My kidney stone was fairly huge when discovered, and so did not attempt to pass itself, therefore no pain. My urologist went in with a laser and turned it into little grains of sand. OK, I bled for 2 weeks afterward, got used to seeing red pee, and still half-expect to see red pee now a year later. But it has healed. Still, it would be preferable to jump on a coaster, dislodge a sand-grain-sized kidney stone such as I passed AfTER my laser surgery, and 1) not have any pain and 2) not have any surgery and 3) not have any bleeding.
This is a real nice excuse for a 69 year old man such as myself to go ride rollercoasters with all the kids. Maybe I should get a season ticket...
Locomotives run on diesel, so more CO2. Could they run on electricity? Maybe. We have 100's of thousands of miles of freight rail, and converting them all to grid electricity may or may not be possible. Ever notice that tunnels have only inches of clearance? Where do you put the extra wiring? And of course we still can't make the grid electricity with just solar and wind because if the wind stops blowing at night, we're screwed. Maybe solvable in the long run by a global high voltage DC power grid, but then do we want to rely on electricity from potential enemies like Russia just to get electricity from the Ukraine? We should, as a strategic plan, keep our electricity generated within our borders, but to do that, we have to be able to store solar and wind electricity. We can't yet do that.
I do hope they get it worked out, but I was speaking of the present. According to the Wikipedia entry for Li-Air batteries, they still need significantly more development to be suitable for automotive uses. That may or may not ever happen. I hope it does. I would _love_ to have an electric car that will do everything my Subaru WRX will do now, including not breaking me up when I have to pay for it. Replacing the batteries rapidly would be a suitable substitute for having several-minute charging, so that's not a big issue in my book. It just has to work at the -30 degrees F that I've experienced in NW Ohio during the blizzard of '78 (My 77 Jeep started right up) and not commit suicide because of the temperature. Again, I _want_ an electric car, but I want to be able to set out for one of my favorite destinations, Tucson, Az. for events that I participate in there, and be able to doing in the same amount of time as I do with the WRX. That is about 3 1/2 days. I normally do 600 - 800 miles a day for the 2400 mile journey. Sitting around and waiting for a 45 minute charging of a battery would not work. Otherwise, electricity should be far more economical than gasoline in terms of $ per energy unit. I want that.
OK, it was 87 - I thought that happened during my 2nd 1-lap, but it was my first. We were car 10, my buddy was in car 65 in a Yugo. We won, BTW. Anyway, I just misremembered the year.
And no, electrics can't do that, they''re not ever going to be doing that in ordinary lithium batteries. Those things need about a 10X reduction in price and a 2X - 3X gain in performance so they aren't so big and heavy and the cars don't have to be shaped like an airplane in order to cut the wind.
As for how much driving I need per day, today is a 40 mile round trip to town. On the days that I eat Pizza at Pizza Hut, it is a 30 mile round trip in the other direction. Yes, lotsa days I eat pizza and go to town both on the same day. Lotsa people drive 50 - 70 miles each way to work because they can only afford real estate down here in the boonies and the work is mostly in the big city, DC. The Tesla will do that, but it is around $100K.
I don't really think we're going to have electric vehicles 100% for a few decades. We can't just replace 90% of the cars with electric 'cuz then we'll lose the economy of scale with gasoline and more importantly diesel, and the the costs to move things by truck will have to contend with $10 - $20 / gallon diesel and American's lives STILL will be diminished with huge living cost increases.
Maybe someone will eventually stumble onto a better material than Lithium to store electricity. Maybe cold fusion wiil become real and every vehicle will have a reactor. But we either solve this 100%, so's we can leave the oil, gas, and coal in the ground, or we add to the CO2 in the air. Perhaps we can construct enough "scrubbers" to capture the CO2 out of the air and turn it back into carbon and oxygen, but that sounds expensive. But then at some point we _still_ run out of fossil fuels, even if it is 300 years in the future maybe, so we're still needing electricity and better batteries.
