Ah yes, the fictional Founding Fathers, who (as revisionists would have you believe) had the foresight to predict 200 years of technological, cultural, and societal changes...
Most of those legislative ancestors had slaves, and according to primary sources, they treated those slaves about as well as any of their peers did. They held pretty normal views on most societal issues of the day, with a bit of irritation at specific injustices perpetrated by the British colonial government. From a historical perspective, the Founding Fathers were not radical liberals, or ultimate paragons of social justice. They were mostly wealthy middle- and upper-class colonists, primarily distinguished from other rebellious colonists by the fact that they played a very good political game to gather and sustain support during their revolution.
We could simply say that they had the realistic foresight to build a government that is merely able to change with society, but that won't reinforce that lovely pedestal we hold so dear. Instead, we project our own morals onto the deceased diplomats, and assume that they support our causes.
This is not to say anything about whether the recent decision being good or bad. Rather, this is a plea to give credit where credit is due. The recent legal changes originate with the recently-changed opinions of American society as a whole, rather than the opinions of a few long-rotted corpses. This is why a public awareness campaign is so important, and why complaining about politicians accomplishes so little. Whether you approve of the current law or not, we did this together, for better or worse.
The right thing to do would be to make engineering toys that aren't "for" anyone.
Make a toy that stands on its own merits, then market it to everybody. It's not a "science kit for girls", it's just a science kit, and it's advertised across all applicable demographics, regardless of gender.
I did not say both were equally probable. I said they're equally reasonable, which is to say that believing either requires no more of a leap of faith than the other, and neither has more evidence than the other.
Perhaps we should apply the same examination to this "law of nature" as you have to the idea of a supernatural being?
The theories which underlie the idea of a spawned universe are conjecture, based on the idea that our universe exists in an unobservable space adjacent to another universe, and that given the right set of circumstances, our universe could have been created, with the initial collapsing quantum effects being manifest in now-our dimensions as the Big Bang.
Unfortunately, we have no proof of this. We can invent mathematical theories that come close to describing a multiverse where such an event is possible, but we have no proof that those theories are actually correct. There is no surviving evidence of their use in the Big Bang, and currently no means to travel beyond our universe to observe those "laws of nature" directly. To note your final concern, those theories also have not produced any testable predictions, as far as I know.
In short, such a "law of nature" is as much a human invention as a story of an extradimensional intelligence that likes to create sentient creatures in his spare time. For the purpose of satisfying the human desire to know everything, both are sufficient tales.
There is precisely nothing, apart from ignorance, that isolates a church from science. It is worth nothing that the ignorance to which I refer is both yours and the church's.
The point of a faith is to reconcile the human desire for knowledge with the understanding of the unknowable. Humans are smart enough to grasp that there is a limit to our observations. Common limits are the experience after biological death, the spacial boundaries of the universe, and the historical events prior to the Big Bang. These are things that currently we do not know about, and cannot know about, beyond vague guesses. Those guesses are a mix of the very-limited theories we have (like assuming that the rules of our universe extended before our universe had formed) and pure faith. It is just as reasonable to say that a God created our universe as it is to say that another universe deformed and spawned our dimensions.
Between the extremes of "known" and "cannot be known", however, there is a wide gap of "we don't know yet", and that is the domain of science. Science gives us the ability to know more, and push the unknowable limits out further. We may be able to invalidate a few religions with our discoveries, but there will always be certain limits to our knowledge, and beyond those limits, faith will still hold sway.
There are a few churches that have not only accepted the role of science, but embraced it. Now the pope is saying that climate change is not a matter of faith, but of science. He's acknowledging that we know enough about our planet to know that we can affect it, despite previous assertions by more-ignorant church members that only God could affect a planet's climate. This does not invalidate the religion, but merely declares that science is still something for humans to deal with, not deities.
It's actually cheaper than trying to maintain only a loose synchronization. You just use prebuilt time equipment, which is almost always built for unnecessary precision, and have the service stop if the times are too far out of sync (indicating that a server stopped getting updates). If you have several servers in several sites, a single site losing its time service is not a big deal, as the service will fail over to the other sites. However, if none of your time clocks can handle the leap second, you'll lose all of your servers at the same time, as they all realize they aren't getting updates.
