it looks like you aren't planning on letting up on.

All to cover for the fact that you know you are a lying idiot, but you want to pretend nobody else can tell.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Okay... so robot responds that he can only respond with programmed information. Good to know talking point bot.

You don't actually have opinions then and your answers are not your own which means I'm not arguing with a person here. I'd like to have the discussion but there are apparently no people here to have it with.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

You're the one that decided to get all pissy about being associated with the UK for no reason despite it being effectively one of the nations you're holding up as an example of how the US should be instead.

I even asked you to tell me what country you are standing behind and you patiently refused.

This puts me at a rhetorical disadvantage because I can't attack your position or show weakenesses in your position because you're not defining anything and you're making a point of not associating yourself with anything.

And for some this is a good tactic only it isn't because your leverage in the discussion is relative to your exposure. If you expose nothing then you have no leverage. If you support nothing then you basically don't have an argument.

Last chance.

Tell me which country you're holding up as superior. I will pull their statistics and start comparing them in a more intelligent way than the stupid politicians and brainless internet trolls will... and we'll get to the bottom of what is causing cost inflation.

That is if you care about the issue at all and are not merely just a troll yourself.

I have ZERO regard for your rhetorical horseshit.

It is not clever, tricky, or credible. Its just annoying and stupid.

So cite a country and I'll engage the issue. But I'd really be surprised if you have the balls to do that at this point. You seem entirely fixated on the tactic of being uncounterable. without realizing that the price of that is that you can't win.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

I'd like to have the discussion but there are apparently no people here to have it with.

You try to drive off anyone who disagrees. You get what you aim for, then complain about it. Must be a Republican.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

I didn't lie. Saying you were backing the UK model is valid. You are arguing for socialized healthcare so I cited a country with socialized healthcare and started going through their stats to see why there were price differences.

Lying requires intentional deceit. It is literally impossible for me to lie to YOU about what YOU believe. You know what you believe.

I could lie to someone else about what you believe but no one else is reading this so it isn't even possible for me to lie about this unless you think I'm trying to gaslight you? That is... trick you into believing you believe or did or something happened that didn't happen?

Your accusation is retarded. As in, the accusation a retard would make. Make a less stupid accusation or I'll have to conclude you are in fact wearing a football helmet and typing by bashing your pudding covered face into the break room keyboard from an institution somewhere.

See? I assure you... if you continue to be a shit head, I will find ways to amuse myself at your expense. Stop being a waste of oxygen and we can have a real discussion. Continue... and I'll keep spooging my smack talk on your face.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

I have really great discussions with people on this site all the time. People that disagree with me as well.

The fact that I conflict with various idiots on this board does not mean that I cannot or do not have good discussions with people on this site with some frequency. ;-)

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Are you going to cite which country you're representing as your model or can I safely conclude that you've conceded the argument to me?

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

Are you going to cite which country you're representing as your model or can I safely conclude that you've conceded the argument to me?

Ah yes, someone gives up arguing with you, so you declare that you "won". What did you win? You obviously didn't convince anyone of anything. Bill Gates will send you a check for $1,000,000 for winning the Internet. Just post your SSN and DOB so he can send it to you.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

So... you are still refusing to cite a nation of comparison between the US thus conceding the argument because you have no contrasting reference.

Done.

Your concession is accepted. It is recommended that you argue against less intelligent or more poorly educated people. You are out of my weight class and you are unable to engage with me on any issue where I have firm footing.

This entire discussion was battleships versus canoes.

I'm sorry if you're shamed by your canoe... Your feelings are not my responsibility.

Good day, sir.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

So... you are still refusing to cite a nation of comparison between the US thus conceding the argument because you have no contrasting reference.

Why? Did you change your mind about the UK after I proved all your lies wrong? You brought up the UK first, and nobody ever objected to it. You are just furthering your rhetorical games, and lying about facts, and lying about what I've said.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

*looks for whether you have finally cited a contrasting reference point*

No contrasting reference point detected. Your concession stands.

Cite a nation or you concede because you lack an argument. I win by default.

How do you not know that you have to actually have a point in there somewhere?

You keep trying to play rhetorical games with me... really dumb ones... and its never going to work against anyone that isn't even more ignorant than you are.

Try harder next time. You're clearly too terrified to actually expose yourself to counter fire in this discussion. Fine. Your terror is merely a sign of my dominance.

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

Your concession stands.

You are lying again. I never conceeded, and I gave multiple contrasting refernece points. You just lie about them, reject anything that proves reality to not match your wrong opinion.

Keep lying about your win.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

I looked again to see if you cited a country as a contrasting reference point.

You didn't do it.

Concession stands. Better luck next time.

Good day.

Re:$805M budget

[eric_harris_76]

Now that there's no danger of East German troops invading West Germany, or of supporting suppression of Soviet Union colonies like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, maybe it's time to reconsider the necessity of NATO.

Now that South Korea is immensely prosperous relative to North Korea, maybe its time to shift the burden of defending South Korea to the South Koreans. (Or make South Korea the 51st state. Take your pick.) (I'm being facetious. They wouldn't go for it. It would be a terrible deal for South Korea.)

Re:$805M budget

[AK Marc]

I did. You suggested UK, and I accepted that. My complaint about the UK was your lies that I was somehow personally vested in that system, as yet another of you ad hominem attacks.