Actually, we don't. The most expensive cars are simply good for "in this region." The less expensive cars are only good for "around town." The batteries run down far too quickly, and take too long to recharge. No electric car today can perform as well as a 1989 Yugo. In 1989, some friends of mine drove a 1989 Yugo in the 1 Lap of America rally, 9000 miles in 10 days of circumnavigating the USA. No electric car could do that today. Then there's the trucks, locomotives, ships, boats, and airplanes. We absolutely do need to leave the oil in the ground, because the CO2 in the atmosphere is going to take 100,000 years to be scrubbed clean as it is. We're just adding to it every day.
And there's not a lot of hope in sight. People currently working the battery problem are not having a lot of success. See:
This scientists are currently coming up with just one answer on batteries, it is Lithium, and Lithium is inadequate. And we can't simply say that Lithium batteries are expensive and we'll just spend what it takes because that hammers the poor, driving those that are in poverty deeper into it and casting those that are just making it now into poverty. Poverty is more deadly than smoking, as it will take up to 10 years off your life. Smoking is only "good" for 7. Converting to batteries now would be a cruel, elitist thing to do.
We're either going to have to solve the battery problem, or solve some way to operate our vehicles on grid electricity done with nukes and geo. Wind and solar are too intermittent - the wind stops blowing at night and your iron lung becomes your coffin.... Not many iron lungs left, but there's the emergency room operation that goes dark, the backup generators fail to start, and the patient dies for lack of electricity in the ER. Dunno how to get grid electricity even to cars, let alone airplanes and boats in rivers and ships at sea.
Right now, we're really screwed. Will the brave scientists find the magic battery and save us like they did when they invented nuclear weapons and ended WW2? Stay tuned.
You don't understand. Hams do this for enjoyment. If these restrictions ruin enjoyment, then they won't do ham radio at all. So, when the community does need emergency communications, there will be no one with a radio that is able to help. People aren't going to become hams just to spend money to be of help in an emergency, they spend the money to have an enjoyable hobby that has as a byproduct the ability to help the community when emergency communications is needed.
His sign just might cause a potential burglar or home invader to instead choose your unsigned house to invade and do his rape/kill thing, which is what he's hoping to avoid for himself.
Otherwise, maybe he just wants the light to be able to walk out in the driveway at night and have a light come on so he doesn't trip over the bicycle that his kid just left laying in the driveway. My own security light is pole-mounted and not motion-sensitive, so its nice to go out and be able to walk around without having to take a flashlight to not fall over something unexpected.
Yes, I've given up on inkjets as well. I don't use color printing sometimes for months at a time, and the next time you go back to the inkjet, 1 or more of the cartridges is belly up from just sitting around. Have a color laser and it is OK for the sort of printing I do. I take a lot of photos, but rarely print them, so when I do... I'll just go to Walmart and use their printers. Have Lexmark B&W laser and Brother Color Laser. Both are not bothered by the HP sabotage of its users. Only sabotage of the moment is the stupid Microsoft popup that says that I have to fix my Microsoft account. No, I'm not going to fix my Microsoft account, I don't even WANT my Microsoft account, and don't know how to do the "fix" anyway...
I drive. Sold my 2012 car last year, in May, with 3 years and 1 month on it, and 124,000 miles on the odometer. I get around, and I do it by driving. I got fed up with the TSA a long time ago, and just decided not to be poked, felt-up, x-rayed, or have stuff stolen out of my luggage. Just stuff everything into the trunk and hit the road. No more illegal 4th amendment violations for me.
Yeah, units _are_ important, and 2 X 10^12 B / 10^5 B/sec (10^5 B/sec = 100kBs) = 2 X 10^7 sec. An extra "k" crept into the units label in my original writing, but the proper divisor is 10^5, or 100,000 B/s, resulting in 2 X 10^7 seconds, and that makes for a very long time to do upload 2 Tb from these parts of the world, and this is Virginia, not Zimbabwe.
