While large pumped hydro damns, reservoirs, etc.. can be expensive, it pays off over time. There certainly are quite a few of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations
Oregon and Washington have large mountain ranges. I'm pretty sure it would be very suitable for dozens of pumped-storage lakes or damns. The issue is who's going to foot the bill? Many wind farms are being built by 3rd parties not associated with the grid owners/base power owners.
This is another reason why I think it would be best if the power grid was unified more, either by being nationalized, or by regulations requiring upgrades and storage mechanisms. The base load/electric company will most likely not build new pumped storage or upgrade the grid unless they are forced to.
Maybe another route would be all the wind farms form a coalition, pool their money, and build several pumped storage reservoirs and/or damns. I'm not sure if all the Oregon wind companies combined would have enough money to pull that off though.
The government, as an elected representation of the people, should be enacting laws based on the morals and social conventions of a society, within the framework of that government's constitution and bill of rights.
In the US, we tend to greatly favor the right of religious freedom, even over most moral or social conventions, but there are limits.
Like I mentioned before, if a religion held that its followers should be naked at all times, but the society that that religion existed in considers nakedness in public immoral, then it is the job of the government to enact laws to uphold what the decency laws say.
The Mormon religion, concentrated around Utah, considered polygamy to be fine and decent. The rest of the country did not. Laws were passed banning polygamy.
There are many other instances where religion has been molded, by law or just by time, by the views of the society it lives in, enforced by the government of that society.
Many people consider the burqa to be degrading to women. Many people considered the Mormon practice of polygamy to be degrading to women, and bad for society as a whole. The Mormon women saw nothing wrong with it.
Is requiring a woman to be covered in public degrading enough, or immoral enough for some societies to pass laws "freeing" those women? I don't know. Like I said, I tend to favor religious freedom. But there are limits, and clear, good reasons for government involvement sometimes.
I listened to a radio show talk about Burqas bans. One thing that I walked away unclear about, is questions of identity.
Driver's license? That's been a big one. In most countries, your face is considered important for identification purposes. Crime? Man in a burqa enters a bank, is far less suspicious than a ski mask, gets the jump on the guard and clerks, etc.. (tiny problem I know, but it came up in the show).
And then, similar to morality laws about indecency (if your religion commanded you to be naked, you wouldn't be allowed to exercise that as a right in most western countries due to indecency laws), there are the issues of communication, social comfort, and the widely held belief that covering women is degrading, even if the woman being covered does not belief so.
I'm almost on the fence about this issue. I probably favor more religious freedom and allowing people to cover themselves if they want, but there are certainly many issues that make this less cut and dry than simply religious freedom factors.
Judging by the wide range of Muslim viewpoints on the burqa on that radio show, it doesn't seem that even Muslims are 100% sure why the burqa is considered required.
As a programmer, it sure seems like legacy code to me. Perhaps a few bans here and there, and Muslims will grow beyond the concept of covered women over time by reinterpreting what the Koran says?
You have to have religious freedom in order to be free from religion. And being free from religion, for me at least, is far more important than driving fast...
We don't need any big projects to end oil use rather quickly. http://www.oilendgame.com/
There's a ted.com talk summarizing the book also. And several youtube videos. http://www.google.com/search?q=winning+the+oil+endgame
Re:United States Government Accountability Office?
on
Top Secret America
·
· Score: 1
There's always been bias in reporting, but I think it can be argued that blatant bias has been increasing in the last 20 years.
Media ownership being increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy corporations, leading to less issues being addressed, and no issues being addressed that might hurt subsidiary corporate profits. News being a money maker rather than a public good that a network provides, resulting in ad money pressure and corporate shareholder/quarterly profit pressure. Rise of the internet and the failure of print media to change fast enough, resulting in a dwindling supply of true investigative journalists. etc etc etc...
And I completely agree that we need a strong government funded news source, but beholden to the people. The board of directors should be publically elected, and the candidates should receive public funding to run for elections, which a set amount of public air time for debates and commercials.