I don't know why you bother to lie. I can look it up in the replies and see your lies. Plain as day.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

I generally agree. I merely object to the notion that US spending is too high because German spending is so low.

The reality is that while US spending could be cut, the immediate result would be that most of the model countries used as examples of what our spending should be would immediately have to start spending more.

The Russians are increasingly looking like they're going to be a long term issue again. Putin is talking about rebuilding the old Russian empire... you know, the one that fell prior to the rise of the USSR. And that's going to be something the Europeans... especially the eastern europeans but really all the europeans are going to have to deal with in the long term.

Add to that, the middle east is apparently going nuclear and no one seems to think that is concerning. Iran is going nuclear and you can bet your ass that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, etc are all going to follow suit if only to counter Iran. How the Turks fit into that model is going to be interesting as well since the Euros thought it was a good idea to add Turkey into their club. That was likely a mistake.

I could go on. But your point is apt... sure, the US could save money by pulling out of a lot of places. But we spend something like 3.3 percent of our GDP on the military. That really isn't that much. Most of our rivals while a great deal poorer are spending a greater percentage of their GDP.

And what do the more enlightened powers that ultimately mooch off our security pay? Something between 2.2 and 1 percent. Its less in proportion to itself but not really a big deal when you're talking about the whole economy.

Spending 1 if you're germany doesn't make a big difference when compared to 3 if you're the US. We're bitching about 2 percent GDP.

And it gets dumber because if you look at what the British Empire was spending on their military around 1905 or so you'll find it was pretty much identical to what the US is spending now. Aka... about 3.3ish GDP.

US spending on the military is minor when you consider what we get for it. And the countries that gainsay the US's spending are mostly cutting their own stupid throats since they ultimately depend on US spending to back up their otherwise shotty security.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Add to that, the middle east is apparently going nuclear and no one seems to think that is concerning.

You must have missed a lot of things while hiding in a cave.

Should we send you a news update?

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Login and we can see who missed what.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Your complaint is idiotic then. If you accept the UK then my position stands. You say I lied... about what? My "lie" was that you were standing behind the UK... which you just admitted you were.

So you're a fucking moron. You're a legit idiot. Like actually. You're not just saying stupid things... you are actually stupid.

Fuck off. You're officially too stupid to have this discussion.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're a fucking moron. You're a legit idiot. Like actually. You're not just saying stupid things... you are actually stupid.

Total hypocrisy.

In a different recent discussion, someone made a personal statement about Karmashock, and he complained about it:

Already you know what kind of man I am? From a few posts you say? You must have super powers. A psychologist couldn't tell what kind of man I am from anything less than several interviews.

But now he's got no problem with declaring, from a few posts, that someone else is "actually stupid." Seriously, dude -- at least *try* to act like a rational adult.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Login and we'll talk about it. Otherwise I can safety conclude you're an troll/sock puppet.

I've no patience for dealing with people I'm arguing with pretending that they're multiple people by abusing the AC system or in dealing with some faceless hydra of trolls.

Login or fuck off.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Login and we'll talk about it.

Talk about what? Your hypocrisy speaks for itself. Also, it's amusing that you offer to "talk about it" if I use an account. You are already responding to me, and it's silly to pretend that you're not.

Otherwise I can safety conclude you're an troll/sock puppet.

Why? That's not rational at all. Would the merit of my comment change if I used a different alias to post the comment? Anyway, conclude whatever you want. To anyone else, I think it's pretty obvious who's acting like a troll here.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

An AC that hides his history uses my history to accuse me of hypocrisy?

I ask him to log in and he says the situation speaks for itself.

You're right. It does.

You're AC shithead and there's a reason I only ask you to login or tell you to fuck off and die. You're everything that is wrong with Slashdot. And I have nothing to prove to you.

You're clearly a troll... the only question that remains if you're a sockpuppet as well. Most of you shift between a few known personas and this AC bullshit.

I've caught them doing it a few times. How deep are we in this thread for example. Who would read this deep down and then comment on something so trivial? You're almost certainly a sock puppet for that alone.

Regardless... people that hide their own records don't get to criticize the records of other people... and to stack on top of that the criticism you're leveling is hypocrisy?

If I were an AC like you... what would you be saying right now? Nothing.

The other guy is an idiot and you're garbage... and chances are you're the same person. Thus making you stupid and garbage at the same time.

I don't know who peed in your gene pool but you've nothing of value to contribute to this community. Fuck off.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

the US infant mortality rate is higher than Cuba and one of the worst in the world.

Re:$805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for at least dropping the pretense that you won't respond to ACs. You should also consider dropping your signature, since it obviously is not true.

Anyway. So, you heap insults on anyone who disagrees with you, but then when an AC points out that your insults are hypocritical, you whine about how unfair that is? Seriously, grow up.

And I have nothing to prove to you.

Right. That's why you're arguing with me about this -- because you have nothing to prove. :D

How deep are we in this thread for example. Who would read this deep down and then comment on something so trivial? You're almost certainly a sock puppet for that alone.

Another unwarranted conclusion. It is just as likely that I have been following this thread from the beginning because it was an interesting discussion, then finally decided to comment when you ruined the conversation by resorting to mindless insults instead of actual thought. And that, in fact, is exactly what happened. So no, I'm not a "sock puppet." Again, try thinking instead of just calling people names.