C'mon, online backup? Really? The poster said "terabytes." Cable companies in this area say "hundreds of kilobits per second" as an upload speed. That'd be 10's of kilobytes per second. How long? Get optimistic at, say, 800 kbps -> 80 - 100 kBps and you have a really long time. Lessee, 2 X 10^12 bytes / 1 X 10^5 kB/s = 2 X 10^7 seconds = 20 million seconds to upload 2 terabytes. 20 X 10^6 seconds / 3.6 X 10^3 seconds / hour = about 5.5 X 10^3 hours, or 5,500 hours. 5,500 hours / 24 hours / day = 229 days. I aborted Carbonite some years ago when I had only a couple hundred gigabytes,it was _NOT_ uploading every single file on my disk, and looked like it was going to exceed 3 weeks to do it.
that I am not rich enough to buy a car that doesn't do everything I want it to. I LOVE the idea of electric cars, but... every now and then I need my car to get me 800 miles or so down the road in a day, for a few days straight. My Subaru WRX will do that just fine, probably on 2 tanks of gas. The electric car won't. Possibly the Tesla with the supercharger will, but it won't do it on a single refill like the WRX.
The electric car has a long way to go to be a viable general purpose vehicle. it is a niche vehicle, for near-home travel. I can't buy a car _just_ for that.
...is some kind of foolproof answer to anything. My Android currently has a blutooth function that is hosed - does not pair with either the phone interface in my car's radio or the phone interface in my big GPS. When it does pair, then it drops out the next day. And, its like pulling teeth to get it to see my fitbit. Its toast. But neither of these functions are all that important. OTOH, if I couldn't use headphones with it 'cuz the blutooth is toast, that would be a repair or replacement bill. Replacing my HTC-1 with the new HTC-10 appears to be about a $699 expense due to the "$100 off" offer going around. Pricey damned thing. May have to drop around to one of those repair places that have sprung up and see what a new mobo would cost to have installed...
I investigated that and decided I wasn't rich enough. Plus, there's the problem of exactly where do you ship it to, your motel, and then were do you ship it from. That last one is NOT your motel because they won't do it - I tried that with the post office. They wouldn't mess with it at the motel. OTOH, there are specific shipping companies for exactly this problem that are cheaper than UPS and FedEx, and if I get back to this sport for which I need to ship baggage / equipment all over the country, I may fall to the task of determining which one is best and which one is cheapest.
My problem is, not rarely, of having to have certain equipment until just before I fly. That is, I can't dump it in UPS or FedEx a week earlier and let it bounce around on a semi out to California for a week, I need to send it maybe a day or 2 before I fly. With the regular services, this gets into "2nd day air" or "Overnight" and my bags are always on the teetering edge of the 50 lb limit the airlines have. Pricey pricey.
Yeah, the game of economics is still not understood. We still can't definitively show what caused the great depression, nor whether government intervention such as WPA and PWA and "relief" shortened or extended the great depression. There is disagreement amongst the experts. Economics in not an exact science yet.
...doesn't work, as proven by the Russians who tried it with their agriculture and other aspects, and were starving. The whole thing is to be avoided. We should strive to avoid as much government involvement in things as possible.
I traded in a 3 year old car last year with 124,000 miles on the odometer. I very, very rarely fly any more due to the TSA nonsense. I load my junk in the trunk, climb into the driver's seat, and drive 2,500 miles to and 2,500 miles back from an event in Arizona, and then I have events to go to in St. Louis, Indianapolis, La Crosse, Madison, Pittsburgh, and Southern New Jersey. If I do an event in California, I MIGHT fly. I also MIGHT ship my bags by other means, too. Enough of the nonsense of violating the 4th Amendment by having GOVERNMENT agents blanket searching people just because they want to travel on an airplane. The GOVERNMENT can't legally do that, but they ignore the Constitution and do it anyway. Lots of the Constitution is being ignored, more every day, and I for one am not going to cooperate. They can stick it.
my own robocall blocking system. Basically, I don't answer anything outside my area code that isn't in my address book so it gets identified. Got about 6 calls today that I refused. Works for me.
