You must have missed Tancredo, Brownback, and Huckabee indicating that they weren't during a recent debate.
And on top of this why exactly do we care whether they are or aren't? If this can influence any decision they make in office please let me know because I can't think of any.
Our recent history of electing people (no names need be mentioned) who believe what they wish to be true rather than working based on objective evidence and seeing the world the way it really is has not been a pretty one.
Why is the government on the *federal* level funding science? At most you could argue that it could find science that is directly impacts military standards and equipment for the Navy.
Economist's answer: Research for its own sake is an extremely risky financial endeavor. Individual companies investing in it may hit the jackpot, but they'll more likely than not lose their initial investment. If there's no high-probability reward in sight, a typical firm would have to be crazy to devote a large chunk of money to the type of research public institutions do all the time. On a massive scale, however, research is a huge net positive with broadly applicable payoffs, even though individual projects are typically not profitable. Think of government-funded research as a way of spreading the risk and rewards across all of society in a manner very similar to an insurance scheme.
Not to somebody who believes that the ENTIRE UNIVERSE was created with a purpose in mind. Nuclear decay can, theoretically, be traced back to the Big Bang if you had perfect knowledge, for instance- it's just a matter of radical electrons hitting nuclei after all, and if you had a time machine you could trace each one back until your time machine itself no longer worked. Same with quantum electrodynamics. Random events are completely indistinguishable from planned events under the rule that we're not allowed to know the plan.
Likewise, gravity is indistinguishable from angels, but there's reasonably broad consensus as to which model is more useful.
I tend to agree with you, but I think it's important to remember that on matters of politics, every citizen has a voice, and basically everybody is a non-expert, so it irritates me when I hear somebody say something like, "They should stick to writing music." I have political opinions, but maybe I should stick to engineering. When did working in a short list of professions disqualify one from having an opinion about public policy? What level of cognitive dissonance must, say, an electrician be experiencing when he shouts down a person's opinion in a political discussion on the grounds that they don't know enough about monetary policy/US-Arab relations/military strategy/just about anything save electrical construction codes?
Sure, celebrities may have more of a voice than their expertise warrants, but if we go by "earned media clout" we're pretty much screwed as well. God help us if we abdicate our responsibility to public discourse to perpetually wrong "experts" like Bill Kristol.
An argument from incredulity is not a fair summation of the book because Behe never makes the claim that evolution can't be true. He's only saying that, at a sub-cellular level, there is a (growing) burden of proof that the proponents of evolution ought to explain at some point.
Interestingly, at the Kitzmiller trial, he was confronted with a number of papers that addressed the topics he claimed had no real literature supporting them. His response? He hadn't read them. Are the answers 100% there? Certainly not. Is Behe adding anything to the discussion beyond his own personal incredulity? Nope.
BTW, I'm particularly interested in evolution from an information theory POV. The basic premise of Evolution seems to be at odds with Shanon's laws related to signal degradation. That's what a comp-sci degree does to you: _everything_ is viewed as information;-)
I would be extremely interested in seeing your math on this one. A good definition of "information" and how to measure it would be a good start. Everybody I've seen invoke Shannon or Kolmogorov in this context has fallen flat on his face before even getting to that point.
PS Colbert?! He's a comedian. Trivializing for the sake of humor is what they do! At least use the Richard Dawkins' quote on the book's Wikipedia article if you're going to be dismissive.
Colbert actually hit on a crucial point: The whole idea of irreducible complexity falls apart for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that the constituent elements of a supposedly IC system would have to be useless in and of themselves.
Just because an evil psycho picks God as his reason to kill does not mean believing in God is evil.
People seem to think that a lot of people think this. I don't think that's the case. No, believing in God doesn't make you do evil things. Believing in a god can and does, however, make people do things that aren't really rational unless the god they believe in actually exists. Sometimes those things are good and sometimes those things are bad. It really all depends on the believer and the god. Personally, I find that fact kind of scary in and of itself. Imagine this: I roll a die. It comes up 1-5 and I'm nice to everybody. If it comes up 6, I'll kill a busload of preschoolers. That's how atheists view religion. Sure, it makes a lot of people do great things, but it's essentially a random assignment of irrational behavior, so it's kind of unnerving, especially when our leaders say that they make their decisions that way. Sure, one guy's disembodied voice likes peace on earth and goodwill toward men, but I'm not so sure that the next guy's disembodied voice won't favor nuclear Armageddon.
I generally agree with you, but there's still a problem that manifests itself pretty badly: By the time the insurance company is supposed to give you their service, they already have your money. Think back through all of your business transactions. I bet that just about every one of them works out better when they need to do something before they get your money. Cell phone companies are my favorite example: We have you in a contract, so your ass is ours. We can kick you around for the next couple of years and you have no choice but to deal with us. Things are starting to get better on that front with carriers offering month-to-month service, but it's a classic example of what happens when a company has no immediate motive to respond to your needs.
I don't know if the argument really is that we are getting it on the cheap so much as we are paying as much as everyone else. I think the false pretense held by most in favor of "free health care" is that everything will remain the same yet we will magically have free medical services. I didn't try to fudge any numbers, just ran the calculation and thats what I got. It probably ends up as a wash if you took enough samples. Unfortunately I suspect if we somehow do end up with socialize medicine here it will end up costing us more than it does now not less. I don't really have anything to back that up with other than our government's past history, which more than speaks for itself.