Finally, your response does nothing to change the fact that your nearly baseless ("from a few posts") derogatory judgments of others are hypocritical. You complain when other people do it to you, but see no problem when you do it yourself.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Login and I'll explain in greater detail why you're wrong.

Wow I thought you were kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

$711,233,000 in salaries alone! 6000 people.
http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/smithsonian-fiscal-year-2014-federal-budget-request-totals-869-million

It gets 30 million visitors a year, so the state pays $20 per visitor.

So each employee could donate $83 out of their $118,000 average salary. 0.07% of the salary....

They spend $13.7 million on planning and design alone, and yet didn't plan to preserve the exhibits they already have???

Re:Wow I thought you were kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

Your math is off a bit. That's 711M for Salaries AND EXPENSES. Actual salaries is ~300M based on their request for a 1% raise of 3M.
So they make roughly 50k/yr on average.

Re:Wow I thought you were kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

He most likely a Republican who skipped math class, since it was those nasty numbers and things.

Re:Wow I thought you were kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that make it better? Splitting their remuneration into Salaries+ Expenses??

They have a job, they have a huge budget for that job, their budget has grown over the years. The exhibit is not a surprise, and its maintenance should be a routinely planned thing, they even have a huge planning budget... yet they go to Kickstarter pleading poverty?

That's 5 employees salary+expenses, they could reduce their numbers from 6000 to 5995, sack a planner or two for failing to plan, sack the people who came up with the Kickstarter idea, and then DO THEIR JOB LIKE THE PROFESSIONALS THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE!

keep the stains

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want the stains removed. They're part of history. They're badges earned by actually making the trip. Preserve it: sure. Clean it: no way.

Re:keep the stains

[DerekLyons]

I don't want the stains removed. They're part of history. They're badges earned by actually making the trip.

That's an assumption, not a fact. Fortunately, the Smithsonian knows the difference and plans to research the history of and determine the source of the stain and how it relates to the history and use of the suit before making any decisions. It could just as easily be a manufacturing flaw that didn't manifest for decades, or a handling error at NASA postflight, or a consequence of storage at the Smithsonian - in none of these cases are they part of the significant history of the suit nor are they badges earned by actually making the trip.

Or, to put it another way, once again the professionals involved know more than random Slashdot posters.

Re:keep the stains

[Tablizer]

I don't want the stains removed. They're part of history.

Generated when Neil first beheld the set in the basement of Universal Studios. "You want me to WHAT?"

Re: keep the stains

[gjh]

Perhaps it should be allowed to decay untouched. As a piece of history. A one time achievement. Like our space ambitions.

Re:keep the stains

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll leave the stains, they just want to vacuum off all that gritty dust that got on there somehow.

I'm a little troubled...

[Karmashock]

That they don't have the money to pay for this out of petty cash. I also question why it is costing half a million dollars.

It sounds like they're mostly taking pictures of it and then putting a website up with historical information they can pull out of records and the pictures.

Why does that cost half a million dollars? I'd feel better about this if they put that out to an open bid. I'm quite certain that you could get a very reputable outfit to do it for a fraction of this amount of money.

This is probably a bad example but I think this gets to something I'm talking about here:
http://www.cleanoilpainting.co...

Okay, that's what it costs for the restoration of an oil painting. And that is finer fiddlier work than the space suit.

Lets take their high number of 2500 USD and say that is what it would cost to restore 80 square inches of space suit. This is a huge inflation of the art restoration costs because they're saying this would cost 500 dollars for 80 square inches. But we'll go with the high number just to make a point.

Okay human body has about 2790 square inches of surface area... we'll double that for inside and outside and just treat the suit for this example like its skin. Then we'll divide that by 80 square inches and then multiply that by 2500 USD... and we get:

174,375 dollars. And that still sounds really high to me. But its a tiny fraction of the money they're asking.

But they also promised to take high res photos. So lets look at what that costs.

I did some digging as to what it would cost to do a full 3d high res photo shoot for the entire space suit... whole thing... inside, outside, helmet, gloves, etc. And I'm having a hard time getting numbers even in 5 figures. This is looking like maybe 8 grand. But lets say its 80 grand because its the government and you can reliabily get them to pay 10 times what something is worth without them batting an eye.

That's still 173 + 80 grand. So... What's left here? Making a website? Who here thinks that explains the gap in costs?

So yeah... I don't understand the 500 grand bill on this. It seems wildly inflated.

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[godrik]

Well I know nothing about conservation but the kick starter project is fairly clear:
1/ they have no idea on how to restore a spacesuit because nobody has done that before. Clearly whoever (probably more than one person) that will have the expertise of developing the technique will not come cheap. And developing the technique will probably take multiple trial on not-armstrong's space suit, space suits are expensive.
2/ Then as you mentioned, the restoration itself, once how to do that is probably a 6 figure cost.
3/ They need to build a portable version of the climate controlled environment where the suit is currently displayed.
4/ They need a custom built mannequin to support the suit
5/ They are probably not going to say this, but the kickstart gift have a price, and shipping costs.

Did you even read TFA? We are not on slashdot!

Oh...