It's a hazard of having a uniform environment. Unfortunately, uniform environments are also far more cost-efficient to manage.
Similarly, a five-minute offset will prohibit logins and group policy updates. If your Windows Time Service configuration is pushed via group policy, you're kinda screwed, and you'll need to have a local admin on site to nudge the clock in the right direction.
Then again, how much could Slashdot cost to run? It's just a forum, for chissakes, right?
It's a forum that gets Slashdotted all day, every day.
I know a guy who wrote about some of his research, and it was Slashdotted. He analyzed the traffic pattern, and though I can't find that analysis any more, he estimated the budget it'd take to survive the story's front-page run without downtime. It was not a small number.
Extrapolate that to running all day, every day, and serving more than a simple static HTML page, and even with the improvements in technology, we're still going to be dealing in numbers where the rounding error is larger than the staff's paychecks.
Frankly I don't see the problem with merely owning any of the aforementioned items. The problem comes when you point them at other animals, or the things that other animals care about. What's so inherently wrong with using a weapon on your own property without harming anyone?
I'd like to see laws constructed such that the moment you intend to cause harm with a weapon, regardless of how big that weapon is, you have committed a misdemeanor. Actually cause harm, and you get upgraded to a felony, with various names and punishments proportional to the actual harm done and the potential harm the weapon could have caused.
Unfortunately, laws are not structured that way. Rather, they're built around knee-jerk panicked responses to the latest horror. I blame the legislators, and the scared people who pressure them to make bad decisions.
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that... all humans would enjoy more leisure time
And that was, and continues to be, the single biggest mistake of optimistic utopian predictions. Not the "more leisure time" part, mind you, but the "enjoy" part.
If you want to live at a standard set by the 1920's, you can... Living with cheap goods, no electronics, and an hourly factory job, you can meet those basic needs pretty easily. If you're working only a few hours per week to meet those minimal expenses, however, your copious leisure time will be quite boring by modern standards. Knowing what else is available, it takes quite a lot of discipline to maintain that nice simple life.
What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply
We realized that we like advancing progress. We like our iPhones, laptops, Internet, movies, and TV shows. We like these things so much that we're still willing to work a full-time job to have them.
our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
This is the single biggest mistake of pessimistic dystopian predictions: The assumption that somehow we're sitting at the absolute maximum of progress, and the precariously balanced economy will topple down the hill on the other side.
The reality is that human nature has not changed. We always want to have the best the world can offer. If that means working just as much as our parents did for a low wage, so be it. At the end of the day, we'll still be able to go to our air-conditioned home, turn on the trillions of transistors in our gaming computers, and play a video game that runs more computations in five minutes than were executed during the entire Apollo 11 mission.
We don't have any more leisure time than we did when those "world of the future" exhibits were built. What's happened instead is that both our working and leisure time have become more effective. At work, we do in an hour what would have taken a team of people several days to accomplish, because our tools are so greatly improved. At play, we routinely spend our time doing what once would have been once-in-a-lifetime activities, because our toys are so greatly improved.
...but it's not clear whether the taxes will be on the locals or Statewide.
Either way, the legislature, being comprised of representatives of the jurisdiction involved approved such an action. By extrapolation, that means that the entire jurisdiction approved and agreed to pay taxes to benefit others in the area.
That's how a republic works.
Assuming [assumptions], and the costs paid entirely by the locals, that should about double the $65/month that is the nominal cost of the system.
Which really means that the cost of the system doesn't double, but rather that $65/month of taxes are going to this project's costs, rather than building that new skate park, nature trail, or a new sign for city hall. Again, the represented constituents chose (likely indirectly) to spend their budget this way.
In addition, the Federal government (that's the rest of us in the USA) are going to cover ~$90M of the cost.
And I will happily pay my 30-cent share while those Massachusetts guys help cover the cost of my town's badly-needed $100M school renovation. You see, a long time ago, our two states (and several others) decided to unite to help each other improve their collective lives. Now referred to as the "United States", each member state's citizens pay some taxes into a pool to go toward projects throughout the entire aggregate society.