I was just listening to NPR a few days ago talking about the climate gate emails. One caller asked if the hockey stick was disproven. The answer was no.
I don't have time to google too much for you, but one of the first hits talks about the myth that the hockey graph is disproven. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-the-hockey-stick-graph-has-been-proven-wrong.html
While in an ideal world "cops vs civilians" and "army vs other army or other soldiers" is the ideal match up, in reality, I suspect it is not so black and white.
Take a fictional riot in Chicago. If 1 in every 1000 people rioting had a rocket launcher, or mortar, or grenades, would it still be the job of the police to handle the crowd? What about if 1 in 50 people in a crowd had rocket propelled grenades? Still police?
I really can't imagine how a police force, as we know it, could handle a country in an unstable situation with crowds that may or may not, at any given time, have military grade lethal weapons.
Not a comment on whether I agree or disagree with the nuclear reprocessing issue, but there's another important thing missed from the Carter decisions that is often overlooked.
Carter put solar panels on the White House, and offered a sizable tax credit for buying solar panels. Reagan had the solar panels removed and ended the tax credit, putting many solar panel companies out of business.
I often wonder what the country would look like if we had pro-solar presidents from Carter until now. My guess is that we wouldn't be having any energy issues at all, solar panels would be cheap and common and painted or rolled onto almost every surface, and that battery technology would have advanced alongside the widespread use of solar.
Who knows, I could be wrong:), but every time I think about Reagan removing the solar panels from the White House, it just pisses me off.
People only fear nuclear waste because it is concentrated in a very dense area.
This is a point that I think a lot of environmental activists miss entirely. The highly concentrated nature of nuclear waste is a benefit to nuclear power, no? I have trouble seeing how people do not see this as inherently better than the current distributed CO2 spewing systems.
I think that most environmental activists would agree that concentrated waste is easier to manage and store. The debate isn't between the perceived toxicity/radioactive pollution of nuclear vs the perceived pollution of coal/oil burning, but rather whether either is needed to maintain base load.
Many people that think we need Nuclear power believe that the sum of wind/solar/geothermal, etc.. cannot provide a steady base load (at least not in the immediate future 10-20years, and not without a huge hit to our economy). Many "environmental activists" disagree, and believe the renewable/green energy sources alone can sustain baseload, be economical, create jobs, etc etc..
To be honest, I don't know which side is right. Like the Ted talk above, every time I start googling, I tend to find numbers supporting both assertions.
"As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient." "People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3."
That study makes perfect sense.
I've always thought that the obvious difference between (US) liberals and conservatives is that liberals like people, conservatives dislike people.
Big cities, surrounded by many different ethnicities, crowded, forced to cooperative, etc.. = mostly liberals. Small town, isolated, mono-culture, great distance between houses = mostly conservatives.
Well, I suppose if there are an equal amount of facts supporting an issue/theory, then the outcome of the court should indicate that in its ruling.
But really, if the wording of the 'new' libel and slander laws were very strongly worded (grossly misrepresented, vast majority of evidence favors, etc..) then the jury should be clear that rulings should only be against the worst of the bunch.
However, in reality, I can't think of any major issues that are so evenly balanced with facts that a jury would be confused, given competent prosecutors of course:)
AGW reporting would be a very interesting case. I cannot imagine how a prosecutor could screw that up, given the preponderance of evidence in favor of the theory.
I do see that bullying could be an issue (big institution vs college blogger) but that is the case with almost all law now.
I don't think the internet is at fault for the group think, so much as the concentration of media ownership and the continual rise of corporate influence in the media and politics.
Take Citizens United vs. the Supreme Court as yet another example of 'big money' being able to influence more and more Americans.
The massive rise of 'think tanks', who do 'studies', which are then taken at face value (or blow out of proportion) on talk radio and internet blogs, which winds up basically being touted as fact a few days later on major news outlets is the primary reason that so many Americans find themselves entrenched in one camp or the other.
The only way out I see (short of a massive reform of campaign finance rules, shorter term limits, etc..) is basically to broaden libel and slander laws to include ideas and theories.
