To own and run ones own fabs, one has a LOT of cash tied up in fabs. That means carrying tremendous debt levels, and given AMD's shaky financials, at a higher interest rate than Intel. This gives Intel a competitive edge, just from the finance side. Selling the fabs would let AMD reduce its debt levels, improve it's balance sheet, and possibly cut costs.
AMD's "tough" years are in part because as a company with its own fabs, it has massive fixed costs (and the interest expenses associated with it), which means that when cyclical demand trends downward, their numbers get destroyed by the high fixed costs. High fixed costs are irrelevant to huge market leaders, but the nimble competitor gets eaten up when things get painful.
OTOH, if one can move capital intensive projects off balance sheet, the company's financial reports improve, which can improve their bond rating and lower their interest costs on other areas.
Right now, AMD must focus on chip design, chip manufacturing, chip marketing, and financial maneuvering. Going fabless would let them focus on designing and selling chips, instead of manufacturing them and managing complicated financial operations to fund everything.
Whether they gain a competitive edge by owning the fabs is another question, and the only people that know that are inside of AMD. Whether the CEO and Board will ask them is another question, but AMD's internal guys know whether they are really good at manufacturing or not.
Music and movies are "consumed" differently. While Audiophiles have been looking for a high end solution, SA-CD and DVD-A promised that, that isn't how most music is consumed. The formats that Audiophiles normally listen to are different, because they normally listen to classical music that benefits from the audio, or jazz and alternative genres where the quality matters. However, the most popular music genres are Pop and Country, which don't benefit from the new formats. Since audio masters are evaluated quickly on what "sounds best," the ear is trained to pick the louder version (especially for Rock) without listening to subtleties. As a result, Pop and Rock masters are generally mixed to sound "loud" which compresses the sound into a small fraction of the range available to the CD. With that mastering reality, and no matter how many sound engineers suggest turning up the volume instead of destroying the audio range, Pop CDs just don't benefit from superior audio. Country is even more vocal heavy than Pop, and the 5.1 separation or expanded audio range doesn't show up there.
The fact is, most music is 1) listened to in the car on the radio or CD player, 2) by teenagers hanging out with their friends, 3) commuting urbanites on mass transit, or 4) someone looking for background music while working on the computer. Very listen music is listened to in a dedicated environment designed to maximize quality.
As a result, unless one is choosing to listen to music in an ideal way, MP3s or mini-discs which compress the music sound "about the same" in the non-ideal environment. The subtleties of music are irrelevant in a noisy car or while at the gym.
Movies are consumed in a variety of ways. Families may play a movie in the car, may watch it in the family room/living room in a relaxed environment, or may use a dedicated home theatre room. While the latter is the minority, it's not the extreme minority that music listening is.
For music, portability is key, and the ability to pop a CD in at a friend's house is important, but the ability to take your digital audio in MP3 and/or AAC/WMA and have a CD in a few minutes is part of why digital audio is popular.
For video, there just isn't a demand for portable viewing... sure the video iPod or iPhone will be popular with urban commuters, but that is are relatively small percentage of the population. The ability to grab a DVD and pop it in the kid's room, in the home theatre, etc., makes a difference. Within a few years, either of the high definition players will crowd out conventional DVD players, because distribution costs and desire for profitability will prevent the DVD player from dropping under the $30 it is at now, and the high def players are already "cheap," sub-$500 for a cutting edge technology is historically cheap, and within two years we'll probably be under $200, and the under $100/$50 range will come within a few years. At that point, new sales of DVD players will taper-off.
The reasons that portable and digital music is so popular don't really apply to video, as they are watched differently. Most adults simply don't have the desire for handheld video (handheld televisions were NEVER mainstream, while walkmans took off like crazy when they came out).
The market for "high end" video is a larger niche... probably 5%-10% of middle to upper-middle class homes have a home theatre setup, and many more have "nice" televisions that would benefit from HDTV... If the studios were smart (and they aren't), they'd ship the dual-layer DVD/BR discs at the same price, eliminating the DVD option, which would cause rapid adoption. However, they are looking to increase the prices for HD formats, which may be their undoing. However, as Car DVD players become Car BR-DVD (or HD-DVD), and the HiDef DVDs become common, the format will take off.
The problem, IMO, is that if I have 3-4 DVD players in a house (not unreasonable, Family room, Master bedroom, plus one or more kids rooms), even if I replace the family room DVD
While Macs are popular with web designers, it's less than 50% of them anyway (although higher than 4.4% in general for users). Developing websites on a Mac is easy, develop to standards, test with Safari/Firefox, with slight workarounds for Firefox, then add some hacks for IE, and away you go. For Windows developers, historically they wrote to IE and then hacked for the others, which is way more work.
If Windows-based Web developers can use Safari, they can either develop to standards and hack for IE better, or at least test their hacks for Firefox/Safari on their machine.
I can fire up Parallels and test against IE, Windows guys had no way to test against Safari before Monday.
So there are two direct strategic benefits for Apple. Had Firefox existed before Safari, I don't know that Apple would have bothered with a browser, but once the spent the time/money to develop it, they might as well keep the revenue stream from the Google search box by keeping the Browser up to date (I doubt it's more than 2m-3m/year in development costs at most), as it's a profitable business, and the Windows port will no doubt cover costs, plus meet strategic needs, iPhone/Safari compatibility. Safari compatibility alone wasn't worth doing it apparently, they prefered to sell some Macs to any shop that cared about 5% of the market (i.e. revenue from Mac Users > cost of a Mac + time to test, a couple of grand in time and equipment, so any site with more than 100k/year in gross margins), but the iPhone gives them a reason to give up a few "testing Mac sales" to get more iPhone penetration
Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest sages, was 40 years old, completely ignorant, and incapable of reading a single Bracha (blessing), before he went off to learn and become the greatest sage of his generation. Since Rabbi Akiva was married and encouraged to do this by his wife, we know that he obtained his Bar Mitzvah and was Married without any literacy whatsoever, yet he performed these lifecycle events.
Traditionally, everyone called for an Aliyah would read their portion, which would include a Bar Mitzvah boy. HOWEVER, when Jewish literacy declined and the sages were concerned that people couldn't read from the Torah and would be embarassed, they decreed that a single reader would read for everyone. When one is called to the Torah, one makes the blessing, and the reader reads the portion.
At a wedding, 7 blessings are read, supposed to be read by the groom. Again, what if you had an ignorant Jewish man, should he simply not be married? So the Sages decreed that a Rabbi should be at the wedding, and he should read the Brachot on behalf of the groom.
The exception to these rules is that a Rabbi is presumed to be literate, and therefore may read his own Aliyah or make his own blessings. It is assumed that he won't embarass everyone else because we know Rabbis are literate, with non-Rabbis, we'd never know like we should with some people.
The other section is the Maftir portion of the Torah reading, which technically isn't part of the Torah service (the required Aliyot for the day), but is done to tie in with Haftorah as we've already closed the Torah service with its Kaddish. This is why we sometimes (or in non-Orthodox circles, ALL the time), have the Bar Mitzvah boy read "his Aliyah" at the end, because Maftir is really short. If you go to an Orthodox shul for a while and observe Bar Mitzvah services, you'll see that some boys simply get an Aliyah and make the blessings, some make the blessings, read Maftir & Haftorah, some will read all the aliyot's portions, Maftir, Haftorah, plus Daven Mussaf.
The Bar Mitzvah is a celebration of adult hood. The father renounces his responsiblity for his son's sins, and the son takes his first opportunity to service in a minyan and it's public communal role. We do it on Shabbat for the same reason we announce upcoming Rosh Chodesh on Shabbat, or do a girl's naming on Shabbat, it's when we'll have the greatest attendence. Nothing prevents a Bar Mitzvah from happening at the Monday/Thursday Torah service, or on Rosh Chodesh, and in fact, we have those. If Rosh Chodesh falls on a Sunday, or Monday is a national holiday, or the Thursday of Thanksgiving, or any other reasons that make it easier to do a non-Shabbat Bar Mitzvah do so, you get a less crowded Sanctuary, people can drive, logistics are easier.
The child gets their first Aliyah and is called to the Torah. Doesn't mean that they are literate...
That's what the Video/Keynote demonstrated, but that doesn't mean that we won't get the DashCode stuff when Leopard ships... four months later. It's got buzz, lots of business people are interested, so perhaps this approach gets people developing now, getting stuff ready to test and tweak after the actual phone launches, and then more when Leopard ships. I also assume that iPhone is running a derivative of Leopard, not Tiger, so perhaps part of the reason to not release the SDK is waiting until Leopard ships.
Agreed that the "example" was in Safari, but given that they want people to develop stuff for this, and the demo'd a business app, I wouldn't assume that going forward, Safari will be the only solution. The ability to add Dashboard-style widgets or icons to the menu and separate launches is too important. What if I want to use two "custom" applications.
The device runs OS X and Quicktime (I assume, it can play MP3s, AAC files, iTMS movies), so I presume that Quicktime is available.
We also know that Safari supports a few extensions for Dashboard, and they could expose whatever functionality they want.
The ONLY people truly wanting an SDK are Cocoa Developers that would like an easy migration path to bring mobile version of their applications to the iPhone.
With my Treo, one of the neat applications was PocketQuicken, that synced when I synced my phone. I imagine that a WebKit-based app could be similar, or not, we don't really know yet.
Everyone has heard Webkit/Safari and decided that the applications are going to be in a browser. It looks more like Dashboard-style widgets as applets, which is NOT the same thing at all. Let's see what happens, but I have the feeling that you'll be able to do more than you think.
Safari for Windows makes developing iPhone apps on Windows possible, then you move over to the iPhone for testing.
Apple is "well known" for massive backwards compatibility updates... except they aren't... They always handle transitions over a couple of versions, intelligently bringing people along. They swapped processor architectures twice and each time brought people along with emulators, in the Intel case it wasn't faster than the fasted G5 machines, but those of us upgrading 3+ year old machines (Powerbook G4 1Ghz -> Macbook Pro in my case) found our PPC apps running faster and Intel code flying.
We all expected the Intel migration to happen with 10.5, they shocked us when they did it off the 10.4 base.
While they did abandon Mac OS to move to OS X, they provided a migration strategy (Carbon) and a compatibility layer (Classic). Classic support shipped with 10.0/10.1, 10.2, and was supported in 10.3 if you already had it, as well as 10.4 I think, but they kept classic for around 5 years, which gave everyone time to migrate to Carbon. Its unfortunate that there is no long-term Classic via Rosetta just from a classic application point of view, but they didn't leave anyone in the lurch.