Since the $90M covers multiple towns in the region, it's impossible to say how much the total cost of the system will be.
The total cost of the system will be less than it would be if the $90M only covered a single town. It's impossible to say what your non sequitur is trying to prove.
Honestly, I'd rather see more stories edited to be less inflammatory. Most of the crap we get on here seems to be pushed to the extremes of "hate these guys" or "love those guys". It's nice to see some small attempt at real journalism, even if it is fueled by corporate politics. I'm hoping it will spread.
Right, and that's why I excuse my double standard.
Considering the poor quality of the submissions, and the flood of nearly-identical comments on other stories, I'm suspicious of the intent. It wouldn't be the first time Slashdot has been used to slander others, and the irony of having one Dice subsidiary embarrass another Dice subsidiary makes this a particularly appealing attack.
I'll point out that even reporting the money's use doesn't really mean anything. They just report that they entertained potential donors, and their big party is a perfectly cromulent expense. Of course, they have to show that the fundraising was somewhat successful, so they'll be sure to invite a few retired politicians who kept their own PACs and run their own parties. It's all a big cycle, where the money and champagne keep flowing.
The main difference between libertarians and liberals is in their preferred solutions.
Ultimately, the liberal philosophy is that society can and should take care of everyone. The libertarian philosophy is that everyone should only be required to take care of themselves. From an antagonist perspective, liberals have their heads in the clouds, and libertarians have never heard of the tragedy of the commons.
Both are able to see problems in the government programs that Sen. Paul spoke against. When it comes time for a solution, however, the libertarians would fight to abolish the programs entirely, reducing the size of government and ultimately the burden on citizens to support what little benefit the programs may bring. On the other hand, the liberals would usually rather fix the flawed programs, to preserve that benefit while removing the harmful details.
For completeness, we should discuss the conservative position as well: Government should only be involved when someone can't take care of themselves. If someone is able to manage their life without dealing with the government, then the government shouldn't interfere with that. The offending programs should be fixed so that their flaws are covered or resolved, but ultimately don't interfere with society's operation.
The libertarians are mocked because they throw the baby out with the bathwater. The liberals are mocked because they just keep making the system bigger. The conservatives are mocked because they rarely actually fix the problems. Welcome to America, where the most common use of free speech is to complain about someone else.
In a number of states you HAVE to give the registration desk at the hospital your SSN. Otherwise you are in violation of some idiot state law.... Federal law now states you have to give the desk a 'government issued ID' for ANY care.
[citation needed]
I used to work in medical data, and SSNs are actually explicitly prohibited in a number of states. I never encountered any state that required them. I'm also particularly skeptical of your "ANY care" comment, as that would prohibit care for foreigners, vagrants, emergencies, and many accidents.
Unfortunately, it is true that many doctors' record systems require the field. I quickly lost count of how many different patients apparently had 123-45-6789 for their SSN.
He also ignores that officials, happy to buy votes by spending taxes, will tax what the market can provide, so to speak, rather than what is needed.
Isn't it the whole point of society to improve people's lives?
Recently, improving my life meant making some major renovations in my hometown... Repaving roads, clearing an old nature trail, awarding scholarships, and the like. One particular city official started making those things happen, so he got my support when he ran for mayor. I suppose from one perspective, he bought my vote with my own tax dollars. From my perspective, my taxes were spent on very worthwhile causes.
This is why they mentally tie spending, taxing, and borrowing to the GDP rather than population or necessity.
The GDP serves as a reference point, because it's independent of demographics. It provides a scale for normalizing other ratios, so the numbers that come out of such analysis can be applied usefully. It also avoids the issue of whether production comes from individuals or corporations. If you want those numbers, you can derive them pretty easily.
They want to be as high a fraction of that as possible.
Do you have any evidence of this generalization? The politician's I've dealt with usually want to maximize GDP, but maximizing a tax/GDP ratio would suggest they'd be better off decreasing GDP.
It has nothing to do with necessity or population.
And that is precisely my point. The world was different in 1940, in many ways. Why should we, as tompaulco suggested, treat 1940 as some ideal standard for running today's government?