Would be nice to have a way to block the robos, tho...
I think "let" is too strong a word, implying willfulness. We certainly fail to prevent these infant deaths, but lightly tromping thru the linked documents didn't come up with a reason for the differences. It seems nobody knows how to get the IM deaths to decrease, although the last paper hints that at-home nurse visits would help a lot. But, after reading them, I don't know. The 1st paper says something to the effect, "No, its not because we don't have universal healthcare" which I find surprising. So, I figure that I now "know" less than I thought I knew about the subject before reading the 4 linked papers. No, I didn't read 'em in full, I have other things to do today, but read the conclusions, and... the solution just doesn't seem to be there.
What's really wasteful is that when I have an appointment with a new doctor, and sometimes one of the old ones I haven't seen for a while, I get a ream of papers with questions and boxes to check, and so forth. I fill them out, it often takes 15 - 20 minutes (How many operations have you had? I'm 69, and that would be answered "a bunch.") and then give all this paper to the office staff. Is there any doubt that some poor schmuck has to enter all this garbage all over again into a computer, maybe more than once? They could easily either send me a web link to fill all that stuff in directly to the computer, or provide computers in the waiting room where I could still do it myself. It would get entered once, and it wouldn't involved doctor or his people expending time on it.
"I'm not really sure I care that a US millionaire can get outstanding care"
I'm not a millionaire, far from it. I'm just a retired gov't engineer that worked in the defense industry, never broke $100K / yr except for "hazard pay" when I went to Iraq a couple times, and... I get the best care available in the USA. The middle class has access to the best care in the USA, its not millionaires.
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No. Neither swings nor centrifuges are as much fun as rollercoasters. No button it, willya?
My kidney stone was fairly huge when discovered, and so did not attempt to pass itself, therefore no pain. My urologist went in with a laser and turned it into little grains of sand. OK, I bled for 2 weeks afterward, got used to seeing red pee, and still half-expect to see red pee now a year later. But it has healed. Still, it would be preferable to jump on a coaster, dislodge a sand-grain-sized kidney stone such as I passed AfTER my laser surgery, and 1) not have any pain and 2) not have any surgery and 3) not have any bleeding.
This is a real nice excuse for a 69 year old man such as myself to go ride rollercoasters with all the kids. Maybe I should get a season ticket...
Locomotives run on diesel, so more CO2. Could they run on electricity? Maybe. We have 100's of thousands of miles of freight rail, and converting them all to grid electricity may or may not be possible. Ever notice that tunnels have only inches of clearance? Where do you put the extra wiring? And of course we still can't make the grid electricity with just solar and wind because if the wind stops blowing at night, we're screwed. Maybe solvable in the long run by a global high voltage DC power grid, but then do we want to rely on electricity from potential enemies like Russia just to get electricity from the Ukraine? We should, as a strategic plan, keep our electricity generated within our borders, but to do that, we have to be able to store solar and wind electricity. We can't yet do that.
I do hope they get it worked out, but I was speaking of the present. According to the Wikipedia entry for Li-Air batteries, they still need significantly more development to be suitable for automotive uses. That may or may not ever happen. I hope it does. I would _love_ to have an electric car that will do everything my Subaru WRX will do now, including not breaking me up when I have to pay for it. Replacing the batteries rapidly would be a suitable substitute for having several-minute charging, so that's not a big issue in my book. It just has to work at the -30 degrees F that I've experienced in NW Ohio during the blizzard of '78 (My 77 Jeep started right up) and not commit suicide because of the temperature. Again, I _want_ an electric car, but I want to be able to set out for one of my favorite destinations, Tucson, Az. for events that I participate in there, and be able to doing in the same amount of time as I do with the WRX. That is about 3 1/2 days. I normally do 600 - 800 miles a day for the 2400 mile journey. Sitting around and waiting for a 45 minute charging of a battery would not work. Otherwise, electricity should be far more economical than gasoline in terms of $ per energy unit. I want that.