I expect 10.5 to introduce this OS, which will be useful for new installs, or for external drive arrays, especially for the Video market, but I wouldn't expect it to be the default. OS X has supported a Unix filed system, but defaulted to HFS+, because HFS+ was compatible with Mac OS, so you could dual-boot OS 9 and OS X for a good 2 years on new hardware to maintain compatibility. If they hadn't done that, they would have lost the Pro-Audio and Pro-Video markets that took a few years to get native OS X applications.
Getting it in the wild and for professionals would help that market, while not breaking ANYONE's compatibility. Sometime in 10.5's lifetime they may ship new computers with it, or they may wait for 10.6 in two years. But giving everyone two years is plenty of time to get utilities and applications compatible with the new file system.
The flashy consumer features are touted for the OS, but the underlying architecture has always followed a 2-cycle release. If you've used OS X Server for 10.2/10.3/10.4, you'd notice that they introduced stuff in one version with limited exposed functionality (with the rest via the Unix layer), enhanced the functionality in the next rev, and polished thereafter.
The Apple Mail Server -> Cyrus migration was someone poorly handled, but mostly because AMS was garbage. But the 10.4 Mail tools are night and day beyond the 10.3 ones.
They are actually far more careful than people give them credit for.
The different is, they don't keep backward compatibility as a long-term goal, they do a two-stage migration, giving people 2-4 years to transition.
Ya know, after Sept 11th, and seeing the Islamist forces, I was discussing that with a friend. However, it's not like Christian Europe of 500 years ago (1508? things were getting BETTER by then) more like Europe on 700 years ago.
I think that it's just a phase that religions go through around 1300 years of age, it's a growing pain. The Judeans and other Israelite tribes were united under King David and went off to slaughter their enemies, to the point that the prior king was deposed and the official reason is leniency towards enemies (read the Bible as a history book and not a religious book and you'll notice things that you don't otherwise). The Christians launched the crusades. And Islam is experimenting with fundamentalism/Islamism.
Howeever, if you look at the change in weaponry from ancient Israel -> Crusader Europe -> modern day, and you can see that the level of carnage that can be unleashed is more problematic. The Israelites could surround a city and demand it's surrender, the Crusaders could slowly burn the city down and chase down those fleeing a bit, but if Iran gets atomic weapons, we've entered a new world of religious warfare.
Jewish contract law doesn't provide for signatures, because you can't assume literacy (Jewish contract law goes back at least 1600 years to the codification of the Talmud). The people that are supposed to sign the Ketubah are the witnesses. They witness that the man agreed to the terms of the Ketubah, and it is presented to the wife, whose acceptance (in front of Witnesses) creates the legal contract.
Now, Ashkenazi communities have used the same standard Aramaic Ketubah for centuries, but among some Sephardic communities, the Ketubah is still negotiated.
Jewish marriage is normally codified via contract, but can be established in three ways, sexual intercourse, being secluded with a member of the opposite sex and validly witnessed, or via contract. The former is frowned upon, and somewhat questionable because there are references in Jewish law to having sex outside the confines of marriage (not counting adultery), but since Jewish laws are so strict on sexual behavior without marriage, it was determined that sexual behavior is sufficient to form a marriage.
This may seem archaic, but some parts of the Israeli Rabbinate have made cohabitation be considered a marriage, and require a Get before permitting the woman to enter a marriage. This is extremely problematic for Kohanim, who aren't permitted to marry divorces.
Right now, phone is Pots, but you can plug a laptop into the ethernet drop there, or a television into the coax (if I ever buy enough multi-switches to make everything live)... Also, you can have an uplink line (nanny-cam, whatever) on the coax and then modulate that out a channel on the antenna line... Lots of options, and once I'm pulling cat5 to the box, a second wire and a coax doesn't really add anything other than th 8-13 cents/foot for the cable...
The reason for the 3 coax + 4 cat5 for the TV location.
Current plan - support next gen DirecTV DVR (or Dish) that needs 3 coax for dual tuner + OTA ATSC feed, 2 ethernet drops for any equipment there (AppleTV or equivalent? Video game system?), phone (for the Satellite box to dial home), and a spare cat 5.
Future possibilities... bring distributed video, where ALL the equipment sits in the AV closet, and all I have in the room is: LCD on the wall, in that case the 3 Coax converts into Component video, and the spare Cat5 carries IR. I contemplated wiring each room for in-ceiling surround sound, but it's just cost prohibitive in my retrofix, but if I was doing new construction, I'd WIRE a 7.1 system for each room, and where the television goes, have a termination block with 7 speakers and 1 coax for the subwoofer...
The poster in this case appears to be a single guy, but who knows what the future will bring. He may get married and have kids, so the spare bedrooms won't need much for a few years (5+). He might get roommates, in which case, the roommates don't want central controlled AV, but might like having the 7.1 system prewired so they don't have to run their own. Who knows what gets computer geeks to spend an extra $100/month on rent, but Gigabit to the room, high speed in the closet, satellite television feeds).
I also can't predict the next 10 years of home entertainment. 3 years ago running dual coax everywhere to get Tivo support was a huge upgrade. Now, you want triple. I think that it is likely that I'll move all my tuners into the Network closet, making the remote connections in the bedrooms tuner-less (pulling content over Cat5), but who knows. It is VERY possible that the 3 component cables become a distributed component network off a multi-zone AVR, or become dormant in an all Cat5 world. It is very possible that my system will look like the following:
1 Big hard drive RAID connection storing video, a 6 tuner ATSC box, grabbing ALL OTA entertainment... The four main networks plus the silly CW and MyNetworkTV or whatever they become... I might then bring in DirecTV for sports and Dish for International programming, and cable because it's cheap to get basic stuff. I might figure 2 tuners for DirecTV and Dish are sufficient. I might need different packages to get different HD options, I have no clue, despite having HDTV for almost 5 years, the stuff is still new... When we got cable at my parents house 20+ years ago, I'd never imagine that I'd want it in the bedroom, we just had it for HBO. Now I can picture running a Cat5 connection to the bathroom to be able to continue watching a movie while on the can... It sounds silly, but if you have 8 people watching a movie, and you've spent 2 hours coordinating while the kids get to sleep, etc., maybe you need to hit the restroom and don't want to pause for everyone, but want to keep watching... I'm not doing it, but I can picture it.
Conduit is the solution of course, so you can upgrade. But if conduit isn't an option, more coax and more cat5 means you can do whatever you imagine. With Cat5 + a balun option, you can run all sorts of neat stuff. With my 3 Coax + lots of Cat 5 living room, I have a neat option. When I replace the Television with a projector, then I have this spare wire in front. But if I leave the Coax for Component, and then use the Cat5 and some RCA over Cat5 (jacks at HD, nothing extravegent), then I can plug the Gamecube (or Wii I suppose), Xbox, or PS 3 into the front of the room, making it easy to access, and send the s
I'm busy retrofitting my wiring in a 36 year old house... The house had a hack job satellite TV install (2 drops/bedroom for Tivo support, but the multiswitch is in the attic, not an accessible closet, and some other strangeness. In retrospect, a cheap install for living room + master bedroom would have been the way to go, since I'm ripping it out now... but anyway...
Each bedroom currently has 1 phone location, and 1 coax location that I put in. The phone is daisy chained, wired outside of the house, all kinds of silliness, but the locations are perfect. For each of my telephone jacks, I'm replacing it with 2 Cat 5E runs (got Cat5E-350 MHz, for what that's worth), and 1 Coax run. I figure that whatever the technology I use in the future, I'll have 4 conventional phone lines run throughout the house (1 of the Cat 5 cables), Ethernet there (for a VOIP or other IP Telephony options), and coax in case the cable company puts a solution together... you never know.
Where I currently have coax for the satellite, I am putting in 3 Coax runs, and 4 Cat5E runs. Why? Well, DirecTV's future calls for not being able to carry antenna over the satellite cables, so a dual-tuner system will need 2 Satellite + 1 Antenna run (my local HDTV OTA feeds rock, the over-compressed MPEG 4 feeds look horrible). In addition, with the addition of F-Connector -> RCA Adapters, ($7 at radioshack or home depot, $1 or so if you plan ahead and buy online), and you can carry component video over it. I realize the the future of video looks to be HDMI, but it has so many problems and confusions, and component distributes so nicely, that if they never "close the analog hole" then you can do nice things with that option. With 4 Cat5E I have a phone wire, 2 Ethernet wires, and a "spare" wire, because Cat5E is SO DAMNED useful (can run an RS-232 Serial port over it, an IR repeater, etc., just about anything.
I ran everything into a dedicated closet that I put in, that is doubling as the home theater closet. Right now the video goes over the 3 coax cables as component, but the plan is a projector in about 6 months, which is going to sit inside the closet and project out. To keep that cool (as I anticipate having multiple computers + AV gear), I put an AC duct in, but near the floor, and a bathroom vent fan at the top, that will be controlled via a temperature probe. If the temperature near the projector gets too hot, vent it outside, and the cool air comes in whenever the AC is on.
For audio, I have 7 speaker locations, plus 2 coax for the subwoofer (they have connections for L&R, why not pull it), so the 7.1 system terminates in the closet. I am currently pulling the whole house audio solution. I chose NOT to pull it into bedrooms, because I think that bedrooms are self contained. But all the main rooms in the house (plus two reserved for two speaker sets outside, others may want 3) are getting in. I am NOT planning on multi-source at the start, but I'll pull a Cat 5 + a 4-conductor wire to where the volume controllers are. In the future, I can switch to a fancy multi-source system, but I really can't see a time I'd want different music in the dining room as the kitchen... music carries, and I want whole house for entertaining. Then you run 2 2-conductor speaker wires to the speaker locations from the volume control.
Security wire is important everywhere. You can go wireless, but if you can pull the wire, the wired alarm systems are more reliable (never need to change a battery), and with the new glass break sensors, you only need to get to the middle of the room. Oh, and if you pull 4-conductor wire, you can get combo glass-break/motion sensors, so you're all set.
If I had the walls down, I would have two conduit runs to each set of wall outlets, cat5 in the low voltage run and standard electricity in the normal run. As I don't have the walls down, I just made sure to get a neutral wire everywhere and picked Insteon as my automated lighting solution, but there are wireless solutions and ho
Uh, after a decade with no increase, and lots of stupidity arguing about it, the minimum. It's buying power has been depressed because we have learned that when you increase the minimum wage, poor people that need to get their act together lose their jobs (that are stepping stones to better jobs hopefully), and wealthy white teenagers make more money in their after school jobs. Instead we created the earned income tax credit, which puts the working poor into a negative tax zone.
In fact, have some fun to see how not real the numbers are... Do a 1040 for the theoretical working poor families, single mom + minimum wage job with 3 kids (and again at $6.50, and $8/hr for more realistic numbers). When you factor in the earned income tax credit, child tax credits, etc., it's not as horrible as you make it out to be.
