More like faith that the government in question will honour it's obligations at roughly the purchasing parity value of the money and not rapidly deflate their currency (by printing money). Their ability to repay is backed by not just gold but the whole assets of the country (since the government can tax anything theoretically).
Much of its value comes from the fact that you can't 'run out of cash' with fiat money, which was a problem after 1800 when the population wordwide started to explode but gold and silver production didn't quite line up. It dodges wacky inflation and deflation caused by local supply of gold and silver or other precious metals and so on. And with constant, small inflation (because deflation is really bad, you're better to err on the side of inflation), you can decrease the value of debt over time both personal and government.
You're absolutely spot on that it assumes a trust in the government to collect fees to pay debts. The problem we're seeing in greece right now is that a country with 140% of GDP debt is running ~15% of GDP deficits (this is a sort of odd statistic, because different countries have different levels of government that can acquire debt, so it's hard to compare to anyone else), and a parliament that seems unwilling to go along with raising tax revenue, or cutting spending, they can't deflate the currency (being part of the Euro, it would be like maryland or indiana teetering on bankrupcy, all 3 of which represent about 2% of the bigger monetary union), and with a shrinking economy it's not clear how they'll pay back the money. Of course it's a bit like a person with credit card debt. If someone would lend them money at 1% interest they can probably sort themselves out, but if they have to pay 16 -20% they simply cannot manage 160, 170% of GDP debt (that would be like the ENTIRE US federal budget going to pay off interest on debt). It's also not clear how exactly greece can default on it's debt, because it's all in euros. Which creates even more uncertainty, and makes it harder for them to borrow money. Oh, and the government isn't agreeing to the terms the people offering them money at low interest want... so ya. Though I suppose from the perspective of greece the Euro isn't really fiat, since they can't really change its value (it would be like one of the Caribbean islands that uses US dollars, sure, it's Fiat for the US, and the Euro is for France/Ger/ITA/SPA but greece.. they don't have much say or influence).
From everything I can tell, neither medicaid nor medicare provide bad, or inefficient care. There are, like any system, inefficiencies, and errors. But overall they seem to do pretty well for the problem they are tasked with. Medicare would save a bunch of money if covered everyone over 60 rather than over 65, but you aren't going to convince politicians of that, and it would be even more efficient if it was anyone over 50.
I'm not an american, but we all have the same biases about perception of care. We think that latest drug/treatment/scan whatever is the best way to do go. We think that you want the top graduate from medical school etc. In practice those don't necessarily equate to the best benefit to patients, nor the best cost effective care. Lots of drugs are expensive re-engineers of existing drugs, and aren't any better, but people want them anyway. Paying a doctor 250k/year when you could pay 175k who had an academic average 5% lower doesn't necessarily equate to worse medical care. A good system objectively assesses what is the most effective way to deliver care with the money available, and tries to work past the publics biases. That's an unpleasant exercise in statistics - the media always loves that one case in a million that goes catastrophically wrong, but is not an overall picture of health care performance. It's important when judging how well a system is doing to ignore media sensationalism, and focus on how the systems judge themselves against each other, and how they are doing overall with the budgets they have.
Sure, medicare, medicaid, the NHS, the french health system, the canadian health system all have things that can be improved. But overall they seem to do pretty well.
$1500 is a lot when you're out of work. And more to the point, how often can that 1500 re-occur? Admittedly I'm in canada so we don't treat people like they'll have to pay out of pocket. But my best friend at 29 had cancer. He was admitted, sent home, re-admitted to hospital several times in a week, and 3 times in one day. It wasn't even that the hospital was trying to be rid of him, he just had a lot of different parts of his body failing in different ways and they'd solve one problem, send him home (because the feeling is you recover better at home) and 2 days later something else would go wrong.
He's sorted out health wise now. But that's beside the point. If you end up in hospital multiple times in a month, how often will your insurance re-bill you.
What does "full coverage" mean? Prescription drugs? Do you have a co-pay? If you have a deductible of 1500 in hospital care (or something like that) it's certainly not 'full'. What if you go to a hospital in a different city than where you live? Does your insurance company approve (or not) of places you can go? Also, under what conditions can they drop your coverage. That was the trick with my friend, as he learned through friends in various support groups. In the US the first time you get cancer you're probably covered by insurance. But the moment they think you're cured for 3 months they drop your ass like a rock, and no one else will touch you with a 100 metre, I'm sorry, foot, pole, and then you're in deep shit.