If you, as a news organization, or journalist, are found guilty of intentionally misleading or grossly mis-reporting facts by a jury of your peers, its off to jail/big fine time.
You can get in trouble for libel or slander against a person, but why not against a theory/idea such as global warming, which for society has a much larger impact if it is not handled objectively and with the truth in mind?
I can appreciate number 1 and 4 (slightly), but the rest....don't paint a pretty picture at all.
2. Learned Bigotry. 3. Willful Ignorance. 5. Complete lack of understanding about taxes. Republicans consistently give tax tiny tax breaks to the middle and lower classes and huge tax breaks the the upper class. My conservative relatives still believe that Obama didn't cut their taxes. I don't know if that is ignorance, or blinded by a conservative ideology, but I cannot understand why those folks can't understand that numbers. 6. Most of the time those shouting the loudest aren't terribly educated, and frankly, the rest of the country is pretty sick of them being on the national news (tea party, palin, etc etc).
Your post is modded correctly as 'insightful', but what it implies is that many of us on the west/east coasts, northwest, etc.. are correct in our assumption that something is drastically wrong with media when the number one news station in the country is very much pro-conservative/tea party.
Maybe it just shows that the blue folks have basically given up trying to talk sense into red folks who willfully ignore facts. I don't know, but I find it pretty depressing.
"The world's current (overall as well as natural) growth rate is about 1.14%, representing a doubling time of 61 years. We can expect the world's population of 6.5 billion to become 13 billion by 2067 if current growth continues. The world's growth rate peaked in the 1960s at 2% and a doubling time of 35 years."
The crowd isn't listening to the loudest talk/media moron because the crowd is stupid. The crowd, on average though, is lazy. If you feed the crowd the truth, the crowd will generally make good decisions.
What we are seeing in media in the last 20 years is a culmination of corporate power controlling the news, a concentration of media ownership in the hands of fewer and fewer companies, and with that a rapid expansion of "think tanks" who are ideologically, not factually, motivated.
Think tank funded by Exxon Mobil produces a report that says global warming is a hoax, news organization receiving 20% of its advertising from Exxon Mobil and subsidiaries airs a special report discussing the report, etc, etc, etc..
We need trusted, non-profit news sources, with prime time air times to make the crowd smarter. As it is, even if you are less lazy than the average crowd member, and take the time to do a lot of internet research on a subject, it can be very difficult getting unbiased (or close to unbiased) details about any given issue.
I first came across the above link in the book Selfish-Biocosm. I think it was in Ohio they developed a stock-market like system that attempts to predict political winners. Its historic accuracy so impressed the intelligence agencies, that DARPA started a pilot program that would have let America basically bet on what terrorist act would happen next.
A few senators flipped out and the project was cancelled. Too bad, because the system is extremely accurate.
You should probably take what a comedian says about politics as not entirely accurate.
The vast majority of what Bush passed was 9/11 related stuff. At that time, with the mood in the country, you'd be committing political suicide to vote against "fighting terror". That is why everything Bush wanted passed.
The republicans are being asses and not letting anything come to a vote. Way moreso than normal. http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/the-rise-of-cloture-how-gop-filibuster-threats-have-changed-the-senate.php
I've never heard that idea before, but it is really interesting. Make them publish as long as they have the copyright. How would one work out how much they would be required to publish though?
Half or quarter of what ever they were publishing during the song/book/movie's peak? And if they find that too costly, give up the copyright?
Well, this whole "internet thing" with its digital files, streaming and copying, just sprung out of no where and caught them completely by surprise. So they are trying to cover all bases in case they get surprised again.;)
I wish UCLA had done a parallel study where they assessed the quality (in terms of getting facts right, etc..) of media outlets and graphed that against their definitions of liberal/conservative.
Stephen Colbert's quote "Reality has a well known liberal bias" is funny because it is true:)
What happened here guys? Prior to the health care reform bill passing, I could have sworn that slashdot was the favorite forum for Fox News consumers. Todays thread actually seems moderated in favor of public health care! (Which I support).