In addition, you are comparing median housing prices to the MINIMUM wage, that's silly. Compare MEDIAN housing prices to MEDIAN wages and you'll see that while affordability has gotten worse over the past few years, monthly expenditures have not because of low interest rates.
You suggest that "a vast amount of Americans" earn the minimum wage. I agree that some do, but not a vast amount, it's small.
You say that in the 1960s it was possible for anyone to own a home, and imply that it isn't now. The fact is that's a myth, home ownership is MUCH higher now, which means MORE Americans are able to own a home, so I suggest that its easier to own a home now than it was in the 1960s.
Of course, genetic transmission does not imply memetic transmission (though they are obviously highly correlated). You could argue that, on the one hand, you have communities and societies that are fecund, but scientifically (and hence economically) backward.
Right, but if I'm simply an animal, and not a human being endowed by my creator, and I'm not a creation in God's imagine, but rather a result of natural selection over generations, shouldn't I focus entirely on passing my DNA along? Isn't man's "wiring" for promiscuity stem form a desire to spread their seed, a desire the that Hebrew Bible merely channeled by declaring each woman his bride and obligating him towards them.
It's EXTREMELY ironic, in my opinion, that the more one accepts religious dictates, the more likely one is to behave in a manner consistent with evolution theory, and the more one rejects those dictates and accepts science as the core value, the more likely one is to behave in a manner inconsistent with evolution theory that they "accept" and "believe" in.
One might argue that, to the extent the latter communities and societies can invite and assimilate members from among the population of fundamentalists, they will ultimately prove successful.
Correct, the secular enlightened societies can compensate for low birthrate by pulling in the people from the religious communities. The problem with this is you need them to come AND assimilate into the culture, increasing your stock of people for your culture. As the EU has seen with their North African immigrants, and the US has seen with SOME groups of immigrants, there is an increasing trend of mass immigration that combined with multiculturalism that decries forced assimilation, is resulting in these immigrant groups joining the country and economy as cheap labor, receiving citizenship of the adopted nation, but not assimilating into the culture.
Unless nation-state immigration policies begin to incorporate cultural assimilation, I think that it is far more likely that the expanding cultures will simply over-run the nation-states, grabbing control via Democracy instead of outright invasion.
Perhaps the religious leadership isn't QUITE as ignorant as you think.
Oh, I think they are. The religious leadership didn't invent this stuff or understand it, they just parrot what they learned at a religious school because they think it will make them go to heaven. Natural selection means that the religions which get the formula right to grow quickly will be more common than ones that don't. Possibly there were mutations along the way to - the religion split over some doctrinal difference and then the fork with the more evolutionarily fit beliefs out competed the other.
Spoken as someone without a religious background. Real religious study is not simple, is not parroted. Each group has their own approach.
Judaism (Orthodox) -- Laity receive religious education through at least age 18, preferably with some afterwards, with basic grounds in Hebrew, Torah Laws, Rabbinic Laws, and some introductory Talmudic study. Those that go on to study for Smeicha (Rabinnic ordination) receive detailed extensive learning and testing. Learning is not memorization, but rather logical arguments to learn to issue a ruling. Ordination (Smeicha) is essentially a Jewish law degree, one is then qualified to sit on a Beit Din (House of Law) and render legal decisions. This involves learning the law, learning the debates of the Talmud, when to pull a minority opinion to issue lenient rulings, etc. Read some of the rulings of Rav. Moshe Feinsten who was America's leading Rabbinic authority for his generation, challenges some relatively long standing understandings (permitted shaving with certain electric shavers, for example), but had an extensive knowledge base to do so. The common religious Jew has a basic understanding of how to live a Jewish life, but nothing that deep.
Jewish (Sephardic) -- Now borrowing heavily from the Orthodox Ashkenazi Yeshiva model, but traditionally required father-to-son transmission of the basics of Judaism, with some of the more intelligent children studying with their Rav, and the best and brightest traveling to learn with other Rabbanim. Because of the heavy influence of the Rambam's works (especially in the Yemenite communities), heavily based upon rationalism and logic, less about simply relying on Mensorah (tradition) to establish behavior. Much less doctrinaire than the Orthodox Ashkenazi approach, but a simpler yet stricter approach to Jewish law... less about understanding the loopholes and exceptions through learning than about preserving customs and mysticism... Kabbalah study is routine here.
Jewish (non-Orthodox) -- Laity receive cursory education in reading Hebrew from ages 10-13, some do a high school after-school program. Religious leadership focuses on pastoral training with minimal advanced learning -- much more like the Protestant Churches -- learn the doctrine. If you are exemptionally interested, you may get involved in committees that make rulings, but generally focus on pastoral training.
Christianity (Protestant) -- Laity receive no education, interact with ministers with cursory knowledge of theology. Matches your understanding pretty well, very few really learn.
Christianity (Denomination Study) instead of taking pastoral positions, go into research into matters of theology. Will research positions, understand historical and theological underpinnings. Very rare, but it's their research that empowers the pastoral leaders to handle issues.
Christianity (Fundamentalist) -- heavy on the learning, lots of bible studies, but done largely without commentary. Much more legal than Protestants, but with literalism and without lots of scholarship. No organized denominational structure for issuing legally binding rulings, independents are empowered to make their own determinations and choose who to follow.
Catholicism -- Laity receive basic education (how to get to heaven), Priests can become pastoral or theological. Pope John Paul II was a pastoral priest and applied theologi
You know, I think the religious are onto something. Cultures that breed fast and fight wars to proselytize are likely to overwhelm cultures that breed slowly and keep to themselves.
Some historians point to a declining birthrate as the cause of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Decadence and homosexuality (which avoided children) caused massive drops in birth rates, and eventually Rome collapsed.
If you think about the economics of inheritence, it's even more stark. Now we split inheritence by all children (traditionally only male, or lesser shares for daughters), but the number of children determines the wealth build up. A family with 4 heirs will pass along half the wealth as a family with 2 heirs. The secular families not only fail to maintain their share of the population, they build up wealth quickly over a few generations. Now we have wealthy children with trust funds... they aren't likely to take up arms and defend Rome... Rome's vassal system of poor soldiers from slave colonies and client-kingdoms let by officers of Roman stock simply collapsed when there weren't younger sons of aristocrats willing to become officers searching for glory. Apparently with enough wealth, one need not have glory.
I'm not suggesting they're better, far from it, just that they may be better from a Darwinian point of view, which is somewhat ironic.
Not terribly ironic, how did the Abrahamic faiths spread to cover half the world. The rules are quite simple:
1. Take virgin wives, be fruitful and multiple with them 2. If you don't have a child within 10 years, she's infertile, dump her 3. Don't have gay sex (which doesn't create children), but have lots of sex with your wife/wives about 10 days after her menstruation (when she's fertile) 4. Never use birth control, keep having children 5. Preserve and build the community, the community trumps the individual
That is a methodoly for taking over the world.
Contrast that with the secular ethos:
1. Sex is fun, have it as much as you want as often as you want, preferably for years (the most fertile ones), but make sure to use a condom 2. Marriage is something risky, push it off a while, just keep having sex for recreation first 3. More education is better... Age 16 isn't enough, a high school diploma @ 18 isn't enough, a college degree at 22 isn't really enough, how about some grad school (24-28)... DO NOT GET MARRIED BEFORE YOU FINISH OR WE TAKE YOUR FUNDING AWAY 4. Start your career before starting a family, wait a few more years 5. Don't have more than 2 kids, you're a breeder and sucking up resources... Let's cap every woman at 2 kids, and not wonder what happens when not all women have kids 6. Spoil your children, so they push off real life an extra few years... 7. Oh, and gay sex should be idealized, not stigmatized, and considered an innate behavior 8. Screw the community, individual liberty is all that matters, whatever makes you happy.
Which one will take over the world in a few generations?
The only reason I bring up the gay sex is that while I don't really care what people do, it certainly isn't a precreation-supported behavior. While a certain amount of sexual desire is innate and certainly biological, there is definitely some social shaping of it... Bisexuality amongst women moved from taboo to "sexy" and a MUCH higher percentage of teenagers poll as "bisexual" than the general population... Doesn't mean that they are acting on it for real, but social factors can certainly influence behavior. A man who mostly feels urges towards men but occaisionally does towards women might be able to marry and have a family if under social pressure to do so, but if gay sex is an equally valid option will most likely go that route and probably be happier... if you goal is individual happiness, than gay rights is a civil right, if your goal is societal growth, then it's to be condemned (perhaps by
The fact that some Doctors and Nurses think that they can tell doesn't mean that they can. The process you are describing is not a statistical analysis of treatment, it's assigning treatment instead of on ability to pay on ability of loved ones to show up. Similarly to the general social medicine situation where the politically connected get the best treatment, it all seems less fair than the American ability to pay.
It's basically assigning woth to the life based upon how much the doctor's decide that that life is worth... that hardly seems to be the role that we want them in.
My point was that the fact that 80% of costs are in the last year is something we know in retrospect. You don't know if the $50,000 heart treatment will work or not. If it doesn't work, then that was $50,000 in the last year. You often have survival rates of 50% - 90% for major treatment, in all cases some people, statistically speaking, will have "wasted treatment."
According to a study cited in this article, that I can't seem to find,
As healthcare costs grow, more analysts are willing to argue for rationing of care. According to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), about 25 percent of U.S. healthcare spending is devoted to the last year of life of the 1 percent of us who die each year.
Some more numbers from a sampling of VA and Medicare benefits from a government study, the abstract is available here
Totaling both VA and Medicare benefits, elderly veterans incurred an average of $43,795 in the final year of life, 40% more than an average Medicare beneficiary accrued during the final year of life. Costs for elderly veterans started increasing rapidly in the final year of life and accelerated sharply during the final 90 days of life. Most of the cost increase near the end of life was for acute hospital services; acute hospital care accounted for 44% and 60% in year 2 and year 1 before death, respectively, and 78% in the final 30 days of life.
Basically, people get sicker as they get older. Costs escalate dramatically in the end, and eventually you get too sick to save. We then look backwards and see what we spent in the last 30-days, last year, and realize it was a lot of money for very little time, and you've have rather had those 30 days with family than with hospital staff.
Big costly events in your life. Birth, OB/Gyn is expensive, and early pediatric monitors (and treatment of any conditions) is costly. Although the majority of children are fine, a small number require very costly interventions to save. If you go inside a NICU, you'll also observe heroic attempts to save a massively pre-mature (1-2 lbs kids) children, when the survival rate is around 5%. We watched this when a friend had a child in NICU (who thank G-d was only being monitored for what turned out to be reflux, but the little helpless babies were heartbreaking).
Childhood is relatively cheap, check-ups, wellness, and vaccination aren't costly. Sure some percentage of kids will break limbs and need medical care, but even that is relatively cheap. Adulthood doesn't costs much (if we charge OB/Gyn to the child and not the mother, just to understand medical costs), regular screening, cancer treatment for a small percentage, but most will survive at that point and it probably isn't an issue.