I think the basic standard of living has increased somewhat since 1940. Just guessing here, but I suspect that today we have a few more roads, better schools, better healthcare, better law enforcement, and of course, we can't forget that in 1940, we didn't really worry about ICBMs, orbital weapons, or instantaneous ethereal attacks from the other side of the planet. We also didn't have satellites, global surveys, or anywhere near the level of scientific study we have today.
Sure, we can probably keep 300 million people breathing for far less than we spend today, but our lives aren't the same as they were 80 years ago. The equivalence is false.
The first thing I did was to install Google Chrome, because I'd rather not tolerate IE while fetching other stuff. Next was Steam, mostly so I could get it downloading a game immediately. Once my game was underway, I downloaded PuTTY, followed by a few other utilities.
From my perspective, you're all very close, but wrong nonetheless.
Regardless, the answer (assuming your unasked question is "why not?") is pretty straightforward: God won't let you. God gave you a life, and no, he didn't ask if you wanted it. You play a particular role, but you don't get to choose whether to accept the part or not. Depending on the particular brand of theism, you might get to choose how you'll say your lines or hit your marks, but according to other schools, you are simply a soul experiencing the story (including your internal thoughts and emotions) that God has laid out for you. Even if you "choose" suicide to escape, that may very well be exactly what God has planned, or it may be a grave insult to your director.
My perspective: Why bother? Either God is or he isn't, and if I have these thoughts and emotions, I might as well play them as my own. I'm not so arrogant as to demand that my free will actually be cosmically and ultimately free.
You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing.
-Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will, 1839
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, the fictional Founding Fathers, who (as revisionists would have you believe) had the foresight to predict 200 years of technological, cultural, and societal changes...
Most of those legislative ancestors had slaves, and according to primary sources, they treated those slaves about as well as any of their peers did. They held pretty normal views on most societal issues of the day, with a bit of irritation at specific injustices perpetrated by the British colonial government. From a historical perspective, the Founding Fathers were not radical liberals, or ultimate paragons of social justice. They were mostly wealthy middle- and upper-class colonists, primarily distinguished from other rebellious colonists by the fact that they played a very good political game to gather and sustain support during their revolution.
We could simply say that they had the realistic foresight to build a government that is merely able to change with society, but that won't reinforce that lovely pedestal we hold so dear. Instead, we project our own morals onto the deceased diplomats, and assume that they support our causes.
This is not to say anything about whether the recent decision being good or bad. Rather, this is a plea to give credit where credit is due. The recent legal changes originate with the recently-changed opinions of American society as a whole, rather than the opinions of a few long-rotted corpses. This is why a public awareness campaign is so important, and why complaining about politicians accomplishes so little. Whether you approve of the current law or not, we did this together, for better or worse.
The right thing to do would be to make engineering toys that aren't "for" anyone.
Make a toy that stands on its own merits, then market it to everybody. It's not a "science kit for girls", it's just a science kit, and it's advertised across all applicable demographics, regardless of gender.
I did not say both were equally probable. I said they're equally reasonable, which is to say that believing either requires no more of a leap of faith than the other, and neither has more evidence than the other.
Perhaps we should apply the same examination to this "law of nature" as you have to the idea of a supernatural being?
The theories which underlie the idea of a spawned universe are conjecture, based on the idea that our universe exists in an unobservable space adjacent to another universe, and that given the right set of circumstances, our universe could have been created, with the initial collapsing quantum effects being manifest in now-our dimensions as the Big Bang.
Unfortunately, we have no proof of this. We can invent mathematical theories that come close to describing a multiverse where such an event is possible, but we have no proof that those theories are actually correct. There is no surviving evidence of their use in the Big Bang, and currently no means to travel beyond our universe to observe those "laws of nature" directly. To note your final concern, those theories also have not produced any testable predictions, as far as I know.
In short, such a "law of nature" is as much a human invention as a story of an extradimensional intelligence that likes to create sentient creatures in his spare time. For the purpose of satisfying the human desire to know everything, both are sufficient tales.