Well, unless there's something different between our government and other governments (and I don't necessarily discount the possibility), your assumption clearly isn't borne out by the numbers. You say it "probably ends up as a wash" if you take enough samples: That's just what the GDP numbers are. They're a sample of everybody in the economy, and by that measure, we're spending about 50% more than the others are. There are winners and losers, of course, but it's abundantly clear that other countries that have done it end up with a lot more money on the winning side than the losing side. In aggregate, we're not paying "as much" as everybody else. We're paying a lot more.
It's generally true that socialized systems have longer waits for elective procedures and shorter waits for required procedures and primary/preventative care. Yeah it sucks to wait a few extra months for a hip replacement, but it sucks even more to live in the US and have to wait 3+ weeks to see your private doctor so he can examine a skin spot to find out if it cancerous or not when that 3 weeks can make a big difference in treatment options.
And of course, it sucks even more to wait forever for the replacement because you can't afford it. I remember hearing a discussion like this in which one person brought up the fact that he could get a knee replacement at the drop of a hat and one of the people responded, "Well, since I can't afford a surgery like that, I guess I'll never know what a great thing it is not to have to wait for it. Good for you."
Assume a $40 a month or $480 per year for a standard health care plan that you are paying 10% and your employer covers the other 90%.
You had me until you got here. You correctly noted that you're paying 15% in Social Security, even though the government claims that half of that is covered by the employer. Obviously, if the employer had that cash and was willing to pay it toward your SS tax, they'd be willing to fork it over to you if the SS tax wasn't there. The same is true for the 90% the employer is paying for your health care. The government does give employers a tax break on that 90%, but that can't really be considered "free money" given that it's essentially a subsidy for all employed workers to get health care on the government dime. Essentially, the "private" health care that we gainfully employed folks are so proud of earning is, to some extent, paid for out of the pockets of other taxpayers. The money always has to come from somewhere. Then, of course, it should be noted that the difference in taxes is not necessarily only due to Canada's health care.
More interestingly, a quick Google search indicates that as a fraction of their overall GDP, Canada is spending significantly less than we are, which makes the result of that calculation suspect. Six years ago it was 9.9% of GDP versus 13.9%. That clearly indicates that private and public spending combined, we're definitely not saving money. Whether we're getting our money's worth is a different question, but it's hard to make an argument we're getting our health care on the cheap.
i don't agree with this at all. the point of insurance is to *distribute risk* across a large pool of people. once you start penalizing on risk factors, you have people with pre-existing conditions, certain genetic markers, etc. becoming "uninsurable", which for many of them means "you go die now".
I agree with you to some extent, but more fundamentally, the point of insurance is to distribute risk of unforeseen problems. If I know 100% (or very nearly so) that my health is going to go down the toilet, I can't reasonably be considered "distributing my risk" any more than a person can buy fire insurance after his house burns down after a lifetime of not paying into the pool. People who try to do that are gaming the system. Of course, there's a distinction between being a smoker and being born with a heart defect, and I think that it's reasonable to treat those issues differently, but people who clearly make a decision not to take care of themselves properly are essentially acting as free riders in an otherwise effective risk distribution scheme.
As I see it, we have three major problems. The first stems from the lack of universal health care. Frankly, if we had meaningful coverage to care for people with genetic conditions *at birth* rather than waiting for them to reach adulthood and try to unring the information bell, we'd be in better shape. We wouldn't be faced with problems like "Well, we could have covered you if you were still a kid, but now you've been to the doctor and we know you're going to die, so have a nice life!"
Second is the simple fact that insurance, which was originally simply supposed to help us pay for unforeseen expenses, has turned into more of a frequent buyer plan than anything resembling insurance. A lot of people prefer an "insurance" plan that pays for every little thing on a day to day basis but has a ridiculously low cap for catastrophic injuries--a plan that's exactly the opposite of insurance! We've gone that far over the edge! Day to day costs of care are skyrocketing, partially because the medical industry is no longer anything like what could be considered a market. When was the last time you went and got a physical knowing what it could cost (not the copay, but what the doctor actually billed all parties involved)? In what other industries is it common practice to buy a service and then ask what the price of it was?
Third, why the hell are we linking what kind of health care we get to where we work anymore? My wife and I are equally educated, work in the same field, and both have health plans through the same provider. I work at a tiny company and she works at a 100,000+ employee firm. She and I get DIFFERENT health plans from the same provider with no option to purchase the same coverage. WTF?
I think that the vein in my forehead might cause my employer some health insurance concerns. I'll stop now.
What I find interesting is that average Canadians pay almost 50% income tax.
Simple question: What on earth does that number have to do with the percentage of one's income one spends on health care? The people who bring up the "Oooh! Taxes!" argument always list the total tax burden for a country (taking advantage of the fact that countries with socialized health care also tend to have higher overall tax burdens) rather than the percentage that's actually spent on socialized health care. Anybody who quotes you numbers like that is either clueless, doesn't give a damn, or is trying to sell you something. The interesting question is, What percentage of Canada's GDP is spent on health care vs what percentage of our GDP is spent on health care? Other cost comparisons are simply not useful.
I work in the IT field (I'm a consultant), and I've yet to see the over, rampant, hostility that you claim exists.