OK, it was 87 - I thought that happened during my 2nd 1-lap, but it was my first. We were car 10, my buddy was in car 65 in a Yugo. We won, BTW. Anyway, I just misremembered the year.
And no, electrics can't do that, they''re not ever going to be doing that in ordinary lithium batteries. Those things need about a 10X reduction in price and a 2X - 3X gain in performance so they aren't so big and heavy and the cars don't have to be shaped like an airplane in order to cut the wind.
As for how much driving I need per day, today is a 40 mile round trip to town. On the days that I eat Pizza at Pizza Hut, it is a 30 mile round trip in the other direction. Yes, lotsa days I eat pizza and go to town both on the same day. Lotsa people drive 50 - 70 miles each way to work because they can only afford real estate down here in the boonies and the work is mostly in the big city, DC. The Tesla will do that, but it is around $100K.
I don't really think we're going to have electric vehicles 100% for a few decades. We can't just replace 90% of the cars with electric 'cuz then we'll lose the economy of scale with gasoline and more importantly diesel, and the the costs to move things by truck will have to contend with $10 - $20 / gallon diesel and American's lives STILL will be diminished with huge living cost increases.
Maybe someone will eventually stumble onto a better material than Lithium to store electricity. Maybe cold fusion wiil become real and every vehicle will have a reactor. But we either solve this 100%, so's we can leave the oil, gas, and coal in the ground, or we add to the CO2 in the air. Perhaps we can construct enough "scrubbers" to capture the CO2 out of the air and turn it back into carbon and oxygen, but that sounds expensive. But then at some point we _still_ run out of fossil fuels, even if it is 300 years in the future maybe, so we're still needing electricity and better batteries.
Actually, we don't. The most expensive cars are simply good for "in this region." The less expensive cars are only good for "around town." The batteries run down far too quickly, and take too long to recharge. No electric car today can perform as well as a 1989 Yugo. In 1989, some friends of mine drove a 1989 Yugo in the 1 Lap of America rally, 9000 miles in 10 days of circumnavigating the USA. No electric car could do that today. Then there's the trucks, locomotives, ships, boats, and airplanes. We absolutely do need to leave the oil in the ground, because the CO2 in the atmosphere is going to take 100,000 years to be scrubbed clean as it is. We're just adding to it every day.
And there's not a lot of hope in sight. People currently working the battery problem are not having a lot of success. See:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...
This scientists are currently coming up with just one answer on batteries, it is Lithium, and Lithium is inadequate. And we can't simply say that Lithium batteries are expensive and we'll just spend what it takes because that hammers the poor, driving those that are in poverty deeper into it and casting those that are just making it now into poverty. Poverty is more deadly than smoking, as it will take up to 10 years off your life. Smoking is only "good" for 7. Converting to batteries now would be a cruel, elitist thing to do.
We're either going to have to solve the battery problem, or solve some way to operate our vehicles on grid electricity done with nukes and geo. Wind and solar are too intermittent - the wind stops blowing at night and your iron lung becomes your coffin.... Not many iron lungs left, but there's the emergency room operation that goes dark, the backup generators fail to start, and the patient dies for lack of electricity in the ER. Dunno how to get grid electricity even to cars, let alone airplanes and boats in rivers and ships at sea.
Right now, we're really screwed. Will the brave scientists find the magic battery and save us like they did when they invented nuclear weapons and ended WW2? Stay tuned.
We can't do 10. We don't know how.
I guess we should be looking at geoengineering, then...
You don't understand. Hams do this for enjoyment. If these restrictions ruin enjoyment, then they won't do ham radio at all. So, when the community does need emergency communications, there will be no one with a radio that is able to help. People aren't going to become hams just to spend money to be of help in an emergency, they spend the money to have an enjoyable hobby that has as a byproduct the ability to help the community when emergency communications is needed.