Older people (starting in their 50s, but accellerating in 60s) start taking preventative drugs for things like cholesterol, high blood pressure, etc. This daily maintenance drugs may start adding up to a couple hundred a month, but push off expensive stuff. It's when "old age" kicks in that we start seeing expensive treatments. And that is what the VA saw as well.
The American one is in the best fiscal shape, because our country is the richest. You are having massive economic problems in the rest of the civilized world because the demographic changes are more severe, not less severe. It's rather simple, 1 retiree:2.2 workers means that providing them with welfare is a huge burden. 1 retiree:4 workers (like now), means that there is a large burden. 1 retiree:13 workers like was in the system historically makes supporting them easy and moral.
The problem with the status quo is that you're not supporting people that need support, you're supporting them just because they are 65. People are entering retirement at 62, when they COULD work until 70. When most jobs were physically intensive, that was not the case, but is there a reason that teachers need to collect early retirement often in their 50s and government retirement money in their 60s when we complain about a teacher shortage?
The rest of the world's retirement systems are collapsing faster, at least in the US the population is growing slightly, in Europe it's shrinking slowly, and shrinking dramatically amongst the non-Muslim population. Given the relationship between the Muslim and European communities, I find it unlikely that they will tolerate supporting a bunch of old white Christian women in old age.
Something like 80% of medical costs are incurred in the last year of life. However, we can't necessarily make decisions based upon this, because that's a retroactive evaluation. Some 80-year olds with cancer will burn through $250,000 in treatment and die inside of the year, making that a huge amount of expenses for nothing. Others will pull-through, living another 5-10 years in good shape, then dying of something different and unrelated. For the latter, the $250,000 was no doubt reasonably spent, for the former, we wasted resources.
The fact is you can't separate when the treatment is extreme and unreasonable, and when it was reasonable until after they go.
That said about the longer lifespans, the modern entitlement complex is a disaster. Social security solved two problems, getting the elderly out of the workforce (lowering the unemployment rate, we creates a drag on the economy beyond the fact that those people aren't working), and preventing the sickly elderly from being indigent, something reasonable to avoid.
If the retirement age was raised to be the equivalent in terms of life expectancy as it was when social security was created it would be 89 today. That's right, MOST PEOPLE didn't live to collect it, it was to help the helpless elderly. We decided that we were entitled to stop working at 65, while others were responsible for it. I'm not sure why that's an entitlement (I don't begrudge anyone that lived below their means and saved up for retirement), but because we didn't raise it continuously, there is no clean solution now.
I'm not suggesting the people should HAVE to work until their death... but retirement, like vacations, is a luxury that is expensive, and it's not clear why one has a right to ask others to pay for it. The true tragedy is the mythical trust fund, an accounting shell game, has given people the mistaken impression that their have "paid into the system" and therefore are entitled to social security, which is why the system is collapsing on itself.
Note that it's called social security, not a national pension, it's not a reward for payment into the system, it's a safety blanket for the disabled, orpaned, and elderly that need it, and never should have become a way of life.
The rest of the country is moving away from lawsuits, and moving towards binding arbitration? Create a legally mandated review and report system, and Doctors who are statistically out of whack get reviewed and if it keeps up, lose their license. Those hurt by incompetants should have a scientifically valid avenue for complaining and receiving restitution. However, the current system is busted.
Current system, we do not award damages based upon merit, but based upon jury awards. While jury awards are a reasonable way of dealing with many torts, they also introduct tremendous unfairness and confusion. If a medical treatment has an 80% success rate, and yours failed, you should not have a tort... sometimes there is bad luck. If you want to protect people from bad luck, then let's pool risk and do insurance. Create a mandatory "tax" on medical services, based upon percentage failure rates and damages for treatments (we already have the billing codes) and let those that lose life's lottery collect from the pool.
However, medicine by jury is HORRID. My wife's delivery was all messed up by overeager Doctors and our need to fight back to stop unnecessary interventions. Unfortunately, "high risk" in medicine is anything over 1%, and as a result the masses suffer to protect the outliers. So little of medicine is based upon statistical evidence, and more about what is the standard procedure so I can defend my actions in front of a jury.
Back to the cost issue, even trial lawyers defending the practice like Sen. Edwards (D - N.C., retired) claim that malpractice is only 1% of the costs, but that seems unusually low. My father who has a successful practice had several years where his malpractice insurance and his takehome were roughly equal, so that's a huge burden. However, defensive medicine, NOT malpractice is the problem.
For example, a pregnant woman can take OTC vitamins that are good enough, cost? $10/month. That same pregnant woman will likely get a perscription for vitamins (my wife did) for $55/month (co-pay, $15/mo.). It only cost us $5/month difference, but the "medical costs" increased over 5-fold.
Likewise, often the new drugs are only slightly better than the old drugs, where they are statistically similar for most cases but slightly better in some. in addition, the generic may cost $2 - $4/pill, while the new perscription pill may cost $200 - $800. Now, I would personally be happy to cough up some money to avoid the low-risk change of complications during surgery, but is that reasonable that you get those drugs for everyone? Would it be better that most people take the risk of complication (which is usually already under 1%) than run up costs?
The problem isn't the costs, but that is you go with the cheaper option, 99% of your patients saved money, but 1% now have a tort against you.
That's why pediatricians perscribe anti-biotics for ear infections, despite the OVERWHELMING majority of them being viral and the anti-biotics have no affect.
Defensive medicine combined with everyone being entitled to the newest, most expensive drugs results in the current out of control medical costs increases.
It's a city government fund, which means that a politician has controls of billions of other people's money. He can do what he can to score points... Basically, he puts at risk the pension returns for the firefighters, police, etc. (not a huge one here, but it theoretically could lower their return from Google stock), but he gets political credit with environmentalists when running for future office. He didn't risk a penny of his money, but the firemen or the city if it guaranteed a pay-out will have to pay for this in the future, while the politician has used his leverage with environmentalists to win higher office.
I'm not suggesting that this is a good or a bad idea, but I AM suggesting that it is horrible (and corrupt) when public officials use public (or other people's money) for their own gain. Sure it's not an outright embezzlement like putting money in his pocket would be, but using the money to score political credit with people that will help him make more money...
Well that isn't behavior I like to see lauded as good...
Put up your own money, survey the shareholders, whatever, but to do something with other people's money for your personal benefit...
Some people may want to change their lifestyle to lower their footprint, that's nice. However, I choose a lifestyle that I enjoy. Will I do things that reduces the impact with no cost to me... maybe... recycling is annoying, and doesn't save me money, so it's not a high priority... maybe I'll do it one day, but we use SO few recyclable items it's not worth the effort to store recycling bins. Maybe as the kids get older it will become worth it, but it doesn't make sense with our usage. CFL however, especially in lights that we leave on for hours at a time? Been doing so. About to replace the lights in the kitchen, starting to with the bathroom vanity globe lights (actually burn whiter, cooler, etc.), and when you use bars of 6-8 lights, works fine.
Will I put them in the dining room? We tried them to reduce heat, but the ugly color they throw off made it not fun to sit in there. Likewise I tried them in our sitting room, don't like them, so out they came.
However, if you want me to get used to being in a darker house? Why, because you tell me to? Go to hell, I like my lifestyle, bust my ass to support it, and don't want to give it up because you want me to.
Long delayed post, pulled up my history and saw this. You are defining raising children successfully to "have the ability to financially support their family." You are setting the bar pretty high, the ability to have a nice middle class life.
However, biologically, "raising children successfully" means that your offspring reach the age at which they can reproduce, then reproducing. When you observe 2-3 generations of "welfare moms" with teenage daughters that have babies, you will notice that they are, biologically speaking, successfully raising children and spreading their genetic component. While the "baby daddies" may not pass their cultural traits on, they will pass their genetics on.
Your listed reasons as to why adultery isn't rewarded financially, it ignores my point, it's rewarded genetically. And those things that discourage that behavior are true for middle class and up families, but not lower and working class, where lawsuits and paternity tests are more rare. Since the birth rates are much higher further down on the totem poll, it IS rewarded where birth control is less used and paternity suits less common.
There is a HUGE cultural gulf between the US and Europe with regards to minorities. The United States, from the days of the colonies onward, has generally tolerated heretics and offshoot groups outside of local areas. While a town might have had an official religion, or even a county, it rarely expanded beyond a small local area. In addition, from the founding of the republic, the concept of all people here being citizens (except for Indians and black slaves) helped form that culture. In Europe, Jews were not considered citizens until relatively recently, and while having to contribute taxes to the crown were generally left alone complete with their own courts for civil and criminal matters, and communities. Similar rules applied to other groups of "others."
With Napoleon's conquests, the idea of people as citizens took hold, but it was culturally foreign, and integration never happened. Combine this with relatively small areas with different languages and religions, and you have homogenous countries that have been reared to hate the other because one was often at war with them.
Indeed, the initial efforts of the Nazi's were not the extermination of the Jews (although that was the end goal, they took stages), the first effort was to separate the assimilated Jews out of German culture, restoring their status as "others" to be distrusted by the people. Before they rounded my ancestors up into camps, they prohibited inter-marriage, and forced them to be separated from the culture. This was an important first step, because in Germany, the Jews were highly assimilated into the local culture, indeed the Reform movement was born in Germany setting the goal to assimilate, which is why so much of Reform cantorials and other German Jewish customs are borrowed from Lutheran protestant Curches through the assimilation there. In order to rile the people of Germany up against them, they needed to draw a line between Germans and Jews, which naturally made Jews the enemies and ripe for being attacked.
Europe's problems of racism and xenophobia stem from a culture of being at was with other groups and having them nearby. In contrast, in the United States, the former Slave and Jim Crow states, which have had a much shorter history of integration, suffer from more severe attitudes towards different races. It's not that racism and persecution doesn't exist in former Union States (it does, and may often be more severe), but the portion of the populace that would support race based laws is more minor.
I don't think that one can simply point to the US's First Amendment and Europe's post-War speech regulations and attempt to show that the latter causes growth of neo-nazism and the former stops it. I think that we have yet to see Europe get 3 generations from killing people for being "other" and Americans outside of the deep south haven't fought over the matter in 150 years and even in the deep south the civil rights movement was accomplished with relatively minor violence. Sure their were showdowns over integration of schools, but no pogroms. Even the worst abuses of people by the KKK pale in comparison to the European's behaviors, including wars over churches, kidnapping Jewish children if someone claimed the child was baptized, prohibitions of land ownership, etc.
There is a massive cultural gap between the US and Europe in these regards, the Europe's cultural elites are so removed from it they don't understand it. While the gulf is smaller in the US, our elites understand it enough to make fun of those that hate others, which is probably better than ignoring it... call someone an idiot or wrong, they fight back, just mock them, and they get embarrassed...