I suppose since Fox stopped talking about health care 24/7 that the sheep have lost interest in the subject?
I do not know much about Japan's or Australia's banks, but Canada has very well regulated banks, and that is the primary reason why they never really 'crashed' like other countries did. Canada's banks are essentially regulated like the USA's used to be, before Reagan and subsequent presidents stripped regulation away and stopped aggressively enforcing the remaining regulation.
I've heard a fair amount of these points on conservative news and talk shows.
The primary issue that I think the above set of points fails to address, is that healthcare is not a normal business. Unlike regular business, which does become more efficient and better for the consumer when exposed to competition, healthcare cannot, morally or economically, thrive under competition.
Would a consumer ever "shop around" for the cheapest brain surgeon? If a doctor's motive is profit, would he ever provide the highest quality care if he could convince the patient to undergo a slightly less effective treatment if it happened to have a higher profit margin for him? If a health insurance company's motive is profit, wouldn't it be their number one goal to provide as little to you as possible? And if another health insurance company did provide more care (getting less profit), they would necessarily cost more. How many young healthy people are going to pick the pricier insurance? None. Meaning that the insurance company attempting to offer more, is going to quickly go out of business, as they will be filled only with the sick and elderly.
Health care cannot be considered as a simple business, with supply & demand, and free market forces effecting it.
In addition to all the ways in which a profit motive screw up reaching the goal of quality health care, another major factor is morality leading to regulation. For example, hospitals must care for anyone in an emergency, regardless of their ability to pay. Who takes care of that cost? The consumers that are able to pay, in terms of higher prices. In a true free market, a hospital would turn away people unable to pay, and a hospital would only treat high profit margin cases.
The only way that health care can be provided at low cost, with high quality outcomes, is if the system is owned by the public, and run as a non-profit agency.
Slashdot Mirror
While large pumped hydro damns, reservoirs, etc.. can be expensive, it pays off over time. There certainly are quite a few of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations
Oregon and Washington have large mountain ranges. I'm pretty sure it would be very suitable for dozens of pumped-storage lakes or damns. The issue is who's going to foot the bill? Many wind farms are being built by 3rd parties not associated with the grid owners/base power owners.
This is another reason why I think it would be best if the power grid was unified more, either by being nationalized, or by regulations requiring upgrades and storage mechanisms. The base load/electric company will most likely not build new pumped storage or upgrade the grid unless they are forced to.
Maybe another route would be all the wind farms form a coalition, pool their money, and build several pumped storage reservoirs and/or damns. I'm not sure if all the Oregon wind companies combined would have enough money to pull that off though.
The government, as an elected representation of the people, should be enacting laws based on the morals and social conventions of a society, within the framework of that government's constitution and bill of rights.
In the US, we tend to greatly favor the right of religious freedom, even over most moral or social conventions, but there are limits.
Like I mentioned before, if a religion held that its followers should be naked at all times, but the society that that religion existed in considers nakedness in public immoral, then it is the job of the government to enact laws to uphold what the decency laws say.
The Mormon religion, concentrated around Utah, considered polygamy to be fine and decent. The rest of the country did not. Laws were passed banning polygamy.
There are many other instances where religion has been molded, by law or just by time, by the views of the society it lives in, enforced by the government of that society.
Many people consider the burqa to be degrading to women. Many people considered the Mormon practice of polygamy to be degrading to women, and bad for society as a whole. The Mormon women saw nothing wrong with it.
Is requiring a woman to be covered in public degrading enough, or immoral enough for some societies to pass laws "freeing" those women? I don't know. Like I said, I tend to favor religious freedom. But there are limits, and clear, good reasons for government involvement sometimes.
I listened to a radio show talk about Burqas bans. One thing that I walked away unclear about, is questions of identity.
Driver's license? That's been a big one. In most countries, your face is considered important for identification purposes.
Crime? Man in a burqa enters a bank, is far less suspicious than a ski mask, gets the jump on the guard and clerks, etc.. (tiny problem I know, but it came up in the show).