His sign just might cause a potential burglar or home invader to instead choose your unsigned house to invade and do his rape/kill thing, which is what he's hoping to avoid for himself.
Otherwise, maybe he just wants the light to be able to walk out in the driveway at night and have a light come on so he doesn't trip over the bicycle that his kid just left laying in the driveway. My own security light is pole-mounted and not motion-sensitive, so its nice to go out and be able to walk around without having to take a flashlight to not fall over something unexpected.
Yes, I've given up on inkjets as well. I don't use color printing sometimes for months at a time, and the next time you go back to the inkjet, 1 or more of the cartridges is belly up from just sitting around. Have a color laser and it is OK for the sort of printing I do. I take a lot of photos, but rarely print them, so when I do... I'll just go to Walmart and use their printers. Have Lexmark B&W laser and Brother Color Laser. Both are not bothered by the HP sabotage of its users. Only sabotage of the moment is the stupid Microsoft popup that says that I have to fix my Microsoft account. No, I'm not going to fix my Microsoft account, I don't even WANT my Microsoft account, and don't know how to do the "fix" anyway...
I drive. Sold my 2012 car last year, in May, with 3 years and 1 month on it, and 124,000 miles on the odometer. I get around, and I do it by driving. I got fed up with the TSA a long time ago, and just decided not to be poked, felt-up, x-rayed, or have stuff stolen out of my luggage. Just stuff everything into the trunk and hit the road. No more illegal 4th amendment violations for me.
Yeah, units _are_ important, and 2 X 10^12 B / 10^5 B/sec (10^5 B/sec = 100kBs) = 2 X 10^7 sec. An extra "k" crept into the units label in my original writing, but the proper divisor is 10^5, or 100,000 B/s, resulting in 2 X 10^7 seconds, and that makes for a very long time to do upload 2 Tb from these parts of the world, and this is Virginia, not Zimbabwe.
C'mon, online backup? Really? The poster said "terabytes." Cable companies in this area say "hundreds of kilobits per second" as an upload speed. That'd be 10's of kilobytes per second. How long? Get optimistic at, say, 800 kbps -> 80 - 100 kBps and you have a really long time. Lessee, 2 X 10^12 bytes / 1 X 10^5 kB/s = 2 X 10^7 seconds = 20 million seconds to upload 2 terabytes. 20 X 10^6 seconds / 3.6 X 10^3 seconds / hour = about 5.5 X 10^3 hours, or 5,500 hours. 5,500 hours / 24 hours / day = 229 days. I aborted Carbonite some years ago when I had only a couple hundred gigabytes,it was _NOT_ uploading every single file on my disk, and looked like it was going to exceed 3 weeks to do it.
that I am not rich enough to buy a car that doesn't do everything I want it to. I LOVE the idea of electric cars, but... every now and then I need my car to get me 800 miles or so down the road in a day, for a few days straight. My Subaru WRX will do that just fine, probably on 2 tanks of gas. The electric car won't. Possibly the Tesla with the supercharger will, but it won't do it on a single refill like the WRX.
The electric car has a long way to go to be a viable general purpose vehicle. it is a niche vehicle, for near-home travel. I can't buy a car _just_ for that.
...is some kind of foolproof answer to anything. My Android currently has a blutooth function that is hosed - does not pair with either the phone interface in my car's radio or the phone interface in my big GPS. When it does pair, then it drops out the next day. And, its like pulling teeth to get it to see my fitbit. Its toast. But neither of these functions are all that important. OTOH, if I couldn't use headphones with it 'cuz the blutooth is toast, that would be a repair or replacement bill. Replacing my HTC-1 with the new HTC-10 appears to be about a $699 expense due to the "$100 off" offer going around. Pricey damned thing. May have to drop around to one of those repair places that have sprung up and see what a new mobo would cost to have installed...