Everywhere by the US has sugar, NOT corn syrup. However, because of high tariffs on sugar, and heavy corn subsidies in the US, high fructose corn syrup is cheaper than sugar in the US, so most products use it. In the rest of the world, importing sugar is cheaper than corn syrup, better for the customers, and tastier, so nobody else using all the corn syrup products that are used in the US.
Every Jew gets to realize this during Passover, as all our corn syrup products are unavailable to us for a week. In fact, it's the ONLY time you can reliably get Coke/Pepsi with sugar instead of corn syrup and is tastier.
It's a shame, a short-sited policy, but benefits a few (I think two) wealthy families that own the US sugar production and benefit from high prices.
Slashdot Mirror
To own and run ones own fabs, one has a LOT of cash tied up in fabs. That means carrying tremendous debt levels, and given AMD's shaky financials, at a higher interest rate than Intel. This gives Intel a competitive edge, just from the finance side. Selling the fabs would let AMD reduce its debt levels, improve it's balance sheet, and possibly cut costs.
AMD's "tough" years are in part because as a company with its own fabs, it has massive fixed costs (and the interest expenses associated with it), which means that when cyclical demand trends downward, their numbers get destroyed by the high fixed costs. High fixed costs are irrelevant to huge market leaders, but the nimble competitor gets eaten up when things get painful.
OTOH, if one can move capital intensive projects off balance sheet, the company's financial reports improve, which can improve their bond rating and lower their interest costs on other areas.
Right now, AMD must focus on chip design, chip manufacturing, chip marketing, and financial maneuvering. Going fabless would let them focus on designing and selling chips, instead of manufacturing them and managing complicated financial operations to fund everything.
Whether they gain a competitive edge by owning the fabs is another question, and the only people that know that are inside of AMD. Whether the CEO and Board will ask them is another question, but AMD's internal guys know whether they are really good at manufacturing or not.
Music and movies are "consumed" differently. While Audiophiles have been looking for a high end solution, SA-CD and DVD-A promised that, that isn't how most music is consumed. The formats that Audiophiles normally listen to are different, because they normally listen to classical music that benefits from the audio, or jazz and alternative genres where the quality matters. However, the most popular music genres are Pop and Country, which don't benefit from the new formats. Since audio masters are evaluated quickly on what "sounds best," the ear is trained to pick the louder version (especially for Rock) without listening to subtleties. As a result, Pop and Rock masters are generally mixed to sound "loud" which compresses the sound into a small fraction of the range available to the CD. With that mastering reality, and no matter how many sound engineers suggest turning up the volume instead of destroying the audio range, Pop CDs just don't benefit from superior audio. Country is even more vocal heavy than Pop, and the 5.1 separation or expanded audio range doesn't show up there.
The fact is, most music is 1) listened to in the car on the radio or CD player, 2) by teenagers hanging out with their friends, 3) commuting urbanites on mass transit, or 4) someone looking for background music while working on the computer. Very listen music is listened to in a dedicated environment designed to maximize quality.
As a result, unless one is choosing to listen to music in an ideal way, MP3s or mini-discs which compress the music sound "about the same" in the non-ideal environment. The subtleties of music are irrelevant in a noisy car or while at the gym.
Movies are consumed in a variety of ways. Families may play a movie in the car, may watch it in the family room/living room in a relaxed environment, or may use a dedicated home theatre room. While the latter is the minority, it's not the extreme minority that music listening is.
For music, portability is key, and the ability to pop a CD in at a friend's house is important, but the ability to take your digital audio in MP3 and/or AAC/WMA and have a CD in a few minutes is part of why digital audio is popular.
For video, there just isn't a demand for portable viewing... sure the video iPod or iPhone will be popular with urban commuters, but that is are relatively small percentage of the population. The ability to grab a DVD and pop it in the kid's room, in the home theatre, etc., makes a difference.
Within a few years, either of the high definition players will crowd out conventional DVD players, because distribution costs and desire for profitability will prevent the DVD player from dropping under the $30 it is at now, and the high def players are already "cheap," sub-$500 for a cutting edge technology is historically cheap, and within two years we'll probably be under $200, and the under $100/$50 range will come within a few years. At that point, new sales of DVD players will taper-off.
The reasons that portable and digital music is so popular don't really apply to video, as they are watched differently. Most adults simply don't have the desire for handheld video (handheld televisions were NEVER mainstream, while walkmans took off like crazy when they came out).
The market for "high end" video is a larger niche... probably 5%-10% of middle to upper-middle class homes have a home theatre setup, and many more have "nice" televisions that would benefit from HDTV... If the studios were smart (and they aren't), they'd ship the dual-layer DVD/BR discs at the same price, eliminating the DVD option, which would cause rapid adoption. However, they are looking to increase the prices for HD formats, which may be their undoing. However, as Car DVD players become Car BR-DVD (or HD-DVD), and the HiDef DVDs become common, the format will take off.
The problem, IMO, is that if I have 3-4 DVD players in a house (not unreasonable, Family room, Master bedroom, plus one or more kids rooms), even if I replace the family room DVD
While Macs are popular with web designers, it's less than 50% of them anyway (although higher than 4.4% in general for users). Developing websites on a Mac is easy, develop to standards, test with Safari/Firefox, with slight workarounds for Firefox, then add some hacks for IE, and away you go. For Windows developers, historically they wrote to IE and then hacked for the others, which is way more work.
If Windows-based Web developers can use Safari, they can either develop to standards and hack for IE better, or at least test their hacks for Firefox/Safari on their machine.
I can fire up Parallels and test against IE, Windows guys had no way to test against Safari before Monday.
So there are two direct strategic benefits for Apple. Had Firefox existed before Safari, I don't know that Apple would have bothered with a browser, but once the spent the time/money to develop it, they might as well keep the revenue stream from the Google search box by keeping the Browser up to date (I doubt it's more than 2m-3m/year in development costs at most), as it's a profitable business, and the Windows port will no doubt cover costs, plus meet strategic needs, iPhone/Safari compatibility. Safari compatibility alone wasn't worth doing it apparently, they prefered to sell some Macs to any shop that cared about 5% of the market (i.e. revenue from Mac Users > cost of a Mac + time to test, a couple of grand in time and equipment, so any site with more than 100k/year in gross margins), but the iPhone gives them a reason to give up a few "testing Mac sales" to get more iPhone penetration
Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest sages, was 40 years old, completely ignorant, and incapable of reading a single Bracha (blessing), before he went off to learn and become the greatest sage of his generation. Since Rabbi Akiva was married and encouraged to do this by his wife, we know that he obtained his Bar Mitzvah and was Married without any literacy whatsoever, yet he performed these lifecycle events.
Traditionally, everyone called for an Aliyah would read their portion, which would include a Bar Mitzvah boy. HOWEVER, when Jewish literacy declined and the sages were concerned that people couldn't read from the Torah and would be embarassed, they decreed that a single reader would read for everyone. When one is called to the Torah, one makes the blessing, and the reader reads the portion.
At a wedding, 7 blessings are read, supposed to be read by the groom. Again, what if you had an ignorant Jewish man, should he simply not be married? So the Sages decreed that a Rabbi should be at the wedding, and he should read the Brachot on behalf of the groom.
The exception to these rules is that a Rabbi is presumed to be literate, and therefore may read his own Aliyah or make his own blessings. It is assumed that he won't embarass everyone else because we know Rabbis are literate, with non-Rabbis, we'd never know like we should with some people.
The other section is the Maftir portion of the Torah reading, which technically isn't part of the Torah service (the required Aliyot for the day), but is done to tie in with Haftorah as we've already closed the Torah service with its Kaddish. This is why we sometimes (or in non-Orthodox circles, ALL the time), have the Bar Mitzvah boy read "his Aliyah" at the end, because Maftir is really short. If you go to an Orthodox shul for a while and observe Bar Mitzvah services, you'll see that some boys simply get an Aliyah and make the blessings, some make the blessings, read Maftir & Haftorah, some will read all the aliyot's portions, Maftir, Haftorah, plus Daven Mussaf.
The Bar Mitzvah is a celebration of adult hood. The father renounces his responsiblity for his son's sins, and the son takes his first opportunity to service in a minyan and it's public communal role. We do it on Shabbat for the same reason we announce upcoming Rosh Chodesh on Shabbat, or do a girl's naming on Shabbat, it's when we'll have the greatest attendence. Nothing prevents a Bar Mitzvah from happening at the Monday/Thursday Torah service, or on Rosh Chodesh, and in fact, we have those. If Rosh Chodesh falls on a Sunday, or Monday is a national holiday, or the Thursday of Thanksgiving, or any other reasons that make it easier to do a non-Shabbat Bar Mitzvah do so, you get a less crowded Sanctuary, people can drive, logistics are easier.
The child gets their first Aliyah and is called to the Torah. Doesn't mean that they are literate...
That's what the Video/Keynote demonstrated, but that doesn't mean that we won't get the DashCode stuff when Leopard ships... four months later. It's got buzz, lots of business people are interested, so perhaps this approach gets people developing now, getting stuff ready to test and tweak after the actual phone launches, and then more when Leopard ships. I also assume that iPhone is running a derivative of Leopard, not Tiger, so perhaps part of the reason to not release the SDK is waiting until Leopard ships.
Agreed that the "example" was in Safari, but given that they want people to develop stuff for this, and the demo'd a business app, I wouldn't assume that going forward, Safari will be the only solution. The ability to add Dashboard-style widgets or icons to the menu and separate launches is too important. What if I want to use two "custom" applications.
We shall see.
The device runs OS X and Quicktime (I assume, it can play MP3s, AAC files, iTMS movies), so I presume that Quicktime is available.
We also know that Safari supports a few extensions for Dashboard, and they could expose whatever functionality they want.
The ONLY people truly wanting an SDK are Cocoa Developers that would like an easy migration path to bring mobile version of their applications to the iPhone.
With my Treo, one of the neat applications was PocketQuicken, that synced when I synced my phone. I imagine that a WebKit-based app could be similar, or not, we don't really know yet.
Everyone has heard Webkit/Safari and decided that the applications are going to be in a browser. It looks more like Dashboard-style widgets as applets, which is NOT the same thing at all. Let's see what happens, but I have the feeling that you'll be able to do more than you think.
Safari for Windows makes developing iPhone apps on Windows possible, then you move over to the iPhone for testing.
We'll see what happens.
Apple is "well known" for massive backwards compatibility updates... except they aren't... They always handle transitions over a couple of versions, intelligently bringing people along. They swapped processor architectures twice and each time brought people along with emulators, in the Intel case it wasn't faster than the fasted G5 machines, but those of us upgrading 3+ year old machines (Powerbook G4 1Ghz -> Macbook Pro in my case) found our PPC apps running faster and Intel code flying.