There is precisely nothing, apart from ignorance, that isolates a church from science. It is worth nothing that the ignorance to which I refer is both yours and the church's.
The point of a faith is to reconcile the human desire for knowledge with the understanding of the unknowable. Humans are smart enough to grasp that there is a limit to our observations. Common limits are the experience after biological death, the spacial boundaries of the universe, and the historical events prior to the Big Bang. These are things that currently we do not know about, and cannot know about, beyond vague guesses. Those guesses are a mix of the very-limited theories we have (like assuming that the rules of our universe extended before our universe had formed) and pure faith. It is just as reasonable to say that a God created our universe as it is to say that another universe deformed and spawned our dimensions.
Between the extremes of "known" and "cannot be known", however, there is a wide gap of "we don't know yet", and that is the domain of science. Science gives us the ability to know more, and push the unknowable limits out further. We may be able to invalidate a few religions with our discoveries, but there will always be certain limits to our knowledge, and beyond those limits, faith will still hold sway.
There are a few churches that have not only accepted the role of science, but embraced it. Now the pope is saying that climate change is not a matter of faith, but of science. He's acknowledging that we know enough about our planet to know that we can affect it, despite previous assertions by more-ignorant church members that only God could affect a planet's climate. This does not invalidate the religion, but merely declares that science is still something for humans to deal with, not deities.
It's actually cheaper than trying to maintain only a loose synchronization. You just use prebuilt time equipment, which is almost always built for unnecessary precision, and have the service stop if the times are too far out of sync (indicating that a server stopped getting updates). If you have several servers in several sites, a single site losing its time service is not a big deal, as the service will fail over to the other sites. However, if none of your time clocks can handle the leap second, you'll lose all of your servers at the same time, as they all realize they aren't getting updates.
It's a hazard of having a uniform environment. Unfortunately, uniform environments are also far more cost-efficient to manage.
Similarly, a five-minute offset will prohibit logins and group policy updates. If your Windows Time Service configuration is pushed via group policy, you're kinda screwed, and you'll need to have a local admin on site to nudge the clock in the right direction.
Then again, how much could Slashdot cost to run? It's just a forum, for chissakes, right?
It's a forum that gets Slashdotted all day, every day.
I know a guy who wrote about some of his research, and it was Slashdotted. He analyzed the traffic pattern, and though I can't find that analysis any more, he estimated the budget it'd take to survive the story's front-page run without downtime. It was not a small number.
Extrapolate that to running all day, every day, and serving more than a simple static HTML page, and even with the improvements in technology, we're still going to be dealing in numbers where the rounding error is larger than the staff's paychecks.
Well, yeah.
Frankly I don't see the problem with merely owning any of the aforementioned items. The problem comes when you point them at other animals, or the things that other animals care about. What's so inherently wrong with using a weapon on your own property without harming anyone?
I'd like to see laws constructed such that the moment you intend to cause harm with a weapon, regardless of how big that weapon is, you have committed a misdemeanor. Actually cause harm, and you get upgraded to a felony, with various names and punishments proportional to the actual harm done and the potential harm the weapon could have caused.
Unfortunately, laws are not structured that way. Rather, they're built around knee-jerk panicked responses to the latest horror. I blame the legislators, and the scared people who pressure them to make bad decisions.
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that ... all humans would enjoy more leisure time
And that was, and continues to be, the single biggest mistake of optimistic utopian predictions. Not the "more leisure time" part, mind you, but the "enjoy" part.
If you want to live at a standard set by the 1920's, you can... Living with cheap goods, no electronics, and an hourly factory job, you can meet those basic needs pretty easily. If you're working only a few hours per week to meet those minimal expenses, however, your copious leisure time will be quite boring by modern standards. Knowing what else is available, it takes quite a lot of discipline to maintain that nice simple life.
What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply
We realized that we like advancing progress. We like our iPhones, laptops, Internet, movies, and TV shows. We like these things so much that we're still willing to work a full-time job to have them.
our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
This is the single biggest mistake of pessimistic dystopian predictions: The assumption that somehow we're sitting at the absolute maximum of progress, and the precariously balanced economy will topple down the hill on the other side.