My wife (an EE by training) is doing a stint as an IT consultant while she works on her MS. I'm glad to hear that you've never seen a really bad environment for women (although part of me wonders if that's partially to do with the fact that only a small percentage of your time was probably spent watching women operate in the field), but they definitely do exist. The one case I can think of is my wife's time at a major oil company. The corporate culture there wasn't that far off of the "culture" you'd find in a high school locker room some days. I'd get the "Wow. He actually said that? What a moron!" stories every night while she was there. She's generally not particularly bothered by it, but it's a pretty weird environment to work in, and I think it says a lot about what a bad job a lot of people do dealing with their coworkers. I can certainly see how a more easily embarrassed person could find an environment like that intolerable.
More likely, it's the usual inter-office politics that exists in pretty much every office job. But instead of chalking it up the standard office culture, why not cry "sexism"?
I don't doubt that there are a lot of hyper-sensitive people out there or people who would rather complain than make an honest assessment of the situation, but I've seen firs and second hand that people who are used to working only with men are often awkward when dealing with women. Does that mean that they're driving women away from the field in droves? I seriously doubt it. Does that mean it's not problematic and often a real problem for workplace productivity and cohesion? I seriously doubt that as well.
Sexism does exist in, and out of, the work environment. But to say that it's the major reason that women aren't in the IT field is absurd.
I doubt it's a major reason why women don't enter the IT field. I would guess that particular problem starts much earlier than anything in the workplace or even in college. When you're a kid, it's hard enough to be a computer geek and strike that fine balance between being interested in something "nerdy" and being "cool" enough not to get picked on if you're a guy. I would guess that the stigma of being a nerd combined with the stigma of computer geekiness being something that girls just "don't do" is what causes girls not to really think about technology as a long term field of interest.
Even more absurd is claiming that the hostility that women feel in the IT field is sexist-driven.
In my experience (my wife's occasional bizarre trips into good-old-boy-land notwithstanding), it's less a matter of sexism (at least the "she's not as good as me" type) and more a matter of being openly regarded as a curiosity day in and day out. My only experience with outright sexism against women in technology have been men who have been around in the workplace equivalent of a gentleman's club for their entire careers (people who are almost all on the way out these days), or people who come in from countries where women don't generally occupy professional positions. From what I've seen, the discomfort women experience is a combination of having it pointed out to them over and over that they're the only woman in the office or simply a side effect of the handful of stereotypical nerds who don't know how to deal with the opposite sex without lots of awkward and uncomfortable moments. It's generally a "no big deal" sort of thing, but after having it happen every day for years, I can see how it can grate on you and make you consider a lower-stress environment.
Of course, there's also the fact that study after study shows that men and women are expected to behave differently and that not
So, the differences between men and woman are only in their physical abilities?
No, but given the number of women I know who have no trouble with technology, I seriously doubt that it's some sort of crippling emotional or intellectual problem that's keeping women from being comfortable in IT departments or at engineering firms.
And the reason that women don't want to work the mines, is because of the lifting requirement? And not because the work is grueling, dirty, and hard on the body?
Here's a hint: Very few people actually want to work in mines. People do so because it's a living, and only people who are physically able to handle it can and do make a career out of it. My point is that there's a difference between women not working in mines where they're physically predisposed to having a hard time and women not working at a particular desk job because their coworkers are assholes. The former makes sense and cannot be changed and the latter is an unfortunate and unnecessary loss to the economy.
If the lifting requirement is all that is holding them back, why not simply lower it? In much the same way that the physical requirements for women were lowered for women firefighters. I'm sure they'd just flock to it.
Because the lifting requirement is there for a reason? That's like saying, "Math is hard, and removing math from the curriculum would give us more electrical engineers!" The people you graduate will no longer be qualified electrical engineers. If you can do the job without lifting heavy weights, the requirement shouldn't be there. If you can't do the job without lifting heavy weights, the requirement shouldn't be compromised. I don't know which of those was the case in the changing of the fire department requirements.
The more important question is, should we be concerned that part of the "job requirement" for being a woman in engineering or IT is being treated with disrespect or even outright contempt, or should we just consider it "part of the job" like getting dirty in a coal mine? Yes, there are jobs that have hard physical requirements, and no modifications to the job description will change that. The analogous problem in an air conditioned office building with comfortable chairs is a very solvable one, though. Working with people who have no clue how to treat their coworkers is not an endemic feature of the job the same way hauling rocks is a core part of what a coal miner does. Claiming otherwise is simply giving people a pass for acting inappropriately in the workplace.
There's a difference between not being adept at a job because you physically can't haul 300 pounds of coal and not being happy in a job because your coworkers make your job intolerable. One of them is due to honest to god differences in natural aptitude and the other is just the failure of employees to act professionally.
Inflation was over 17% when Carter was in Office. Reagan had to do something about this fast before the second great depression would have started.
So reagan increased money and borrowed (yes its bad when overdone) and the democrats kept getting in his way as he requested funds to be cut from government programs.
Are you saying that inflation was curbed by Reagan's spending rather than the purposeful tightening of the money supply by the Federal Reserve? It's not clear from what you wrote, but it sounds like you're saying that the Reagan Administration's spending binge was actually just a sneaky way of increasing real interest rates. Huh?
Teh S&L issues would have been worse if the interest rates were higher.