And then, similar to morality laws about indecency (if your religion commanded you to be naked, you wouldn't be allowed to exercise that as a right in most western countries due to indecency laws), there are the issues of communication, social comfort, and the widely held belief that covering women is degrading, even if the woman being covered does not belief so.
I'm almost on the fence about this issue. I probably favor more religious freedom and allowing people to cover themselves if they want, but there are certainly many issues that make this less cut and dry than simply religious freedom factors.
Judging by the wide range of Muslim viewpoints on the burqa on that radio show, it doesn't seem that even Muslims are 100% sure why the burqa is considered required.
As a programmer, it sure seems like legacy code to me. Perhaps a few bans here and there, and Muslims will grow beyond the concept of covered women over time by reinterpreting what the Koran says?
Well, as an American, I'd say this:
You have to have religious freedom in order to be free from religion. And being free from religion, for me at least, is far more important than driving fast...
We don't need any big projects to end oil use rather quickly.
http://www.oilendgame.com/
There's a ted.com talk summarizing the book also. And several youtube videos. http://www.google.com/search?q=winning+the+oil+endgame
There's always been bias in reporting, but I think it can be argued that blatant bias has been increasing in the last 20 years.
Media ownership being increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy corporations, leading to less issues being addressed, and no issues being addressed that might hurt subsidiary corporate profits.
News being a money maker rather than a public good that a network provides, resulting in ad money pressure and corporate shareholder/quarterly profit pressure.
Rise of the internet and the failure of print media to change fast enough, resulting in a dwindling supply of true investigative journalists.
etc etc etc...
And I completely agree that we need a strong government funded news source, but beholden to the people. The board of directors should be publically elected, and the candidates should receive public funding to run for elections, which a set amount of public air time for debates and commercials.
I was just listening to NPR a few days ago talking about the climate gate emails. One caller asked if the hockey stick was disproven. The answer was no.
I don't have time to google too much for you, but one of the first hits talks about the myth that the hockey graph is disproven.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-the-hockey-stick-graph-has-been-proven-wrong.html
While in an ideal world "cops vs civilians" and "army vs other army or other soldiers" is the ideal match up, in reality, I suspect it is not so black and white.
Take a fictional riot in Chicago. If 1 in every 1000 people rioting had a rocket launcher, or mortar, or grenades, would it still be the job of the police to handle the crowd? What about if 1 in 50 people in a crowd had rocket propelled grenades? Still police?
I really can't imagine how a police force, as we know it, could handle a country in an unstable situation with crowds that may or may not, at any given time, have military grade lethal weapons.
Not a comment on whether I agree or disagree with the nuclear reprocessing issue, but there's another important thing missed from the Carter decisions that is often overlooked.
Carter put solar panels on the White House, and offered a sizable tax credit for buying solar panels.
Reagan had the solar panels removed and ended the tax credit, putting many solar panel companies out of business.
I often wonder what the country would look like if we had pro-solar presidents from Carter until now. My guess is that we wouldn't be having any energy issues at all, solar panels would be cheap and common and painted or rolled onto almost every surface, and that battery technology would have advanced alongside the widespread use of solar.
Who knows, I could be wrong:), but every time I think about Reagan removing the solar panels from the White House, it just pisses me off.
People only fear nuclear waste because it is concentrated in a very dense area.
This is a point that I think a lot of environmental activists miss entirely. The highly concentrated nature of nuclear waste is a benefit to nuclear power, no? I have trouble seeing how people do not see this as inherently better than the current distributed CO2 spewing systems.
I think that most environmental activists would agree that concentrated waste is easier to manage and store. The debate isn't between the perceived toxicity/radioactive pollution of nuclear vs the perceived pollution of coal/oil burning, but rather whether either is needed to maintain base load.
http://www.ted.com/talks/debate_does_the_world_need_nuclear_energy.html
Many people that think we need Nuclear power believe that the sum of wind/solar/geothermal, etc.. cannot provide a steady base load (at least not in the immediate future 10-20years, and not without a huge hit to our economy). Many "environmental activists" disagree, and believe the renewable/green energy sources alone can sustain baseload, be economical, create jobs, etc etc..