The reality is that human nature has not changed. We always want to have the best the world can offer. If that means working just as much as our parents did for a low wage, so be it. At the end of the day, we'll still be able to go to our air-conditioned home, turn on the trillions of transistors in our gaming computers, and play a video game that runs more computations in five minutes than were executed during the entire Apollo 11 mission.
We don't have any more leisure time than we did when those "world of the future" exhibits were built. What's happened instead is that both our working and leisure time have become more effective. At work, we do in an hour what would have taken a team of people several days to accomplish, because our tools are so greatly improved. At play, we routinely spend our time doing what once would have been once-in-a-lifetime activities, because our toys are so greatly improved.
Utopia? We are living it and don't even see it
...but it's not clear whether the taxes will be on the locals or Statewide.
Either way, the legislature, being comprised of representatives of the jurisdiction involved approved such an action. By extrapolation, that means that the entire jurisdiction approved and agreed to pay taxes to benefit others in the area.
That's how a republic works.
Assuming [assumptions], and the costs paid entirely by the locals, that should about double the $65/month that is the nominal cost of the system.
Which really means that the cost of the system doesn't double, but rather that $65/month of taxes are going to this project's costs, rather than building that new skate park, nature trail, or a new sign for city hall. Again, the represented constituents chose (likely indirectly) to spend their budget this way.
In addition, the Federal government (that's the rest of us in the USA) are going to cover ~$90M of the cost.
And I will happily pay my 30-cent share while those Massachusetts guys help cover the cost of my town's badly-needed $100M school renovation. You see, a long time ago, our two states (and several others) decided to unite to help each other improve their collective lives. Now referred to as the "United States", each member state's citizens pay some taxes into a pool to go toward projects throughout the entire aggregate society.
Since the $90M covers multiple towns in the region, it's impossible to say how much the total cost of the system will be.
The total cost of the system will be less than it would be if the $90M only covered a single town. It's impossible to say what your non sequitur is trying to prove.
Good.
Honestly, I'd rather see more stories edited to be less inflammatory. Most of the crap we get on here seems to be pushed to the extremes of "hate these guys" or "love those guys". It's nice to see some small attempt at real journalism, even if it is fueled by corporate politics. I'm hoping it will spread.
As was Lego Creator before that.
This is not Lego's first round in the "creative game" genre.
Right, and that's why I excuse my double standard.
Considering the poor quality of the submissions, and the flood of nearly-identical comments on other stories, I'm suspicious of the intent. It wouldn't be the first time Slashdot has been used to slander others, and the irony of having one Dice subsidiary embarrass another Dice subsidiary makes this a particularly appealing attack.
I saw several submissions, and frankly, not one of them was decent journalism. I voted them down.
Copying a juicy bit from the article and saying "Link to original source" is not a summary.
If you rearrange the letters...
If I rearrange the letters in that first sentence, I can't make the latter one. I end up with an extra "eeefgghhlmtt", and still need "aiopsvwy".
Lying is evil too, right?
I'll point out that even reporting the money's use doesn't really mean anything. They just report that they entertained potential donors, and their big party is a perfectly cromulent expense. Of course, they have to show that the fundraising was somewhat successful, so they'll be sure to invite a few retired politicians who kept their own PACs and run their own parties. It's all a big cycle, where the money and champagne keep flowing.
The main difference between libertarians and liberals is in their preferred solutions.
Ultimately, the liberal philosophy is that society can and should take care of everyone. The libertarian philosophy is that everyone should only be required to take care of themselves. From an antagonist perspective, liberals have their heads in the clouds, and libertarians have never heard of the tragedy of the commons.
Both are able to see problems in the government programs that Sen. Paul spoke against. When it comes time for a solution, however, the libertarians would fight to abolish the programs entirely, reducing the size of government and ultimately the burden on citizens to support what little benefit the programs may bring. On the other hand, the liberals would usually rather fix the flawed programs, to preserve that benefit while removing the harmful details.
For completeness, we should discuss the conservative position as well: Government should only be involved when someone can't take care of themselves. If someone is able to manage their life without dealing with the government, then the government shouldn't interfere with that. The offending programs should be fixed so that their flaws are covered or resolved, but ultimately don't interfere with society's operation.