So you're saying that Reagan's action was lowering interest rates or the S&L crisis would have been worse? The S&L issues occurred because of a rise in interest rates. That's true and it's also true that for every increase in prevailing interest rate the S&L crisis would have gotten worse, but I don't see how Reagan's spending programs would have the effect you're talking about.
Also do not confuse federal fund interest rates that banks use with what they charge customers. Yes they went up to control inflation but when you have an oversupply of money aka inflation then it needs to be cut by charging more for it. This brought stabilization. But the government tried to take too much too quickly and that brought interest rates up again.
I'm very confused by the narrative you're trying to offer here. The Fed dials down the money supply, interest rates skyrocket, inflation decreases, a recession follows, but stagflation is over. That was the plan, and it worked quite well. I don't really see how we can attribute any of it to some sort of clever action on the part of President Reagan. I suppose one could say that the government increasing long-term investments even at high interest rates softened the recession that was practically a necessary result of the Fed's activities, but it also has the effect of ratcheting up interest rates further. I'm just not clear on what you're trying to claim.
Yes, we lost a lot of lives at D-Day. Were all those lives worth it?
We need to get past this bogus idea that our deposing a tinpot dictator for our long-term geopolitical convenience is anything like the world uniting to stop the Nazis from literally conquering the planet. And while we're at it, George Bush is not Winston Churchill or FDR. I'd liken this adventure more to the Bay of Pigs than anything like World War II.
I never said that. I merely noted that this exists in our society. Peter Arnett was practically working for the enemy even before the first shot was fired. If you ignore this fact, you are ignoring truth.
I never said that such people didn't exist. My point is that they didn't make the slightest bit of difference in the course of history. None at all. The people holding all the cards love to point to them as convenient scapegoats (Why not? Nobody likes them.) for their complete failure to do their jobs. It would be like Barry Bonds striking out and then blaming some guy in the middle of nowhere for not cheering hard enough while watching the game on TV. If it makes you feel better to have enemies to blame, that's fine, but the reality is that beating up on those people is like pointing out that mosquitoes are annoying. Yes, it's true, but they're not losing the war for us.
I do not disagree. However, let's put this into perspective. Around "2,500 Americans and 3,000 other Allied troops died on D-Day. More than 19,000 civilians in Normandy also died in Allied bombing before and after D-Day to soften up German defenses. And Allied air forces lost nearly 12,000 men in April and May 1944 in operations ahead of the invasion..." This was just in one day!
Wow. We've managed to completely destroy a country's infrastructure, racked up a six-figure body count, taken an arguably stable (if repressive) country and turn it into a haven for warlords, a training ground for terrorists, and potentially another site for genocide, and it only cost us a few thousand American lives and a half trillion dollars (and of course our ability to finish the job in Afghanistan). If I had known that this war was going to be such a great deal, I would have bought two. Of course, we've been told for years that the big payout is just around the corner--just long as we sign another blank check to the people who are being played for chumps and handing out strategic victories to the likes of Ahmadinejad. Then again, some people believe that lottery tickets are a good investment, so maybe they can still sell this as a long term victory in the works. Sort of an "I meant to do that" after falling on your ass on an international scale.
I don't know what to say for you if you're seriously entertaining the grand delusion that a think tank experiment gone horribly wrong is in any way analogous to the largest and arguably most important conflict in the history of mankind. We need to recognize this for what it was: An ill-conceived and completely botched implementation of PNAC's wet-dream of democratic-looking puppet governments that exist only for our convenience. We need to scale back our dreams victory and our delusions of heroism and focus on extricating ourselves with a minimum of bloodshed for all involved. That's going to take some doing, and it's going to be a noble pursuit, but the nobility is not in the glorious ends that Bush originally envisioned as much as it is in honorably cleaning up our mess and getting the hell out.
Lieberman isn't really a third-party candidate. The only reason he's listed as an Independent is because the far-left Democrats in Connecticut thought he was too conservative and voted for someone else in the primary, but all of the moderate (and probably some not-so-moderate) Republicans easily made up for it in the general election. In the end, though, Lieberman may be a good example of what's wrong with the primary system in the US.
I'm going to have to take issue with the "far left" characterization of the people who simply think that he was a wrong-headed putz for continuing to claim that the Iraq war has been the best thing since sliced bread. I'd say it myself, but I think that Tim Kreider put it best:
For reasons that I'm struggling to resist assigning any conspiratorial agenda to, national pundits seem unable to accept that the ousting of Lieberman was not a coup by a few far-left bloggers and activists but the legitimate, mainstream rejection of a pro-war, Bush-friendly Democrat. I don't understand why the Far Right, which believes that dinosaurs are fake and that very shortly Jesus will return and Christians will be lifted bodily into Heaven, has to be taken seriously as a major political constituency whereas the Far Left, which believes that invading Iraq was a mistake and maybe we should have national health care, is dismissed as a bunch of crackpots.
And of course, this raises the question, why on earth are senators allowed to do secret anything in the course of carrying out their duties? The only exception I can think of are classified hearings and debates for national security reasons. WTF is wrong with us when an elected official can secretly gum up the legislative process without being answerable to the voters?
I am not going to defend the obvious incompetence in planning the post war occupation.
Probably a good idea. That would take some serious acrobatics.
However, these things are like trying to hold a cat by the tail, all the while letting a dog run around the room.