I investigated that and decided I wasn't rich enough. Plus, there's the problem of exactly where do you ship it to, your motel, and then were do you ship it from. That last one is NOT your motel because they won't do it - I tried that with the post office. They wouldn't mess with it at the motel. OTOH, there are specific shipping companies for exactly this problem that are cheaper than UPS and FedEx, and if I get back to this sport for which I need to ship baggage / equipment all over the country, I may fall to the task of determining which one is best and which one is cheapest.
My problem is, not rarely, of having to have certain equipment until just before I fly. That is, I can't dump it in UPS or FedEx a week earlier and let it bounce around on a semi out to California for a week, I need to send it maybe a day or 2 before I fly. With the regular services, this gets into "2nd day air" or "Overnight" and my bags are always on the teetering edge of the 50 lb limit the airlines have. Pricey pricey.
Yeah, the game of economics is still not understood. We still can't definitively show what caused the great depression, nor whether government intervention such as WPA and PWA and "relief" shortened or extended the great depression. There is disagreement amongst the experts. Economics in not an exact science yet.
...doesn't work, as proven by the Russians who tried it with their agriculture and other aspects, and were starving. The whole thing is to be avoided. We should strive to avoid as much government involvement in things as possible.
I traded in a 3 year old car last year with 124,000 miles on the odometer. I very, very rarely fly any more due to the TSA nonsense. I load my junk in the trunk, climb into the driver's seat, and drive 2,500 miles to and 2,500 miles back from an event in Arizona, and then I have events to go to in St. Louis, Indianapolis, La Crosse, Madison, Pittsburgh, and Southern New Jersey. If I do an event in California, I MIGHT fly. I also MIGHT ship my bags by other means, too. Enough of the nonsense of violating the 4th Amendment by having GOVERNMENT agents blanket searching people just because they want to travel on an airplane. The GOVERNMENT can't legally do that, but they ignore the Constitution and do it anyway. Lots of the Constitution is being ignored, more every day, and I for one am not going to cooperate. They can stick it.
my own robocall blocking system. Basically, I don't answer anything outside my area code that isn't in my address book so it gets identified. Got about 6 calls today that I refused. Works for me.
Would be nice to have a way to block the robos, tho...
"But why does the USA let babies die?"
I think "let" is too strong a word, implying willfulness. We certainly fail to prevent these infant deaths, but lightly tromping thru the linked documents didn't come up with a reason for the differences. It seems nobody knows how to get the IM deaths to decrease, although the last paper hints that at-home nurse visits would help a lot. But, after reading them, I don't know. The 1st paper says something to the effect, "No, its not because we don't have universal healthcare" which I find surprising. So, I figure that I now "know" less than I thought I knew about the subject before reading the 4 linked papers. No, I didn't read 'em in full, I have other things to do today, but read the conclusions, and... the solution just doesn't seem to be there.
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba649
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba596
https://riffenberg.wordpress.c...
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/20...
http://talkbusiness.net/2009/0...
What's really wasteful is that when I have an appointment with a new doctor, and sometimes one of the old ones I haven't seen for a while, I get a ream of papers with questions and boxes to check, and so forth. I fill them out, it often takes 15 - 20 minutes (How many operations have you had? I'm 69, and that would be answered "a bunch.") and then give all this paper to the office staff. Is there any doubt that some poor schmuck has to enter all this garbage all over again into a computer, maybe more than once? They could easily either send me a web link to fill all that stuff in directly to the computer, or provide computers in the waiting room where I could still do it myself. It would get entered once, and it wouldn't involved doctor or his people expending time on it.
"I'm not really sure I care that a US millionaire can get outstanding care"
I'm not a millionaire, far from it. I'm just a retired gov't engineer that worked in the defense industry, never broke $100K / yr except for "hazard pay" when I went to Iraq a couple times, and... I get the best care available in the USA. The middle class has access to the best care in the USA, its not millionaires.