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[Anonymous Coward]

The climate controlled custom case will probably cost half of that. Then they have pesky expenses like salaries, insurance, storage costs, etc.

But what does the Smithsonian know, they should be talking to you!

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[Karmashock]

1. They were made by this company:
http://www.ilcdover.com/

They still make space suits. Do you know who knows how to build a space suit? These people. And knowing how something was made in the first place is kind of a prerequisite for restoration in most cases. If you don't know how the oil painting was painted you're probably going to fuck up the restoration. Any restoration project that doesn't include the company that made them and likely has a lot of records and specifications on it is dubious from the get go. If the company didn't exist anymore and the technology were lost to the mists of time or something that would be one thing. But the company does exist and the technology is not lost.

They're just standing there. They're right there. So... use them.

I read more of the kickstarter page... They are using ILC Dover. So the original manufacturer is assisting in the restoration. So they know how to make the suit. The suit is made out of known materials that we can get our hands on right now. Explain to me why they can't just take some bits of that same material and f' with it to their hearts content until they figure out how to fix it?

Beyond that, the notion of restoring the thing without replacing materials is nonsense. The suit has undergone chemical changes. Most of these materials are not like clay tablets you can just store in a cave somewhere and take them out 2000 years later and they're as good as new. They change. You can expose them to air and that will change them or you can expose them to a vacuum and that will change them too.

They're not stable in the long term. They have shelf life. And you can't restore them without replacing them. Its like trying to restore cheese or a banana or something. I don't care what you do... that cheese or that banana is going to undergo some changes if you put it somewhere for decades.

Here is what is POSSIBLE:
You can make it LOOK restored which will involve cleaning and painting and squirting liquids on it to give it a new car smell.

OR

You can can basically build a brand new suit reusing a few components that are chemically stable.

Those are the two things you can do.

For obvious reasons they're going with option 1. And option 1 is cheaper than option 2 and option 2 is cheaper than the amount of money they're asking for by quite a bit.

And just in case you're curious what a replica suit costs:
http://www.spacetoys.com/produ...

I doubt that thing is more than a mock up... aka, I'm just about positive it doesn't work. But so long as you didn't need to actually use it... it works for a museum etc.
2. My figure was a gross inflation assuming the work was as hard per inch as oil painting restorations. The restoration of a space suit for photography and display would be vastly cheaper. Again, the company that made the suit in the first place would probably sell you a functional replica for less and restoring is generally a lot cheaper than actually building from scratch especially when you only need it to LOOK restored and not actually hold pressure or something.

3. I don't understand why they need to do that and I don't understand why that is expensive. You're talking about a box that controls temperature and humidity. That is not expensive.

4. Why do they need a custom built one? And even if they do... which is dubious... why is this assumed to be expensive? You're talking about some foam rubber in a rough human shape around a metal skeleton.

Myth busters builds dummies all the time out of crap and it is demonstrably not difficult.

5. That fee is 5%.

As to what I read... I reacted to a kickstarter project.

NASA is not the only one to issue one of them. I judged NASA by the same standards I judge any kickstarter project.

I look at what they're doing, I look at the cost, I look at who they are, I look at what the ultimate payout will be... and from that I decide if I'm going to fund a project.

I don't like the price they're citing. It seems high.

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[Overzeetop]

Just because you don't like to cost doesn't mean it's not accurate.

It is almost always more expensive to restore an old [anything] than it would be to build a lookalike from scratch. Materials fail and have to be very carefully repaired. Have you ever tried to repair fabric in a historically accurate way?

I happen to deal in buildings, and most people don't realize how complex it is to restore an old building while keeping as much of the historic content as possible. It means you spend $10000 to internally repair and strengthen a damaged beam that might cost $200 in steel and $350 in fabrication to replace. That trim work that's very similar - but not exactly the same profile - as the $1.10/LF chair rail at Home Depot will cost you $400 for a custom knife, $3/ft for the lumber, and $75/hr to have it milled, plus shipping and markup - and you're probably only going to be 20-30LF to patch in places where the old lumber could not be saved or where it was cut out (say for a door) and you're putting back the wall.

As for ilcdover - how many workers currently employed by them worked on the Apollo era suits and still remember all the techniques used for assembly? I'm going to guess the number is right around zero. How many of the materials used in modern suits they do have experience with match the condition of the materials used in Armstrong's suit? How many workers have used that material after it's been laying around for 50 years? How much are you willing to save to risk damaging the suit forever?

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[AmiMoJo]

It does seem high, but comparing it to oil painting restoration isn't really fair. Oil paintings are well understood and repair is somewhat routine. We know what techniques to use, how materials will react etc. Plus, for that money you won't be getting fully insured work on a priceless bit of art.

For an Apollo era space suit a lot of the documentation has been lost, or at least needs to be found. Samples of the material need to be found to test processes on before using them on the real suit. Not just testing for discolouration and stuff like that, but testing for accelerated deterioration that might affect it in 10 or 20 years time. It's a new process on a unique artefact.

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[Karmashock]

Just because you're gullible, it doesn't mean the price isn't extortionate.

As to restoration, I cited the cost of restoring an oil painting with the same surface area as that suit... and then multiplied that number by 5. Explain why restoring the LOOK of an old space suit is more expensive than that when you have original company that built the suit and that still builds space suits helping you?