We all expected the Intel migration to happen with 10.5, they shocked us when they did it off the 10.4 base.
While they did abandon Mac OS to move to OS X, they provided a migration strategy (Carbon) and a compatibility layer (Classic). Classic support shipped with 10.0/10.1, 10.2, and was supported in 10.3 if you already had it, as well as 10.4 I think, but they kept classic for around 5 years, which gave everyone time to migrate to Carbon. Its unfortunate that there is no long-term Classic via Rosetta just from a classic application point of view, but they didn't leave anyone in the lurch.
I expect 10.5 to introduce this OS, which will be useful for new installs, or for external drive arrays, especially for the Video market, but I wouldn't expect it to be the default. OS X has supported a Unix filed system, but defaulted to HFS+, because HFS+ was compatible with Mac OS, so you could dual-boot OS 9 and OS X for a good 2 years on new hardware to maintain compatibility. If they hadn't done that, they would have lost the Pro-Audio and Pro-Video markets that took a few years to get native OS X applications.
Getting it in the wild and for professionals would help that market, while not breaking ANYONE's compatibility. Sometime in 10.5's lifetime they may ship new computers with it, or they may wait for 10.6 in two years. But giving everyone two years is plenty of time to get utilities and applications compatible with the new file system.
The flashy consumer features are touted for the OS, but the underlying architecture has always followed a 2-cycle release. If you've used OS X Server for 10.2/10.3/10.4, you'd notice that they introduced stuff in one version with limited exposed functionality (with the rest via the Unix layer), enhanced the functionality in the next rev, and polished thereafter.
The Apple Mail Server -> Cyrus migration was someone poorly handled, but mostly because AMS was garbage. But the 10.4 Mail tools are night and day beyond the 10.3 ones.
They are actually far more careful than people give them credit for.
The different is, they don't keep backward compatibility as a long-term goal, they do a two-stage migration, giving people 2-4 years to transition.
Ya know, after Sept 11th, and seeing the Islamist forces, I was discussing that with a friend. However, it's not like Christian Europe of 500 years ago (1508? things were getting BETTER by then) more like Europe on 700 years ago.
I think that it's just a phase that religions go through around 1300 years of age, it's a growing pain. The Judeans and other Israelite tribes were united under King David and went off to slaughter their enemies, to the point that the prior king was deposed and the official reason is leniency towards enemies (read the Bible as a history book and not a religious book and you'll notice things that you don't otherwise). The Christians launched the crusades. And Islam is experimenting with fundamentalism/Islamism.
Howeever, if you look at the change in weaponry from ancient Israel -> Crusader Europe -> modern day, and you can see that the level of carnage that can be unleashed is more problematic. The Israelites could surround a city and demand it's surrender, the Crusaders could slowly burn the city down and chase down those fleeing a bit, but if Iran gets atomic weapons, we've entered a new world of religious warfare.
Jewish contract law doesn't provide for signatures, because you can't assume literacy (Jewish contract law goes back at least 1600 years to the codification of the Talmud). The people that are supposed to sign the Ketubah are the witnesses. They witness that the man agreed to the terms of the Ketubah, and it is presented to the wife, whose acceptance (in front of Witnesses) creates the legal contract.
Now, Ashkenazi communities have used the same standard Aramaic Ketubah for centuries, but among some Sephardic communities, the Ketubah is still negotiated.
Jewish marriage is normally codified via contract, but can be established in three ways, sexual intercourse, being secluded with a member of the opposite sex and validly witnessed, or via contract. The former is frowned upon, and somewhat questionable because there are references in Jewish law to having sex outside the confines of marriage (not counting adultery), but since Jewish laws are so strict on sexual behavior without marriage, it was determined that sexual behavior is sufficient to form a marriage.
This may seem archaic, but some parts of the Israeli Rabbinate have made cohabitation be considered a marriage, and require a Get before permitting the woman to enter a marriage. This is extremely problematic for Kohanim, who aren't permitted to marry divorces.
Right now, phone is Pots, but you can plug a laptop into the ethernet drop there, or a television into the coax (if I ever buy enough multi-switches to make everything live)... Also, you can have an uplink line (nanny-cam, whatever) on the coax and then modulate that out a channel on the antenna line... Lots of options, and once I'm pulling cat5 to the box, a second wire and a coax doesn't really add anything other than th 8-13 cents/foot for the cable...
The reason for the 3 coax + 4 cat5 for the TV location.
Current plan - support next gen DirecTV DVR (or Dish) that needs 3 coax for dual tuner + OTA ATSC feed, 2 ethernet drops for any equipment there (AppleTV or equivalent? Video game system?), phone (for the Satellite box to dial home), and a spare cat 5.
Future possibilities... bring distributed video, where ALL the equipment sits in the AV closet, and all I have in the room is: LCD on the wall, in that case the 3 Coax converts into Component video, and the spare Cat5 carries IR. I contemplated wiring each room for in-ceiling surround sound, but it's just cost prohibitive in my retrofix, but if I was doing new construction, I'd WIRE a 7.1 system for each room, and where the television goes, have a termination block with 7 speakers and 1 coax for the subwoofer...
The poster in this case appears to be a single guy, but who knows what the future will bring. He may get married and have kids, so the spare bedrooms won't need much for a few years (5+). He might get roommates, in which case, the roommates don't want central controlled AV, but might like having the 7.1 system prewired so they don't have to run their own. Who knows what gets computer geeks to spend an extra $100/month on rent, but Gigabit to the room, high speed in the closet, satellite television feeds).
I also can't predict the next 10 years of home entertainment. 3 years ago running dual coax everywhere to get Tivo support was a huge upgrade. Now, you want triple. I think that it is likely that I'll move all my tuners into the Network closet, making the remote connections in the bedrooms tuner-less (pulling content over Cat5), but who knows. It is VERY possible that the 3 component cables become a distributed component network off a multi-zone AVR, or become dormant in an all Cat5 world. It is very possible that my system will look like the following:
1 Big hard drive RAID connection storing video, a 6 tuner ATSC box, grabbing ALL OTA entertainment... The four main networks plus the silly CW and MyNetworkTV or whatever they become... I might then bring in DirecTV for sports and Dish for International programming, and cable because it's cheap to get basic stuff. I might figure 2 tuners for DirecTV and Dish are sufficient. I might need different packages to get different HD options, I have no clue, despite having HDTV for almost 5 years, the stuff is still new... When we got cable at my parents house 20+ years ago, I'd never imagine that I'd want it in the bedroom, we just had it for HBO. Now I can picture running a Cat5 connection to the bathroom to be able to continue watching a movie while on the can... It sounds silly, but if you have 8 people watching a movie, and you've spent 2 hours coordinating while the kids get to sleep, etc., maybe you need to hit the restroom and don't want to pause for everyone, but want to keep watching... I'm not doing it, but I can picture it.
Conduit is the solution of course, so you can upgrade. But if conduit isn't an option, more coax and more cat5 means you can do whatever you imagine. With Cat5 + a balun option, you can run all sorts of neat stuff. With my 3 Coax + lots of Cat 5 living room, I have a neat option. When I replace the Television with a projector, then I have this spare wire in front. But if I leave the Coax for Component, and then use the Cat5 and some RCA over Cat5 (jacks at HD, nothing extravegent), then I can plug the Gamecube (or Wii I suppose), Xbox, or PS 3 into the front of the room, making it easy to access, and send the s
I'm busy retrofitting my wiring in a 36 year old house... The house had a hack job satellite TV install (2 drops/bedroom for Tivo support, but the multiswitch is in the attic, not an accessible closet, and some other strangeness. In retrospect, a cheap install for living room + master bedroom would have been the way to go, since I'm ripping it out now... but anyway...
Each bedroom currently has 1 phone location, and 1 coax location that I put in. The phone is daisy chained, wired outside of the house, all kinds of silliness, but the locations are perfect. For each of my telephone jacks, I'm replacing it with 2 Cat 5E runs (got Cat5E-350 MHz, for what that's worth), and 1 Coax run. I figure that whatever the technology I use in the future, I'll have 4 conventional phone lines run throughout the house (1 of the Cat 5 cables), Ethernet there (for a VOIP or other IP Telephony options), and coax in case the cable company puts a solution together... you never know.
Where I currently have coax for the satellite, I am putting in 3 Coax runs, and 4 Cat5E runs. Why? Well, DirecTV's future calls for not being able to carry antenna over the satellite cables, so a dual-tuner system will need 2 Satellite + 1 Antenna run (my local HDTV OTA feeds rock, the over-compressed MPEG 4 feeds look horrible). In addition, with the addition of F-Connector -> RCA Adapters, ($7 at radioshack or home depot, $1 or so if you plan ahead and buy online), and you can carry component video over it. I realize the the future of video looks to be HDMI, but it has so many problems and confusions, and component distributes so nicely, that if they never "close the analog hole" then you can do nice things with that option. With 4 Cat5E I have a phone wire, 2 Ethernet wires, and a "spare" wire, because Cat5E is SO DAMNED useful (can run an RS-232 Serial port over it, an IR repeater, etc., just about anything.
I ran everything into a dedicated closet that I put in, that is doubling as the home theater closet. Right now the video goes over the 3 coax cables as component, but the plan is a projector in about 6 months, which is going to sit inside the closet and project out. To keep that cool (as I anticipate having multiple computers + AV gear), I put an AC duct in, but near the floor, and a bathroom vent fan at the top, that will be controlled via a temperature probe. If the temperature near the projector gets too hot, vent it outside, and the cool air comes in whenever the AC is on.
For audio, I have 7 speaker locations, plus 2 coax for the subwoofer (they have connections for L&R, why not pull it), so the 7.1 system terminates in the closet. I am currently pulling the whole house audio solution. I chose NOT to pull it into bedrooms, because I think that bedrooms are self contained. But all the main rooms in the house (plus two reserved for two speaker sets outside, others may want 3) are getting in. I am NOT planning on multi-source at the start, but I'll pull a Cat 5 + a 4-conductor wire to where the volume controllers are. In the future, I can switch to a fancy multi-source system, but I really can't see a time I'd want different music in the dining room as the kitchen... music carries, and I want whole house for entertaining. Then you run 2 2-conductor speaker wires to the speaker locations from the volume control.
Security wire is important everywhere. You can go wireless, but if you can pull the wire, the wired alarm systems are more reliable (never need to change a battery), and with the new glass break sensors, you only need to get to the middle of the room. Oh, and if you pull 4-conductor wire, you can get combo glass-break/motion sensors, so you're all set.