A mean-spirited person might be tempted to say that grabbing the cat by the tail in the first place was an unwise maneuver. Of course, I'm just that kind of mean-spirited person.
That said, it doesn't help that there is a large group of our own people who want to see us fail. Moral relativism and Fabian Socialism, combined with a dose of blame America first, is the order of the day.
Nonsense. You're buying into the new narrative about the war that the powers that be are more than happy to sell: It wasn't our fault that we started a war that we couldn't handle and then totally mismanaged it. It was the fault of the hippies and the blame-America-first leftists and the feminists and the secular humanists! Our control over very aspect of government and unquestioning support from the media and the public were no match for their hackey sacks and love-ins! If only they hadn't held those candlelight vigils, we would have been able to keep the insurgency down! Woe! This is the same crap the revisionists have been pulling with the Vietnam war: "Everything would have gone perfectly if it weren't for the bleeding hearts and the media undermining the war effort!" When will our leadership just be able to own up to their screw ups and move on without scapegoating a powerless, practically non-existent minority? Fabian socialism indeed.
You show me a plan for how you are going to play the board game 'Sorry!' and I'll show you America's plan for Iraq.
You show me a general who thinks that way and I'll show you a general who should be out of a job. The "Let's just wing it" plan has failed, just as it always does when the stakes are high. War is always a mess of surprises, mistakes, disasters, and curveballs. That doesn't mean that the answer is for our leadership to send people into the meat grinder without seriously considering what they'll be doing in the short and the long run. How do we maintain law and order to get society back online? How do we safely rebuild the utilities? Which warlords do we not worry about and which ones do we eliminate? How many people will it take to do it (not how many people can I get, or how many people will the American people tolerate losing before they get tired, but how many people will it actually take to do it right)? Nobody seems to have good answers. We owe the people we're sending to die at leas that much. We should spend at least as much time on those plans as we do on market deregulation, implementing a flat tax, and answering questions of what the constitution will look like.
Frankly, I'd be interested in knowing exactly what General Shinseki had planned for the 500,000 troops he suggested would be necessary for the task. I'm reasonably sure that part of his estimates included having enough people on the ground in the cities to prevent anarchy from taking over to begin with. Sadly, I'm fairly convinced that it will take more people to restore order than it would have to have kept order to begin with, so I'm not optimistic that we'll be able to make it happen.
We may be able to. It's going to cost a lot in manpower and cash, though. A lot more than most Americans are probably willing to spend, given that they seemed to think that this war was just going to be a fun little three hour tour and not a serious commitment of blood and treasure. Our odds were certainly a lot better a few years ago before we managed to screw up everything in every imaginable way at every opportunity.
The Shiites are actually two groups: those who align with Iran, and those who don't. The Shiites who don't align with Iran want us there because they don't want Iran to control Iraq via the other Shiite block (Al Sadr's people).
What you're missing is that it doesn't take a large majority to cause chaos, as has been in evidence over the past few years. The fact that the two sides of the civil war that's on the verge of breaking out aren't politically unified doesn't make the end result all that much cleaner.
The Kurds, Sunnis, and non-Sadr Shiites will iron out their differences because it is in their best interest.
Ahh, the ever-popular "everything will work out because that's the best way for it to be" prediction. It's that type of reasoning that got us into this mess in the first place. Exactly what, over the past several years, has given you the idea that everybody is going to start acting rationally, control the violent minority, and work our their differences? When has that ever happened in a situation like this? Anybody with half a brain and any knowledge of the region saw this clusterfuck coming a mile away, but we were told that everything would be OK by a bunch of people who have the "it can't happen to me" foresight of a bunch of teenagers. I seriously doubt that the solution is to rely on the goodwill of the players at the negotiating table or simply to write another blank check to a clearly incompetent administration.
Iran is now taking notice that we are making big arms deals with Saudi Arabia (Sunni), Egypt (Sunni), and Israel. If we leave and a civil war breaks out, the Saudis and Syria will jump in and protect the Sunnis and Iran will jump in to protect the Shiites. The whole middle east will go to war. We need to start talking victory, not defeat.
We agree there. Many people with whom I usually agree politically would like to see an immediate pullout. Personally, given the fact that we came in and destroyed their country, I think that we owe the people of Iraq something better than mass graves full of religious minorities and a chaotic failed state, which is exactly what we'd have on our hands within a few weeks of a pullout. Unfortunately, to do the right thing is going to be incredibly expensive in both lives and dollars. We can thank a completely incompetent Bush administration for that fact, and I don't think that the fact that his heart might arguably have been in the right place in any way mitigates the colossal negligence and dereliction of duty we've witnessed over the past few years.
That being said, I have a hard time buying into the idea that if we just give the retards at the top of the command chain another year and another pile of "emergency" money, they'll suddenly channel the spirits of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill and create a thriving democracy of people who love us. More likely, we have a long, grinding police action ahead of us that will consist of little more than trying to prevent Iraq from turning into Sudan or Rwanda that will end in some sort of semi-stable power sharing agreement and a lot of unhappy people. I know that it's tempting to blame "The Left" for our defeat (and make no mistake, we're not going to accomplish the pie in the sky goals we set out to) just like it was the news media and the hippies who lost us the Vietnam war, but here's the reality: Our leadership took on a very risky proposition and mismanaged it into the ground,
Given the state's low population density, combined with importance of the oil reserves, it's not really surprising that Alaska gets more tax money back than it spends.