I mean, are they saying they're going to restore it so it can take pressure again? Get real. they're just making it "look" new.

Which means what? Clean it... fill in the cracks in the plastic, rub some oils into it to keep all the bendy bits flexible, and then maybe splash some new paint on it.

Done.

What could possibly complicate that situation?

All they're going to do when they're done with all that is cram a dummy into the suit and stick it in a climate controlled exhibit. The Russians have more to worry about keeping Comrade Lenin looking pink and pretty and I really doubt they're dropping half a mill on that amusing cadaver.

As to repairing a building... the suit is quite a bit smaller... the skills and craftsmanship that went into the first suit is not lost and does not need to be relearned.... we still have all the original materials... And the suit doesn't have to be structurally sound. It doesn't have to take pressure for example. It just has to look okay.

Your house example is bigger, the craftsmanship that went into the house is often lost or uncommon requiring the hiring of specialists, and the house actually has to be structurally sound... aka not fall over and kill people.

This suit when NASA is done... would you feel safe climbing into it and having all the air sucked out from around it? I wouldn't. The fucking thing would almost certainly leak. Those suits undergo chemical changes over the years. Rubber at manufacture is not the same rubber after sitting on a shelf for decades. And you can't restore it. You have to replace it. And they're not going to replace it because then it might as well be a replica. The original means you've got the original rubber in there. And the original rubber after all these year is not safe.

I should point out that a museum quality replica of the suit sells for about 10 grand. I don't think it is functional either but it gives you an idea of what a suit that looks like the original suit costs. The company I was looking at made these suits custom for museums.

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[dave420]

You are showing your ignorance again. You are assuming it costs the same to restore a space suit as it does an oil painting, then running on from there. No wonder you come to such fucked-up conclusions when you confuse "something you pulled out of your ass" with "reality". It explains so much of the drivel you've shat on this thread. Wow.

Hint: People have been restoring oil paintings for hundreds of years, the mechanics and materials involved are well known, and art restoration is a thriving industry, with people being trained in it working around the world. You fucking idiot.

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're all missing that they're not actually restoring it. They don't plan to change the condition of the suit. They're conserving it; recording it in extreme detail.

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[painandgreed]

I did some digging as to what it would cost to do a full 3d high res photo shoot for the entire space suit... whole thing... inside, outside, helmet, gloves, etc. And I'm having a hard time getting numbers even in 5 figures. This is looking like maybe 8 grand.

That's probably because you've never had to hire a trained professional with professional equipment before. Eight grand wouldn't be unheard of for a single day of a wedding photographer. Of course that single day includes prep time, equipment costs, an assistant, and a week of post production work at a contractor's rate, but you're just one of those people who wonders why they can' just have their cousin take photos with their point and shoot for free instead. five figures is easy to reach if you have to hire a contracted professional for their time or hire an FTE to use your own equipment (which would easily be another five figures to do what they want to do). That doesn't even begin to cover transportation costs, stands to set up the suit for the 3D photos, or any number of other costs that will start to appear once the project gets underway and done with the due diligance needed with preservation in mind. Extend that to all the other features of the work you have no idea about, and I don't doubt that you might question it, however I do doubt any of your figures have anything to do with reality.

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[Anonymous Coward]

For those interested in the development of the suits, an excellent read is Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (http://www.amazon.ca/Spacesuit-Fashioning-Apollo-Nicholas-Monchaux/dp/026201520X) which reveals the history of International Latex Corporation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILC_Dover) which was later known as Playtex.

21 layers of specialty fabrics sewn by hand customized to each astronaut is pretty much a restoration job like a building.

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[Karmashock]

... did you ignore the bit where I took that number... inflated it by a factor of 10... and it still didn't add up?

Are you saying the photos will cost 80 grand? because even at eighty grand we're barely to half the money being asked for here. And that was with me inflating the cost of the suit restoration by a factor of five assuming it was as hard to make LOOK good as an oil painting. If it were an oil painting... the entire surface area of the suit... inside and out cost about of fifth of the 173 thousand I cited for restoration assuming some comparability with oil painting restoration.

And while you might not find that comparable... how can the suit be harder to restore than a fucking oil painting? We're not talking about making it take pressure again though even that wouldn't cost that much. I shopped around for what the actual suit costs... that is the skin... and replacing that apparently is around 10 grand.

Same materials... same look... brand new.

The numbers don't add up, darling. Maybe I'm a penny pinching spoilsport... but then you're a credulous spend thrift.

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[Karmashock]

No, I assume it costs about as much to make a space suit LOOK new.

Are you replacing all the things in the suit that have undergone chemical changes over the years that will ensure that hte suit is not safe to take pressure again?

No you're not.

So when you say "restore" you mean you're making it look good. You're cleaning it, you're filling in the cracks in the dried rubber, and you're blowing some new car smell into it.

What else could you possibly do? First off, large portions of the suit are chemically stable. The helmet, the visor, the back pack, the various metal fittings... I mean that stuff is likely good as new or could be made so for a song. What has gone the way of the mummies is the flexible bits. And that's mostly old nylon and rubber.

Nylon might have been a space age material in the 60s but in 2014 its quite passe. We have it everywhere and its not hardly anything mysterious to us.