The libertarians are mocked because they throw the baby out with the bathwater. The liberals are mocked because they just keep making the system bigger. The conservatives are mocked because they rarely actually fix the problems. Welcome to America, where the most common use of free speech is to complain about someone else.
Alaska statute 45.48.410 explicitly permits hospitals to ask, but I can't find a statute that requires it.
CareFirst puts healthcare first, and security somewhere around eighty-ninth.
In a number of states you HAVE to give the registration desk at the hospital your SSN. Otherwise you are in violation of some idiot state law. ... Federal law now states you have to give the desk a 'government issued ID' for ANY care.
[citation needed]
I used to work in medical data, and SSNs are actually explicitly prohibited in a number of states. I never encountered any state that required them. I'm also particularly skeptical of your "ANY care" comment, as that would prohibit care for foreigners, vagrants, emergencies, and many accidents.
Unfortunately, it is true that many doctors' record systems require the field. I quickly lost count of how many different patients apparently had 123-45-6789 for their SSN.
He also ignores that officials, happy to buy votes by spending taxes, will tax what the market can provide, so to speak, rather than what is needed.
Isn't it the whole point of society to improve people's lives?
Recently, improving my life meant making some major renovations in my hometown... Repaving roads, clearing an old nature trail, awarding scholarships, and the like. One particular city official started making those things happen, so he got my support when he ran for mayor. I suppose from one perspective, he bought my vote with my own tax dollars. From my perspective, my taxes were spent on very worthwhile causes.
This is why they mentally tie spending, taxing, and borrowing to the GDP rather than population or necessity.
The GDP serves as a reference point, because it's independent of demographics. It provides a scale for normalizing other ratios, so the numbers that come out of such analysis can be applied usefully. It also avoids the issue of whether production comes from individuals or corporations. If you want those numbers, you can derive them pretty easily.
They want to be as high a fraction of that as possible.
Do you have any evidence of this generalization? The politician's I've dealt with usually want to maximize GDP, but maximizing a tax/GDP ratio would suggest they'd be better off decreasing GDP.
It has nothing to do with necessity or population.
And that is precisely my point. The world was different in 1940, in many ways. Why should we, as tompaulco suggested, treat 1940 as some ideal standard for running today's government?
I think the basic standard of living has increased somewhat since 1940. Just guessing here, but I suspect that today we have a few more roads, better schools, better healthcare, better law enforcement, and of course, we can't forget that in 1940, we didn't really worry about ICBMs, orbital weapons, or instantaneous ethereal attacks from the other side of the planet. We also didn't have satellites, global surveys, or anywhere near the level of scientific study we have today.
Sure, we can probably keep 300 million people breathing for far less than we spend today, but our lives aren't the same as they were 80 years ago. The equivalence is false.
I just rebuilt my Windows desktop at home.
The first thing I did was to install Google Chrome, because I'd rather not tolerate IE while fetching other stuff. Next was Steam, mostly so I could get it downloading a game immediately. Once my game was underway, I downloaded PuTTY, followed by a few other utilities.
From my perspective, you're all very close, but wrong nonetheless.
Utterly offtopic...
Regardless, the answer (assuming your unasked question is "why not?") is pretty straightforward: God won't let you. God gave you a life, and no, he didn't ask if you wanted it. You play a particular role, but you don't get to choose whether to accept the part or not. Depending on the particular brand of theism, you might get to choose how you'll say your lines or hit your marks, but according to other schools, you are simply a soul experiencing the story (including your internal thoughts and emotions) that God has laid out for you. Even if you "choose" suicide to escape, that may very well be exactly what God has planned, or it may be a grave insult to your director.
My perspective: Why bother? Either God is or he isn't, and if I have these thoughts and emotions, I might as well play them as my own. I'm not so arrogant as to demand that my free will actually be cosmically and ultimately free.
You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing.
-Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will, 1839
A legal insanity defense means that he was so out of touch with reality that he didn't know that what he was doing was wrong.
It does not actually have any relation to whether he was behaving in a reasonable manner.