No, that's not really surprising, and I don't really regard it as a problem. Alaska is important and I'm sure that the union gets its money's worth in the long run. The problem I see is when it's done to the exclusion of local taxes, and especially so when it's spent extraordinarily unwisely on projects like the Gravina Island bridge. That kind of stewardship reeks of "Well, it's not my money, so fuck 'em." Seriously. If you were the dictator of Alaska and I offered you $200M for any infrastructure project you saw fit, would you really build that thing?
The spread in cost of living in Alaska is also more than $1-2k. And its not like that money is paid by the federal government, it is a dividend on money that Alaska has invested (originally comandeered from oil companies).
Of course, I wouldn't dispute that it's their money by most reasonable definitions. I think that most people would agree. The reason they point it out, though, is that it seems pretty clear that for projects like that, a lot of people seem to think that their local contribution should be 0%. I don't mind federal spending on local infrastructure, especially when it develops into a national asset, but I would expect to see a state dig into its coffers at least a little bit before drinking from the federal money trough, if only for the principle of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Our recent history of electing people (no names need be mentioned) who believe what they wish to be true rather than working based on objective evidence and seeing the world the way it really is has not been a pretty one.
I tend to agree with you, but I think it's important to remember that on matters of politics, every citizen has a voice, and basically everybody is a non-expert, so it irritates me when I hear somebody say something like, "They should stick to writing music." I have political opinions, but maybe I should stick to engineering. When did working in a short list of professions disqualify one from having an opinion about public policy? What level of cognitive dissonance must, say, an electrician be experiencing when he shouts down a person's opinion in a political discussion on the grounds that they don't know enough about monetary policy/US-Arab relations/military strategy/just about anything save electrical construction codes?
Sure, celebrities may have more of a voice than their expertise warrants, but if we go by "earned media clout" we're pretty much screwed as well. God help us if we abdicate our responsibility to public discourse to perpetually wrong "experts" like Bill Kristol.
I would be extremely interested in seeing your math on this one. A good definition of "information" and how to measure it would be a good start. Everybody I've seen invoke Shannon or Kolmogorov in this context has fallen flat on his face before even getting to that point.
Colbert actually hit on a crucial point: The whole idea of irreducible complexity falls apart for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that the constituent elements of a supposedly IC system would have to be useless in and of themselves.
I generally agree with you, but there's still a problem that manifests itself pretty badly: By the time the insurance company is supposed to give you their service, they already have your money. Think back through all of your business transactions. I bet that just about every one of them works out better when they need to do something before they get your money. Cell phone companies are my favorite example: We have you in a contract, so your ass is ours. We can kick you around for the next couple of years and you have no choice but to deal with us. Things are starting to get better on that front with carriers offering month-to-month service, but it's a classic example of what happens when a company has no immediate motive to respond to your needs.
More interestingly, a quick Google search indicates that as a fraction of their overall GDP, Canada is spending significantly less than we are, which makes the result of that calculation suspect. Six years ago it was 9.9% of GDP versus 13.9%. That clearly indicates that private and public spending combined, we're definitely not saving money. Whether we're getting our money's worth is a different question, but it's hard to make an argument we're getting our health care on the cheap.
As I see it, we have three major problems. The first stems from the lack of universal health care. Frankly, if we had meaningful coverage to care for people with genetic conditions *at birth* rather than waiting for them to reach adulthood and try to unring the information bell, we'd be in better shape. We wouldn't be faced with problems like "Well, we could have covered you if you were still a kid, but now you've been to the doctor and we know you're going to die, so have a nice life!"
Second is the simple fact that insurance, which was originally simply supposed to help us pay for unforeseen expenses, has turned into more of a frequent buyer plan than anything resembling insurance. A lot of people prefer an "insurance" plan that pays for every little thing on a day to day basis but has a ridiculously low cap for catastrophic injuries--a plan that's exactly the opposite of insurance! We've gone that far over the edge! Day to day costs of care are skyrocketing, partially because the medical industry is no longer anything like what could be considered a market. When was the last time you went and got a physical knowing what it could cost (not the copay, but what the doctor actually billed all parties involved)? In what other industries is it common practice to buy a service and then ask what the price of it was?
Third, why the hell are we linking what kind of health care we get to where we work anymore? My wife and I are equally educated, work in the same field, and both have health plans through the same provider. I work at a tiny company and she works at a 100,000+ employee firm. She and I get DIFFERENT health plans from the same provider with no option to purchase the same coverage. WTF?
I think that the vein in my forehead might cause my employer some health insurance concerns. I'll stop now.
My wife (an EE by training) is doing a stint as an IT consultant while she works on her MS. I'm glad to hear that you've never seen a really bad environment for women (although part of me wonders if that's partially to do with the fact that only a small percentage of your time was probably spent watching women operate in the field), but they definitely do exist. The one case I can think of is my wife's time at a major oil company. The corporate culture there wasn't that far off of the "culture" you'd find in a high school locker room some days. I'd get the "Wow. He actually said that? What a moron!" stories every night while she was there. She's generally not particularly bothered by it, but it's a pretty weird environment to work in, and I think it says a lot about what a bad job a lot of people do dealing with their coworkers. I can certainly see how a more easily embarrassed person could find an environment like that intolerable.