If I had the walls down, I would have two conduit runs to each set of wall outlets, cat5 in the low voltage run and standard electricity in the normal run. As I don't have the walls down, I just made sure to get a neutral wire everywhere and picked Insteon as my automated lighting solution, but there are wireless solutions and ho
Uh, after a decade with no increase, and lots of stupidity arguing about it, the minimum. It's buying power has been depressed because we have learned that when you increase the minimum wage, poor people that need to get their act together lose their jobs (that are stepping stones to better jobs hopefully), and wealthy white teenagers make more money in their after school jobs. Instead we created the earned income tax credit, which puts the working poor into a negative tax zone.
In fact, have some fun to see how not real the numbers are... Do a 1040 for the theoretical working poor families, single mom + minimum wage job with 3 kids (and again at $6.50, and $8/hr for more realistic numbers). When you factor in the earned income tax credit, child tax credits, etc., it's not as horrible as you make it out to be.
In addition, you are comparing median housing prices to the MINIMUM wage, that's silly. Compare MEDIAN housing prices to MEDIAN wages and you'll see that while affordability has gotten worse over the past few years, monthly expenditures have not because of low interest rates.
You suggest that "a vast amount of Americans" earn the minimum wage. I agree that some do, but not a vast amount, it's small.
You say that in the 1960s it was possible for anyone to own a home, and imply that it isn't now. The fact is that's a myth, home ownership is MUCH higher now, which means MORE Americans are able to own a home, so I suggest that its easier to own a home now than it was in the 1960s.
Right, but if I'm simply an animal, and not a human being endowed by my creator, and I'm not a creation in God's imagine, but rather a result of natural selection over generations, shouldn't I focus entirely on passing my DNA along? Isn't man's "wiring" for promiscuity stem form a desire to spread their seed, a desire the that Hebrew Bible merely channeled by declaring each woman his bride and obligating him towards them.
It's EXTREMELY ironic, in my opinion, that the more one accepts religious dictates, the more likely one is to behave in a manner consistent with evolution theory, and the more one rejects those dictates and accepts science as the core value, the more likely one is to behave in a manner inconsistent with evolution theory that they "accept" and "believe" in.
Correct, the secular enlightened societies can compensate for low birthrate by pulling in the people from the religious communities. The problem with this is you need them to come AND assimilate into the culture, increasing your stock of people for your culture. As the EU has seen with their North African immigrants, and the US has seen with SOME groups of immigrants, there is an increasing trend of mass immigration that combined with multiculturalism that decries forced assimilation, is resulting in these immigrant groups joining the country and economy as cheap labor, receiving citizenship of the adopted nation, but not assimilating into the culture.
Unless nation-state immigration policies begin to incorporate cultural assimilation, I think that it is far more likely that the expanding cultures will simply over-run the nation-states, grabbing control via Democracy instead of outright invasion.
Spoken as someone without a religious background. Real religious study is not simple, is not parroted. Each group has their own approach.
Judaism (Orthodox) -- Laity receive religious education through at least age 18, preferably with some afterwards, with basic grounds in Hebrew, Torah Laws, Rabbinic Laws, and some introductory Talmudic study. Those that go on to study for Smeicha (Rabinnic ordination) receive detailed extensive learning and testing. Learning is not memorization, but rather logical arguments to learn to issue a ruling. Ordination (Smeicha) is essentially a Jewish law degree, one is then qualified to sit on a Beit Din (House of Law) and render legal decisions. This involves learning the law, learning the debates of the Talmud, when to pull a minority opinion to issue lenient rulings, etc. Read some of the rulings of Rav. Moshe Feinsten who was America's leading Rabbinic authority for his generation, challenges some relatively long standing understandings (permitted shaving with certain electric shavers, for example), but had an extensive knowledge base to do so. The common religious Jew has a basic understanding of how to live a Jewish life, but nothing that deep.
Jewish (Sephardic) -- Now borrowing heavily from the Orthodox Ashkenazi Yeshiva model, but traditionally required father-to-son transmission of the basics of Judaism, with some of the more intelligent children studying with their Rav, and the best and brightest traveling to learn with other Rabbanim. Because of the heavy influence of the Rambam's works (especially in the Yemenite communities), heavily based upon rationalism and logic, less about simply relying on Mensorah (tradition) to establish behavior. Much less doctrinaire than the Orthodox Ashkenazi approach, but a simpler yet stricter approach to Jewish law... less about understanding the loopholes and exceptions through learning than about preserving customs and mysticism... Kabbalah study is routine here.
Jewish (non-Orthodox) -- Laity receive cursory education in reading Hebrew from ages 10-13, some do a high school after-school program. Religious leadership focuses on pastoral training with minimal advanced learning -- much more like the Protestant Churches -- learn the doctrine. If you are exemptionally interested, you may get involved in committees that make rulings, but generally focus on pastoral training.
Christianity (Protestant) -- Laity receive no education, interact with ministers with cursory knowledge of theology. Matches your understanding pretty well, very few really learn.
Christianity (Denomination Study) instead of taking pastoral positions, go into research into matters of theology. Will research positions, understand historical and theological underpinnings. Very rare, but it's their research that empowers the pastoral leaders to handle issues.
Christianity (Fundamentalist) -- heavy on the learning, lots of bible studies, but done largely without commentary. Much more legal than Protestants, but with literalism and without lots of scholarship. No organized denominational structure for issuing legally binding rulings, independents are empowered to make their own determinations and choose who to follow.
Catholicism -- Laity receive basic education (how to get to heaven), Priests can become pastoral or theological. Pope John Paul II was a pastoral priest and applied theologi
Some historians point to a declining birthrate as the cause of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Decadence and homosexuality (which avoided children) caused massive drops in birth rates, and eventually Rome collapsed.
If you think about the economics of inheritence, it's even more stark. Now we split inheritence by all children (traditionally only male, or lesser shares for daughters), but the number of children determines the wealth build up. A family with 4 heirs will pass along half the wealth as a family with 2 heirs. The secular families not only fail to maintain their share of the population, they build up wealth quickly over a few generations. Now we have wealthy children with trust funds... they aren't likely to take up arms and defend Rome... Rome's vassal system of poor soldiers from slave colonies and client-kingdoms let by officers of Roman stock simply collapsed when there weren't younger sons of aristocrats willing to become officers searching for glory. Apparently with enough wealth, one need not have glory.
Not terribly ironic, how did the Abrahamic faiths spread to cover half the world. The rules are quite simple:
1. Take virgin wives, be fruitful and multiple with them
2. If you don't have a child within 10 years, she's infertile, dump her
3. Don't have gay sex (which doesn't create children), but have lots of sex with your wife/wives about 10 days after her menstruation (when she's fertile)
4. Never use birth control, keep having children
5. Preserve and build the community, the community trumps the individual
That is a methodoly for taking over the world.
Contrast that with the secular ethos:
1. Sex is fun, have it as much as you want as often as you want, preferably for years (the most fertile ones), but make sure to use a condom
2. Marriage is something risky, push it off a while, just keep having sex for recreation first
3. More education is better... Age 16 isn't enough, a high school diploma @ 18 isn't enough, a college degree at 22 isn't really enough, how about some grad school (24-28)... DO NOT GET MARRIED BEFORE YOU FINISH OR WE TAKE YOUR FUNDING AWAY
4. Start your career before starting a family, wait a few more years
5. Don't have more than 2 kids, you're a breeder and sucking up resources... Let's cap every woman at 2 kids, and not wonder what happens when not all women have kids
6. Spoil your children, so they push off real life an extra few years...
7. Oh, and gay sex should be idealized, not stigmatized, and considered an innate behavior
8. Screw the community, individual liberty is all that matters, whatever makes you happy.
Which one will take over the world in a few generations?
The only reason I bring up the gay sex is that while I don't really care what people do, it certainly isn't a precreation-supported behavior. While a certain amount of sexual desire is innate and certainly biological, there is definitely some social shaping of it... Bisexuality amongst women moved from taboo to "sexy" and a MUCH higher percentage of teenagers poll as "bisexual" than the general population... Doesn't mean that they are acting on it for real, but social factors can certainly influence behavior. A man who mostly feels urges towards men but occaisionally does towards women might be able to marry and have a family if under social pressure to do so, but if gay sex is an equally valid option will most likely go that route and probably be happier... if you goal is individual happiness, than gay rights is a civil right, if your goal is societal growth, then it's to be condemned (perhaps by
The fact that some Doctors and Nurses think that they can tell doesn't mean that they can. The process you are describing is not a statistical analysis of treatment, it's assigning treatment instead of on ability to pay on ability of loved ones to show up. Similarly to the general social medicine situation where the politically connected get the best treatment, it all seems less fair than the American ability to pay.
It's basically assigning woth to the life based upon how much the doctor's decide that that life is worth... that hardly seems to be the role that we want them in.
My point was that the fact that 80% of costs are in the last year is something we know in retrospect. You don't know if the $50,000 heart treatment will work or not. If it doesn't work, then that was $50,000 in the last year. You often have survival rates of 50% - 90% for major treatment, in all cases some people, statistically speaking, will have "wasted treatment."
Some more numbers from a sampling of VA and Medicare benefits from a government study, the abstract is available here
Basically, people get sicker as they get older. Costs escalate dramatically in the end, and eventually you get too sick to save. We then look backwards and see what we spent in the last 30-days, last year, and realize it was a lot of money for very little time, and you've have rather had those 30 days with family than with hospital staff.
Big costly events in your life. Birth, OB/Gyn is expensive, and early pediatric monitors (and treatment of any conditions) is costly. Although the majority of children are fine, a small number require very costly interventions to save. If you go inside a NICU, you'll also observe heroic attempts to save a massively pre-mature (1-2 lbs kids) children, when the survival rate is around 5%. We watched this when a friend had a child in NICU (who thank G-d was only being monitored for what turned out to be reflux, but the little helpless babies were heartbreaking).
Childhood is relatively cheap, check-ups, wellness, and vaccination aren't costly. Sure some percentage of kids will break limbs and need medical care, but even that is relatively cheap. Adulthood doesn't costs much (if we charge OB/Gyn to the child and not the mother, just to understand medical costs), regular screening, cancer treatment for a small percentage, but most will survive at that point and it probably isn't an issue.
Older people (starting in their 50s, but accellerating in 60s) start taking preventative drugs for things like cholesterol, high blood pressure, etc. This daily maintenance drugs may start adding up to a couple hundred a month, but push off expensive stuff. It's when "old age" kicks in that we start seeing expensive treatments. And that is what the VA saw as well.
The American one is in the best fiscal shape, because our country is the richest. You are having massive economic problems in the rest of the civilized world because the demographic changes are more severe, not less severe. It's rather simple, 1 retiree:2.2 workers means that providing them with welfare is a huge burden. 1 retiree:4 workers (like now), means that there is a large burden. 1 retiree:13 workers like was in the system historically makes supporting them easy and moral.