To be honest, I don't know which side is right. Like the Ted talk above, every time I start googling, I tend to find numbers supporting both assertions.
"As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient."
"People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3."
That study makes perfect sense.
I've always thought that the obvious difference between (US) liberals and conservatives is that liberals like people, conservatives dislike people.
Big cities, surrounded by many different ethnicities, crowded, forced to cooperative, etc.. = mostly liberals.
Small town, isolated, mono-culture, great distance between houses = mostly conservatives.
Well, I suppose if there are an equal amount of facts supporting an issue/theory, then the outcome of the court should indicate that in its ruling.
But really, if the wording of the 'new' libel and slander laws were very strongly worded (grossly misrepresented, vast majority of evidence favors, etc..) then the jury should be clear that rulings should only be against the worst of the bunch.
However, in reality, I can't think of any major issues that are so evenly balanced with facts that a jury would be confused, given competent prosecutors of course:)
AGW reporting would be a very interesting case. I cannot imagine how a prosecutor could screw that up, given the preponderance of evidence in favor of the theory.
I do see that bullying could be an issue (big institution vs college blogger) but that is the case with almost all law now.
I don't think the internet is at fault for the group think, so much as the concentration of media ownership and the continual rise of corporate influence in the media and politics.
Take Citizens United vs. the Supreme Court as yet another example of 'big money' being able to influence more and more Americans.
The massive rise of 'think tanks', who do 'studies', which are then taken at face value (or blow out of proportion) on talk radio and internet blogs, which winds up basically being touted as fact a few days later on major news outlets is the primary reason that so many Americans find themselves entrenched in one camp or the other.
The only way out I see (short of a massive reform of campaign finance rules, shorter term limits, etc..) is basically to broaden libel and slander laws to include ideas and theories.
If you, as a news organization, or journalist, are found guilty of intentionally misleading or grossly mis-reporting facts by a jury of your peers, its off to jail/big fine time.
You can get in trouble for libel or slander against a person, but why not against a theory/idea such as global warming, which for society has a much larger impact if it is not handled objectively and with the truth in mind?
I can appreciate number 1 and 4 (slightly), but the rest....don't paint a pretty picture at all.
2. Learned Bigotry.
3. Willful Ignorance.
5. Complete lack of understanding about taxes. Republicans consistently give tax tiny tax breaks to the middle and lower classes and huge tax breaks the the upper class. My conservative relatives still believe that Obama didn't cut their taxes. I don't know if that is ignorance, or blinded by a conservative ideology, but I cannot understand why those folks can't understand that numbers.
6. Most of the time those shouting the loudest aren't terribly educated, and frankly, the rest of the country is pretty sick of them being on the national news (tea party, palin, etc etc).
Your post is modded correctly as 'insightful', but what it implies is that many of us on the west/east coasts, northwest, etc.. are correct in our assumption that something is drastically wrong with media when the number one news station in the country is very much pro-conservative/tea party.
Maybe it just shows that the blue folks have basically given up trying to talk sense into red folks who willfully ignore facts. I don't know, but I find it pretty depressing.
Is this incorrect?
"The world's current (overall as well as natural) growth rate is about 1.14%, representing a doubling time of 61 years. We can expect the world's population of 6.5 billion to become 13 billion by 2067 if current growth continues. The world's growth rate peaked in the 1960s at 2% and a doubling time of 35 years."
http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/populationgrow.htm
The crowd isn't listening to the loudest talk/media moron because the crowd is stupid. The crowd, on average though, is lazy. If you feed the crowd the truth, the crowd will generally make good decisions.
What we are seeing in media in the last 20 years is a culmination of corporate power controlling the news, a concentration of media ownership in the hands of fewer and fewer companies, and with that a rapid expansion of "think tanks" who are ideologically, not factually, motivated.
Think tank funded by Exxon Mobil produces a report that says global warming is a hoax, news organization receiving 20% of its advertising from Exxon Mobil and subsidiaries airs a special report discussing the report, etc, etc, etc..