I don't doubt that there are a lot of hyper-sensitive people out there or people who would rather complain than make an honest assessment of the situation, but I've seen firs and second hand that people who are used to working only with men are often awkward when dealing with women. Does that mean that they're driving women away from the field in droves? I seriously doubt it. Does that mean it's not problematic and often a real problem for workplace productivity and cohesion? I seriously doubt that as well.
I doubt it's a major reason why women don't enter the IT field. I would guess that particular problem starts much earlier than anything in the workplace or even in college. When you're a kid, it's hard enough to be a computer geek and strike that fine balance between being interested in something "nerdy" and being "cool" enough not to get picked on if you're a guy. I would guess that the stigma of being a nerd combined with the stigma of computer geekiness being something that girls just "don't do" is what causes girls not to really think about technology as a long term field of interest.
In my experience (my wife's occasional bizarre trips into good-old-boy-land notwithstanding), it's less a matter of sexism (at least the "she's not as good as me" type) and more a matter of being openly regarded as a curiosity day in and day out. My only experience with outright sexism against women in technology have been men who have been around in the workplace equivalent of a gentleman's club for their entire careers (people who are almost all on the way out these days), or people who come in from countries where women don't generally occupy professional positions. From what I've seen, the discomfort women experience is a combination of having it pointed out to them over and over that they're the only woman in the office or simply a side effect of the handful of stereotypical nerds who don't know how to deal with the opposite sex without lots of awkward and uncomfortable moments. It's generally a "no big deal" sort of thing, but after having it happen every day for years, I can see how it can grate on you and make you consider a lower-stress environment.
Of course, there's also the fact that study after study shows that men and women are expected to behave differently and that not
Here's a hint: Very few people actually want to work in mines. People do so because it's a living, and only people who are physically able to handle it can and do make a career out of it. My point is that there's a difference between women not working in mines where they're physically predisposed to having a hard time and women not working at a particular desk job because their coworkers are assholes. The former makes sense and cannot be changed and the latter is an unfortunate and unnecessary loss to the economy.
Because the lifting requirement is there for a reason? That's like saying, "Math is hard, and removing math from the curriculum would give us more electrical engineers!" The people you graduate will no longer be qualified electrical engineers. If you can do the job without lifting heavy weights, the requirement shouldn't be there. If you can't do the job without lifting heavy weights, the requirement shouldn't be compromised. I don't know which of those was the case in the changing of the fire department requirements.
The more important question is, should we be concerned that part of the "job requirement" for being a woman in engineering or IT is being treated with disrespect or even outright contempt, or should we just consider it "part of the job" like getting dirty in a coal mine? Yes, there are jobs that have hard physical requirements, and no modifications to the job description will change that. The analogous problem in an air conditioned office building with comfortable chairs is a very solvable one, though. Working with people who have no clue how to treat their coworkers is not an endemic feature of the job the same way hauling rocks is a core part of what a coal miner does. Claiming otherwise is simply giving people a pass for acting inappropriately in the workplace.
There's a difference between not being adept at a job because you physically can't haul 300 pounds of coal and not being happy in a job because your coworkers make your job intolerable. One of them is due to honest to god differences in natural aptitude and the other is just the failure of employees to act professionally.
So you're saying that Reagan's action was lowering interest rates or the S&L crisis would have been worse? The S&L issues occurred because of a rise in interest rates. That's true and it's also true that for every increase in prevailing interest rate the S&L crisis would have gotten worse, but I don't see how Reagan's spending programs would have the effect you're talking about.
I'm very confused by the narrative you're trying to offer here. The Fed dials down the money supply, interest rates skyrocket, inflation decreases, a recession follows, but stagflation is over. That was the plan, and it worked quite well. I don't really see how we can attribute any of it to some sort of clever action on the part of President Reagan. I suppose one could say that the government increasing long-term investments even at high interest rates softened the recession that was practically a necessary result of the Fed's activities, but it also has the effect of ratcheting up interest rates further. I'm just not clear on what you're trying to claim.
I never said that such people didn't exist. My point is that they didn't make the slightest bit of difference in the course of history. None at all. The people holding all the cards love to point to them as convenient scapegoats (Why not? Nobody likes them.) for their complete failure to do their jobs. It would be like Barry Bonds striking out and then blaming some guy in the middle of nowhere for not cheering hard enough while watching the game on TV. If it makes you feel better to have enemies to blame, that's fine, but the reality is that beating up on those people is like pointing out that mosquitoes are annoying. Yes, it's true, but they're not losing the war for us.
Wow. We've managed to completely destroy a country's infrastructure, racked up a six-figure body count, taken an arguably stable (if repressive) country and turn it into a haven for warlords, a training ground for terrorists, and potentially another site for genocide, and it only cost us a few thousand American lives and a half trillion dollars (and of course our ability to finish the job in Afghanistan). If I had known that this war was going to be such a great deal, I would have bought two. Of course, we've been told for years that the big payout is just around the corner--just long as we sign another blank check to the people who are being played for chumps and handing out strategic victories to the likes of Ahmadinejad. Then again, some people believe that lottery tickets are a good investment, so maybe they can still sell this as a long term victory in the works. Sort of an "I meant to do that" after falling on your ass on an international scale.