I shopped around for someone that was selling whole new museme quality replicas of the suit and they were quoting about 10 grand for the whole thing. Functional?... no... able to take pressure? I wouldn't chance it. But the damn thing looks as good as anything you're going to have when all is said and done.

What is your restoration accomplishing?

Now I cited the oil painting thing because i wanted to show what detailed restoration of something very complex would cost. That is someone sitting there and billing you by the square inch for cleaning a very sensitive delicate surface.

I then inflated their costs by a factor of FIVE. The cost of the oil painting was about 34 thousand if the suit were an oil painting. They said it was about 500 dollars per 80 square inches. I inflated that to 2500 per 80 square inches just to make it clear that even if it is harder per INCH to restore old rubber and nylon than it is to restore an oil painting... the costs still don't add up.

As to no one knowing how to restore nylon and rubber... The textiles industry actually knows how to do the nylon very well... and rubber has been restored by people for over a century.

WHat other mysterious materials are you using in this suit? Unobtainium?

Cite the material. do I need to do all the research? Apparently I am the only one that know how to use a search engine. You people all too busy tell me how much you know to actually do any kind of research.

Here's a fun one: Beta cloth...
I can buy it on ebay apparently
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Authen...

woven fiberglass coated in Teflon... I grant that's pretty unusual. I'd grant no one knows how to restore that given that apparently the stuff naturally tears itself apart unless the individual fibers are coated in the same stuff that keeps my eggs from sticking to the pan. that is besides the butter. Eggs. :)

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[Richard_at_work]

It's a new process on a unique artefact.

Hardly, museums do artefact cleaning and restoration on centuries old cloth and materials all the time, this is no different. My local dry cleaners had no issues cleaning my wife's wedding dress which has been in her family for nigh on 150 years.

This sort of thing is routine.

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[Karmashock]

As to lost documentation... I'm actually finding a lot of information about those suits and I would be very surprised if the manufacturer doesn't have more.

We know all the materials that were used and how they were joined together. I don't think it has been lost actually.

The company assisting Nasa with this still makes space suits for nasa.

I'll be interested when they finally acknowledge..

[storkus]

...Nicola Tesla. Yeah, I know Edison founded it, but isn't a hundred-year grudge just a bit too much?

What ever you do

[Tablizer]

please, don't hand it to the bloke who lost the original tapes.

Re:$805M budget O/T

[Anonymous Coward]

Just had a freaky thought. Imagine your front teeth being ground very hard against a chalk board.

Sorry for the off topic.

Re:I'll be interested when they finally acknowledg

[Anonymous Coward]

Oatmeal, is that you, you arrogant narcissistic fuck? Oh, I'm sorry, you're just some moronic asshole who wants to be The Oatmeal, aren't you? Keep dreaming, and if you pretend really hard to like all the same things, it just might happen. You fucker.

Re:I'll be interested when they finally acknowledg

[Anonymous Coward]

The idiot from the oatmeal already created a place of worship for Tesla. You can go there and jerk off to him.

A small step for historical accuracy

[saviorsloth]

I'm glad their promotional material used what Armstrong actually said, "One small step for *a* man..." rather than what people heard over the buggy comm-link that dropped the word "a".

Growing up, it always bothered me that "man" without an article and "mankind" meant the same thing, and I was so happy when that guy discovered the audio signal of the word "a" in that famous transmission, which Armstrong always insisted he had said.

Re:A small step for historical accuracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Discovered the audio signal? Pshaw - somebody found the old soundstage script in their files.

137 Million Objects

[westlake]

The Smithsonian has a $805,000,000 budget.... surely they could scrounge up 0.06% of their annual budget to pay for it themselves since preserving significant artifacts of USA history is pretty much exactly what taxpayers are paying them for.

The Smithsonian owns 137 million artifacts.

That translates to a budget of $5.88/yr per artifact for research. conservation, storage and display, security, outreach and all other purposes and expenses.

I'll ask Dad

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll ask my father, he machined part of it.
(Hamilton Standard)

Pretty damn cool when you can point to the moon and say, "stuff my father made sits on it".

Seriously is this for real?

[AndyKron]

The government needs Kickstarter money to restore the spacesuit of the first man that walked on the the Moon? Oh ya, we're fucked!

Ludicrous levels of military spending

[sjbe]

Yet whenever anyone wants to raid a fund to pay for something... its the military budget. Why is that?

Because that is where the money is and we spend ludicrously more on our military than is sensible or necessary. We apparently spend more on our military than the next 7 or so largest military spenders COMBINED. There is no reasonable justification for that. That is just rampant paranoia.

And I should point out that the military is one of the few things the government does that it is supposed to do and it is one of the few things the world... especially our allies need us to be competent in.

Remind me again why we have to be the ones to defend other countries that are perfectly capable of paying to defend themselves? Europe should not need the US to defend them and yet their largest military spender (France) spends literally 1/10th of what the US does.

So why are you raiding the military budget? Do you want the US to pull out of NATO? Maybe sunset its guarantee to protect Japan? We could let Israel get genocided. Maybe let the Russians run wild in Eastern Europe. Possibly allow the North Koreans to invade and enslave the south koreans?