We need trusted, non-profit news sources, with prime time air times to make the crowd smarter. As it is, even if you are less lazy than the average crowd member, and take the time to do a lot of internet research on a subject, it can be very difficult getting unbiased (or close to unbiased) details about any given issue.
I think more modern studies outweigh any of the older 'evidence' that crowds are dumb.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol50no4/using-prediction-markets-to-enhance-us-intelligence-capabilities.html
I first came across the above link in the book Selfish-Biocosm. I think it was in Ohio they developed a stock-market like system that attempts to predict political winners. Its historic accuracy so impressed the intelligence agencies, that DARPA started a pilot program that would have let America basically bet on what terrorist act would happen next.
A few senators flipped out and the project was cancelled. Too bad, because the system is extremely accurate.
You should probably take what a comedian says about politics as not entirely accurate.
The vast majority of what Bush passed was 9/11 related stuff. At that time, with the mood in the country, you'd be committing political suicide to vote against "fighting terror". That is why everything Bush wanted passed.
The republicans are being asses and not letting anything come to a vote. Way moreso than normal.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/the-rise-of-cloture-how-gop-filibuster-threats-have-changed-the-senate.php
I've never heard that idea before, but it is really interesting. Make them publish as long as they have the copyright. How would one work out how much they would be required to publish though?
Half or quarter of what ever they were publishing during the song/book/movie's peak? And if they find that too costly, give up the copyright?
Well, this whole "internet thing" with its digital files, streaming and copying, just sprung out of no where and caught them completely by surprise. So they are trying to cover all bases in case they get surprised again. ;)
I wish UCLA had done a parallel study where they assessed the quality (in terms of getting facts right, etc..) of media outlets and graphed that against their definitions of liberal/conservative.
Stephen Colbert's quote "Reality has a well known liberal bias" is funny because it is true:)
I understand your point. If the people are poor, they are much more likely to give up information.
However, ngo's, peace corp, and other humanitarian groups are not filled with spies.
What's FSU by the way? It is hard to search for, all I get are hits about Florida State University heh.
What happened here guys? Prior to the health care reform bill passing, I could have sworn that slashdot was the favorite forum for Fox News consumers. Todays thread actually seems moderated in favor of public health care! (Which I support).
I suppose since Fox stopped talking about health care 24/7 that the sheep have lost interest in the subject?
I do not know much about Japan's or Australia's banks, but Canada has very well regulated banks, and that is the primary reason why they never really 'crashed' like other countries did. Canada's banks are essentially regulated like the USA's used to be, before Reagan and subsequent presidents stripped regulation away and stopped aggressively enforcing the remaining regulation.
I've heard a fair amount of these points on conservative news and talk shows.
The primary issue that I think the above set of points fails to address, is that healthcare is not a normal business. Unlike regular business, which does become more efficient and better for the consumer when exposed to competition, healthcare cannot, morally or economically, thrive under competition.
Would a consumer ever "shop around" for the cheapest brain surgeon?
If a doctor's motive is profit, would he ever provide the highest quality care if he could convince the patient to undergo a slightly less effective treatment if it happened to have a higher profit margin for him?
If a health insurance company's motive is profit, wouldn't it be their number one goal to provide as little to you as possible?
And if another health insurance company did provide more care (getting less profit), they would necessarily cost more. How many young healthy people are going to pick the pricier insurance? None. Meaning that the insurance company attempting to offer more, is going to quickly go out of business, as they will be filled only with the sick and elderly.
Health care cannot be considered as a simple business, with supply & demand, and free market forces effecting it.
In addition to all the ways in which a profit motive screw up reaching the goal of quality health care, another major factor is morality leading to regulation. For example, hospitals must care for anyone in an emergency, regardless of their ability to pay. Who takes care of that cost? The consumers that are able to pay, in terms of higher prices. In a true free market, a hospital would turn away people unable to pay, and a hospital would only treat high profit margin cases.
The only way that health care can be provided at low cost, with high quality outcomes, is if the system is owned by the public, and run as a non-profit agency.