I don't know what to say for you if you're seriously entertaining the grand delusion that a think tank experiment gone horribly wrong is in any way analogous to the largest and arguably most important conflict in the history of mankind. We need to recognize this for what it was: An ill-conceived and completely botched implementation of PNAC's wet-dream of democratic-looking puppet governments that exist only for our convenience. We need to scale back our dreams victory and our delusions of heroism and focus on extricating ourselves with a minimum of bloodshed for all involved. That's going to take some doing, and it's going to be a noble pursuit, but the nobility is not in the glorious ends that Bush originally envisioned as much as it is in honorably cleaning up our mess and getting the hell out.
And of course, this raises the question, why on earth are senators allowed to do secret anything in the course of carrying out their duties? The only exception I can think of are classified hearings and debates for national security reasons. WTF is wrong with us when an elected official can secretly gum up the legislative process without being answerable to the voters?
A mean-spirited person might be tempted to say that grabbing the cat by the tail in the first place was an unwise maneuver. Of course, I'm just that kind of mean-spirited person.
Nonsense. You're buying into the new narrative about the war that the powers that be are more than happy to sell: It wasn't our fault that we started a war that we couldn't handle and then totally mismanaged it. It was the fault of the hippies and the blame-America-first leftists and the feminists and the secular humanists! Our control over very aspect of government and unquestioning support from the media and the public were no match for their hackey sacks and love-ins! If only they hadn't held those candlelight vigils, we would have been able to keep the insurgency down! Woe! This is the same crap the revisionists have been pulling with the Vietnam war: "Everything would have gone perfectly if it weren't for the bleeding hearts and the media undermining the war effort!" When will our leadership just be able to own up to their screw ups and move on without scapegoating a powerless, practically non-existent minority? Fabian socialism indeed.
You show me a general who thinks that way and I'll show you a general who should be out of a job. The "Let's just wing it" plan has failed, just as it always does when the stakes are high. War is always a mess of surprises, mistakes, disasters, and curveballs. That doesn't mean that the answer is for our leadership to send people into the meat grinder without seriously considering what they'll be doing in the short and the long run. How do we maintain law and order to get society back online? How do we safely rebuild the utilities? Which warlords do we not worry about and which ones do we eliminate? How many people will it take to do it (not how many people can I get, or how many people will the American people tolerate losing before they get tired, but how many people will it actually take to do it right)? Nobody seems to have good answers. We owe the people we're sending to die at leas that much. We should spend at least as much time on those plans as we do on market deregulation, implementing a flat tax, and answering questions of what the constitution will look like.
Frankly, I'd be interested in knowing exactly what General Shinseki had planned for the 500,000 troops he suggested would be necessary for the task. I'm reasonably sure that part of his estimates included having enough people on the ground in the cities to prevent anarchy from taking over to begin with. Sadly, I'm fairly convinced that it will take more people to restore order than it would have to have kept order to begin with, so I'm not optimistic that we'll be able to make it happen.
We may be able to. It's going to cost a lot in manpower and cash, though. A lot more than most Americans are probably willing to spend, given that they seemed to think that this war was just going to be a fun little three hour tour and not a serious commitment of blood and treasure. Our odds were certainly a lot better a few years ago before we managed to screw up everything in every imaginable way at every opportunity.
What you're missing is that it doesn't take a large majority to cause chaos, as has been in evidence over the past few years. The fact that the two sides of the civil war that's on the verge of breaking out aren't politically unified doesn't make the end result all that much cleaner.
Ahh, the ever-popular "everything will work out because that's the best way for it to be" prediction. It's that type of reasoning that got us into this mess in the first place. Exactly what, over the past several years, has given you the idea that everybody is going to start acting rationally, control the violent minority, and work our their differences? When has that ever happened in a situation like this? Anybody with half a brain and any knowledge of the region saw this clusterfuck coming a mile away, but we were told that everything would be OK by a bunch of people who have the "it can't happen to me" foresight of a bunch of teenagers. I seriously doubt that the solution is to rely on the goodwill of the players at the negotiating table or simply to write another blank check to a clearly incompetent administration.
We agree there. Many people with whom I usually agree politically would like to see an immediate pullout. Personally, given the fact that we came in and destroyed their country, I think that we owe the people of Iraq something better than mass graves full of religious minorities and a chaotic failed state, which is exactly what we'd have on our hands within a few weeks of a pullout. Unfortunately, to do the right thing is going to be incredibly expensive in both lives and dollars. We can thank a completely incompetent Bush administration for that fact, and I don't think that the fact that his heart might arguably have been in the right place in any way mitigates the colossal negligence and dereliction of duty we've witnessed over the past few years.
That being said, I have a hard time buying into the idea that if we just give the retards at the top of the command chain another year and another pile of "emergency" money, they'll suddenly channel the spirits of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill and create a thriving democracy of people who love us. More likely, we have a long, grinding police action ahead of us that will consist of little more than trying to prevent Iraq from turning into Sudan or Rwanda that will end in some sort of semi-stable power sharing agreement and a lot of unhappy people. I know that it's tempting to blame "The Left" for our defeat (and make no mistake, we're not going to accomplish the pie in the sky goals we set out to) just like it was the news media and the hippies who lost us the Vietnam war, but here's the reality: Our leadership took on a very risky proposition and mismanaged it into the ground,