Let's address those:
1) NATO: NATO has 28 members yet the US pays for 3/4 of the budget. The other members can pony up more.
2) Japan: Japan SHOULD be responsible more for its own defense. WWII ended 70 years ago.
3) Israel: Israel is quite capable of defending themselves and have shown that several times. They also are not working productively for peace (nor are the palestinians) so until they get serious they can get help elsewhere.
4) The Russians already are running wild in Easter Europe (see Ukraine) and we are doing nothing about it.
5) North Korean "enslaving" the South? Spare me. That's just ridiculous on the face of it. South Korean can handle their business just fine.

Where would you like to cut the US military budget?

Let's start with the items like hardware the military says it doesn't need but congress still forces them to buy. Then I would move on to cutting programs like the F35 that are wildly over budget and under performing and arguably unnecessary. We probably don't actually need 11 aircraft carriers with their attendant fleets. I'm quite sure we don't need as many nuclear weapons as we currently have. We have numerous military bases that we no longer need and which are only being kept alive because they are congressional pork. We don't need to maintain Guantanamo Bay and the prison it contains. We could get out of the money pit that is the Middle East. I could go on and on.

Seriously, did you even give this a moment's thought?

Re:Ludicrous levels of military spending

[Karmashock]

As I previously pointed out, military spending in the US has not increased remarkably and is not the dominant item on the budget. Healthcare subsidies dwarf defense spending.

And regardless, if you want to cut military spending, then you need to tell me what specifically you want to cut.

Be specific or eat a dick.

Who are we cutting out of our defense treaties for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Pick someone you want to fuck over. Lets hear it.

As to why we have to defend other countries at all. Excellent point. Tell the 50 or so countries we've agreed to defend that they're on their own now.

Guess what is going to happen? Their military spending is going to go up.

And that shatters the stupid statistical argument against the US. People say "look at how much they spend"... yes... because we defend half the fucking world. And given what we do, the price paid for it is a bargain. We do it for very very cheap all things considered. If they were all doing it themselves the collective spending by all those countries would dwarf what we're throwing at it.

now you could argue that these countries should pay us for the protection we offer. And some do actually. Japan is a good example. But most don't... if you can figure out how to get the other 49 or so countries to pay anything I'd like to hear it. They're getting the security for free as it is and you can hear them bitch about it even when they're getting it for free.

So how you're going to get them to pay a dime... I do not know.

Also factor into your calculations the cost of a world war which would be higher without the US riding herd. Which is cheaper? US security or WW3? Tell me.

As to the Russians running wild in Eastern Europe, no they're not. They're screwing with border nations. But they could be fucking with poland if we pull out. They're not.

As to this idea to give more buying options to the chiefs... Yes... but we've done that before you know. And the current regime was set up to address problems with that idea. And that creates new problems.

Is the new better or worse than the old? Its debatable. The point is that there are problems with any system and you have to be willing to accept those as the price paid when you adopt them.

Have free speech in a country and people are going to say stupid or crazy shit. You have to accept that. Price of admission.

You want to have the bureaucrats run the military? Then don't be surprised when they make typical bureaucrat decisions like the idea to save money by combining all planes into one with the F35. That is typical bureaucrat thinking. But then the military has their own way of doing things that some people have a problem with... such as not wanting to replace anything that is battle tested with something that isn't. Do you know how long it took to get militaries to stop carrying swords?

Every organizational structure or regime or culture is going to have problems. Not all are equal and you have to choose between them so you find something you prefer. However... keep in mind... whatever you choose is going to have cons as well as pros. And you need to accept those until you find a better way.

Crowdfunding Government Projects

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called "taxation."

Usage

[tmjva]

It isn't like they're going to use it again.

Why didn't they keep it under glass the since then?

Moon suit

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the moon suit stayed in The LEM, wich was left in Lunar orbit?

Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck is donating to this. Morons. They have the money.

Re:$805M budget Why US Health Care is BROKEN

[darkonc]

The upper class and the upper-middle class in the US probably do OK under republicare because they can afford it. (in some cases -- barely). Once you gt to the lower middle class, though, I'm betting that the US does worse than Canada (which is where I'm from)

I remember a incident, some years ago, when an American friend fell and hit his head. He was a small business owner, which means that health care was beyond his reach. The conversation went pretty much as follows:

Canadians: That's not good. You might have a concussion. We should take you to the hospital.
Paul: Hospital? No way man! How much is it gonna cost me? A hospital visit could bankrupt me!
Canadians: Huh?
Paul: The last time I went to the hospital with a headache, I ended up with a $20K second mortgage -- and they didn't even solve the problem!
Canadians: Seriously?

After a good deal of cajoling we managed to get him to the hospital, where things turned out fine. As a foreigner, the visit was a flat-rate $600 (a good hard hit, but it could have been a lot worse in the US.)

The fact that a simple visit to the hospital could bankrupt an average middle-class american is what makes the US system so dangerous. I have little respect for it. Many Canadian doctors have moved to the US for the money, and then moved back to Canada, where they could actually spend their time taking care of people, rather than worrying about whether or not they could afford to pay for that care.

Re:$805M budget Why US Health Care is BROKEN

[Karmashock]

The issue with US healthcare is not the lack of subsidization but the high cost. And the ACA did nothing to address that. And contrary to the broken record of the supporters of socialized healthcare, the costs in the US are not high due to the lack of single payer.