The problem with the status quo is that you're not supporting people that need support, you're supporting them just because they are 65. People are entering retirement at 62, when they COULD work until 70. When most jobs were physically intensive, that was not the case, but is there a reason that teachers need to collect early retirement often in their 50s and government retirement money in their 60s when we complain about a teacher shortage?
The rest of the world's retirement systems are collapsing faster, at least in the US the population is growing slightly, in Europe it's shrinking slowly, and shrinking dramatically amongst the non-Muslim population. Given the relationship between the Muslim and European communities, I find it unlikely that they will tolerate supporting a bunch of old white Christian women in old age.
Something like 80% of medical costs are incurred in the last year of life. However, we can't necessarily make decisions based upon this, because that's a retroactive evaluation. Some 80-year olds with cancer will burn through $250,000 in treatment and die inside of the year, making that a huge amount of expenses for nothing. Others will pull-through, living another 5-10 years in good shape, then dying of something different and unrelated. For the latter, the $250,000 was no doubt reasonably spent, for the former, we wasted resources.
The fact is you can't separate when the treatment is extreme and unreasonable, and when it was reasonable until after they go.
That said about the longer lifespans, the modern entitlement complex is a disaster. Social security solved two problems, getting the elderly out of the workforce (lowering the unemployment rate, we creates a drag on the economy beyond the fact that those people aren't working), and preventing the sickly elderly from being indigent, something reasonable to avoid.
If the retirement age was raised to be the equivalent in terms of life expectancy as it was when social security was created it would be 89 today. That's right, MOST PEOPLE didn't live to collect it, it was to help the helpless elderly. We decided that we were entitled to stop working at 65, while others were responsible for it. I'm not sure why that's an entitlement (I don't begrudge anyone that lived below their means and saved up for retirement), but because we didn't raise it continuously, there is no clean solution now.
I'm not suggesting the people should HAVE to work until their death... but retirement, like vacations, is a luxury that is expensive, and it's not clear why one has a right to ask others to pay for it. The true tragedy is the mythical trust fund, an accounting shell game, has given people the mistaken impression that their have "paid into the system" and therefore are entitled to social security, which is why the system is collapsing on itself.
Note that it's called social security, not a national pension, it's not a reward for payment into the system, it's a safety blanket for the disabled, orpaned, and elderly that need it, and never should have become a way of life.
The rest of the country is moving away from lawsuits, and moving towards binding arbitration? Create a legally mandated review and report system, and Doctors who are statistically out of whack get reviewed and if it keeps up, lose their license. Those hurt by incompetants should have a scientifically valid avenue for complaining and receiving restitution. However, the current system is busted.
Current system, we do not award damages based upon merit, but based upon jury awards. While jury awards are a reasonable way of dealing with many torts, they also introduct tremendous unfairness and confusion. If a medical treatment has an 80% success rate, and yours failed, you should not have a tort... sometimes there is bad luck. If you want to protect people from bad luck, then let's pool risk and do insurance. Create a mandatory "tax" on medical services, based upon percentage failure rates and damages for treatments (we already have the billing codes) and let those that lose life's lottery collect from the pool.
However, medicine by jury is HORRID. My wife's delivery was all messed up by overeager Doctors and our need to fight back to stop unnecessary interventions. Unfortunately, "high risk" in medicine is anything over 1%, and as a result the masses suffer to protect the outliers. So little of medicine is based upon statistical evidence, and more about what is the standard procedure so I can defend my actions in front of a jury.
Back to the cost issue, even trial lawyers defending the practice like Sen. Edwards (D - N.C., retired) claim that malpractice is only 1% of the costs, but that seems unusually low. My father who has a successful practice had several years where his malpractice insurance and his takehome were roughly equal, so that's a huge burden. However, defensive medicine, NOT malpractice is the problem.
For example, a pregnant woman can take OTC vitamins that are good enough, cost? $10/month. That same pregnant woman will likely get a perscription for vitamins (my wife did) for $55/month (co-pay, $15/mo.). It only cost us $5/month difference, but the "medical costs" increased over 5-fold.
Likewise, often the new drugs are only slightly better than the old drugs, where they are statistically similar for most cases but slightly better in some. in addition, the generic may cost $2 - $4/pill, while the new perscription pill may cost $200 - $800. Now, I would personally be happy to cough up some money to avoid the low-risk change of complications during surgery, but is that reasonable that you get those drugs for everyone? Would it be better that most people take the risk of complication (which is usually already under 1%) than run up costs?
The problem isn't the costs, but that is you go with the cheaper option, 99% of your patients saved money, but 1% now have a tort against you.
That's why pediatricians perscribe anti-biotics for ear infections, despite the OVERWHELMING majority of them being viral and the anti-biotics have no affect.
Defensive medicine combined with everyone being entitled to the newest, most expensive drugs results in the current out of control medical costs increases.
It's a city government fund, which means that a politician has controls of billions of other people's money. He can do what he can to score points... Basically, he puts at risk the pension returns for the firefighters, police, etc. (not a huge one here, but it theoretically could lower their return from Google stock), but he gets political credit with environmentalists when running for future office. He didn't risk a penny of his money, but the firemen or the city if it guaranteed a pay-out will have to pay for this in the future, while the politician has used his leverage with environmentalists to win higher office.
I'm not suggesting that this is a good or a bad idea, but I AM suggesting that it is horrible (and corrupt) when public officials use public (or other people's money) for their own gain. Sure it's not an outright embezzlement like putting money in his pocket would be, but using the money to score political credit with people that will help him make more money...
Well that isn't behavior I like to see lauded as good...
Put up your own money, survey the shareholders, whatever, but to do something with other people's money for your personal benefit...
Some people may want to change their lifestyle to lower their footprint, that's nice. However, I choose a lifestyle that I enjoy. Will I do things that reduces the impact with no cost to me... maybe... recycling is annoying, and doesn't save me money, so it's not a high priority... maybe I'll do it one day, but we use SO few recyclable items it's not worth the effort to store recycling bins. Maybe as the kids get older it will become worth it, but it doesn't make sense with our usage. CFL however, especially in lights that we leave on for hours at a time? Been doing so. About to replace the lights in the kitchen, starting to with the bathroom vanity globe lights (actually burn whiter, cooler, etc.), and when you use bars of 6-8 lights, works fine.
Will I put them in the dining room? We tried them to reduce heat, but the ugly color they throw off made it not fun to sit in there. Likewise I tried them in our sitting room, don't like them, so out they came.
However, if you want me to get used to being in a darker house? Why, because you tell me to? Go to hell, I like my lifestyle, bust my ass to support it, and don't want to give it up because you want me to.
Long delayed post, pulled up my history and saw this. You are defining raising children successfully to "have the ability to financially support their family." You are setting the bar pretty high, the ability to have a nice middle class life.
However, biologically, "raising children successfully" means that your offspring reach the age at which they can reproduce, then reproducing. When you observe 2-3 generations of "welfare moms" with teenage daughters that have babies, you will notice that they are, biologically speaking, successfully raising children and spreading their genetic component. While the "baby daddies" may not pass their cultural traits on, they will pass their genetics on.
Your listed reasons as to why adultery isn't rewarded financially, it ignores my point, it's rewarded genetically. And those things that discourage that behavior are true for middle class and up families, but not lower and working class, where lawsuits and paternity tests are more rare. Since the birth rates are much higher further down on the totem poll, it IS rewarded where birth control is less used and paternity suits less common.
There is a HUGE cultural gulf between the US and Europe with regards to minorities. The United States, from the days of the colonies onward, has generally tolerated heretics and offshoot groups outside of local areas. While a town might have had an official religion, or even a county, it rarely expanded beyond a small local area. In addition, from the founding of the republic, the concept of all people here being citizens (except for Indians and black slaves) helped form that culture. In Europe, Jews were not considered citizens until relatively recently, and while having to contribute taxes to the crown were generally left alone complete with their own courts for civil and criminal matters, and communities. Similar rules applied to other groups of "others."
With Napoleon's conquests, the idea of people as citizens took hold, but it was culturally foreign, and integration never happened. Combine this with relatively small areas with different languages and religions, and you have homogenous countries that have been reared to hate the other because one was often at war with them.
Indeed, the initial efforts of the Nazi's were not the extermination of the Jews (although that was the end goal, they took stages), the first effort was to separate the assimilated Jews out of German culture, restoring their status as "others" to be distrusted by the people. Before they rounded my ancestors up into camps, they prohibited inter-marriage, and forced them to be separated from the culture. This was an important first step, because in Germany, the Jews were highly assimilated into the local culture, indeed the Reform movement was born in Germany setting the goal to assimilate, which is why so much of Reform cantorials and other German Jewish customs are borrowed from Lutheran protestant Curches through the assimilation there. In order to rile the people of Germany up against them, they needed to draw a line between Germans and Jews, which naturally made Jews the enemies and ripe for being attacked.
Europe's problems of racism and xenophobia stem from a culture of being at was with other groups and having them nearby. In contrast, in the United States, the former Slave and Jim Crow states, which have had a much shorter history of integration, suffer from more severe attitudes towards different races. It's not that racism and persecution doesn't exist in former Union States (it does, and may often be more severe), but the portion of the populace that would support race based laws is more minor.
I don't think that one can simply point to the US's First Amendment and Europe's post-War speech regulations and attempt to show that the latter causes growth of neo-nazism and the former stops it. I think that we have yet to see Europe get 3 generations from killing people for being "other" and Americans outside of the deep south haven't fought over the matter in 150 years and even in the deep south the civil rights movement was accomplished with relatively minor violence. Sure their were showdowns over integration of schools, but no pogroms. Even the worst abuses of people by the KKK pale in comparison to the European's behaviors, including wars over churches, kidnapping Jewish children if someone claimed the child was baptized, prohibitions of land ownership, etc.
There is a massive cultural gap between the US and Europe in these regards, the Europe's cultural elites are so removed from it they don't understand it. While the gulf is smaller in the US, our elites understand it enough to make fun of those that hate others, which is probably better than ignoring it... call someone an idiot or wrong, they fight back, just mock them, and they get embarrassed...
Everywhere by the US has sugar, NOT corn syrup. However, because of high tariffs on sugar, and heavy corn subsidies in the US, high fructose corn syrup is cheaper than sugar in the US, so most products use it. In the rest of the world, importing sugar is cheaper than corn syrup, better for the customers, and tastier, so nobody else using all the corn syrup products that are used in the US.
Every Jew gets to realize this during Passover, as all our corn syrup products are unavailable to us for a week. In fact, it's the ONLY time you can reliably get Coke/Pepsi with sugar instead of corn syrup and is tastier.
It's a shame, a short-sited policy, but benefits a few (I think two) wealthy families that own the US sugar production and benefit from high prices.