If you don't just offer simplistic arguments where you cite big conflated numbers that give no detail... if instead you go into the nitty gritty as to what costs what and why. You'll find that the issue is more complicated and also... more easily solved.

Rather than arguing about shit we disagree about, we could simply do all the stuff we agree on and solve nearly the entire problem.

Get costs low enough and companies will be happy to offer healthcare with employment again and won't be so prone to push part time labor etc to avoid having to deal with that.

The problem with so many of these issues is that people are so lazy... especially the politicians that they have no patience for complex problems that have to be dealt with piecemeal. You break it up into the thousand issues is really is... and you go through them one at a time. And the reality is that most of the issues would not be controversial this way.

There is a hospital in Texas that was able to cut medical expenses for patients by about 75 percent or something crazy by changing the way the hospital is administered. They don't have those upper 3 floors that most hospitals have that are just people doing paper work. The hospital is 100 percent run by the shift nurses. There are no hidden costs and everything is billed what it actually costs. So if you took an aspirin... they literally put on the bill "aspirin 5 cents".

The cost reductions vary. But they tend to be somewhere between 75 percent to 50 percent cheaper than their local equivalents with roughly the same capabilities.

Now who talks about that?

If you could drop medical costs by half that would address most of the problem.

And then we can go over the drugs which is another complex issue... you have protectionism for the US drug industry, you have the DEA/FDA making it complicated to get drugs or making the cost of drugs artificially higher than it should be.... there are a lot of issues.

Every one of these issues is also a generalization and to really address any of them you'd have to go into them in great detail and be very patient as you do so.

And anyone too lazy to do that really has no business in the discussion. Its like someone coming into an engineer's meeting over a problem with a car and just saying over and over again "the car uses too much gasoline"... yeah okay... but the reasons for that will be complicated. Weight, engine design, average use profile... and dealing with it isn't helped by throwing money at it either.

Sometimes you have to be patient and you have to be willing to deal with the details.

Re:$805M budget Why US Health Care is BROKEN

[darkonc]

More specifically, Health care inflation has dropped significantly since the ACA went into effect

Obamacare has brought down health care costs in the US. It's also brought down the number of uninsured, and seems to be part of the economic recovery. (when small business owners can get health coverage, it removes a dis-incentive to start a business, and thus create new jobs). some stats, and some more stats. or you can just peruse through a tags search on dailyKOS

Strange thing is that the left is all over stats about stuff -- but if you only go to Fox for your news, you won't hear much about hard numbers.

The right was forecasting massive price increases, but California only saw a 4% increase in premiums, compared to a historical (pre-ACA) trend of about 10% per year.

Re:$805M budget Why US Health Care is BROKEN

[Karmashock]

First, the reduction in healthcare costs is just more playing with statistics. What Americans actually pay for healthcare has if anything gone up.

The government playing with stats to make themselves look better is nothing new. They do that with everything.

As to small businesses and jobs... the ACA actually encourages businesses to only hire part time labor... or at least do that as much as possible because it is a loophole in most of the annoying regulations. This was widely reported and pretending it didn't happen is not intellectually sustainable.

As to fox, I get no news from fox what so ever. And I frankly find it to be nothing more than ad hominem for little shits like you to enter a discussion, drop a lot of talking points, and then say the opposition is wrong because of the evil fox news.

lets look at your sources...
Four links from the Daily Kos which is about as valid as me citing Breitbart. The fact that you can without irony accuse me of only getting my news from fox and then you cite all your information from the daily fucking kos is fucking hilarious.

And your final example, the Los Angeles Times? Hardly an impartial source. I live in Los Angeles. I know that paper very well. It is frequently prone to advocacy.

Here's the thing, your sources were so fucking biased that I could cite literally anything at this point and you'd be unable to claim the source was biased without immediately becoming guilty of hypocrisy. You just lost any ability to do that.

Now... with that understanding... unless you want to retract all your citations... I will respond. I first just want your confirmation either that I can cite anything because you've surrendered any claim to my sources being biased in this discussion... or you need to pull those two sources and the 5 associated links back.

Your choice. I'll wait for you to make it.

Re:$805M budget Why US Health Care is BROKEN

[Anonymous Coward]

As to small businesses and jobs... the ACA actually encourages businesses to only hire part time labor... or at least do that as much as possible because it is a loophole in most of the annoying regulations. This was widely reported and pretending it didn't happen is not intellectually sustainable.

It was actually what all the businesses screamed they needed and had to have, or else...I dunno, oblivion.

Maybe if the single-payer option had been pursued, it'd have been a moot issue. But instead we have employer-tied insurance...still.

Thanks?

Re:$805M budget Why US Health Care is BROKEN

[darkonc]

I grabbed the stats from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics... The end result is that Obamacare didn't really affect jobs at all -- either negative or positive. I even made an article about it. Read it via the link.

Re:$805M budget Why US Health Care is BROKEN

[Karmashock]

If you're going to keep citing the daily fucking kos... then I'm going to punish you by citing the most shamelessly biased sites from the right just to show you how f'ing stupid it is that you're citing the kos:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-g...

http://www.teaparty.org/obamac...

What do you think you're doing?

Either cite something moderate or you open the door for people to cite anything.