If you're homeless you should qualify for medicaid, I don't live there, but I know a couple of people in the US on medicaid, and I know they're on medicaid because it has kept them alive and in good care.
At 14% growth they will double their wages every 5 years.
As they increase in wages, they will tend to slow down, because they are converging on the US per capita income, but then as you see most other places do pretty well after you hit about 75% of US wages on an overall average.
They're investing heavily in R&D, but they absolutely have to catch up. They're investing in energy, both renewable and nuclear, they're investing in transport - notably as you say, high speed rail. And they're innovating on small scales. They're taking that glass you want manufactured, and making it better, 10% cheaper, 10% stronger, whatever it is. They're not going to wake up tomorrow and decide they're going to put a man on mars by 2020 with any hope of success. Much of their intellectual capital is invested in people policies, or, put another way, where, in the west our great minds are trying to build some physical or software thing to solve a problem, in china they are trying to build policy and procedure. How do you cope with too many people? How do you prevent 100 million people from all trying to move to one massive unsustainable city, how do build and education system with an ever shrinking potential enrolment (but huge numbers of people coming out of rural areas). How do you build a political system that can balance the will of illiterate masses with the need to build and create a modern society (and drag said illiterate masses into the modern society). I think we have seen enormous innovation from china, just not on problems you or I care about all that much. But some poor bugger in india, or vietnam, or even europe (all of whom have much higher population density overall that mainland china) will want that insight in policy and society. China is also big, but largely (like australia) uninhabited, they face huge social problems with cities and trying to balance the needs of farmers etc.
Oh, and they've done a great job innovating a way to take money from us, grab the Americans by the balls, and then keep getting more money. They've secured resources from places the rest of us won't touch, they've misdirected the americans into underestimating them at every turn geopolitically, they've figured out how to steal pretty much every secret we've had that was important. Those are all innovations. Not necessarily the sort you were looking for, but ones not to be underestimated either.
ya, and as we've seen, the big boys who lease lines to the aforementioned boutique sellers are working hard to make sure they aren't going to be selling unlimited for much longer.
Cutting spending is cutting jobs, even if they are bad, or involuntary jobs. There's no easy way around that. That was my point. What the long term budget of the US should look like, presumably not spending 5% of GDP on defence (and coming more in line with everyone else in NATO at like 2%) might be in order. But the broader future question of how to deal with china on less money, when they get far more 'bang for the buck' so to speak is well beyond economics.
The best thing they could have done for jobs and the economy would have been to attach unfreezing credit as a condition of bailout funds to rich banks. They can still make demands on banking and finance, they just have to be a bit more blunt about it now. I doubt it'll happen though since our politicians are too fond of the taste of Wall streets ass.
Requiring they lend money poses its own problems. Mostly that you drive up the risks associated with it.
An offshore labour tax would simply be illegal and unworkable. What exactly defines 'offshore'? Factories in China produce stuff for china as well as europe as well as the US, and most of those, including the well known foxconn aren't owned by the US at all. It's a business to business transaction. Secondly what right does the US have to dictate labour prices to me? Oh and you'd be handing a *huge* advantage to foreign corporations who don't have to play by those rules. Like I said, with all trade barriers it's a short term benefit which creates a huge long term disparity. No one wants to pay $25 for socks they can buy for $1 now, the enormous cost to effective buying power would change up the US a lot. And probably not for the better, since everywhere else that still had free trade would still be doing the $1 sock thing.
I was trying to come out neither for nor against stimulus, only discussing its consequences, and of course my pie in the sky solution is impossible. Evidence based decision making is beyond the capacity of US elected representatives.
I think every semi democratic country in the world has at least one party that wants to privatize utilities, and to push all of these things onto the private sector. Putting the internet as a public utility creates a slew of problems that the government now can, and will be expected to, monitor the content moving over its network.
Other way around. Because there's no added cost, the 'cap the user' is being spread like wildfire. It's easy to justify to the public, they can charge enormous sums for it, and there's dick all you can do about it.
We've had caps in canada on the big carriers for nearly a decade. When netflix launched in canada they all *lowered* their caps. You poor bastards down south might be catching up to the anti-competitive bullshit that we've had since windows XP launched.
of course, wasteful spending is bad. But that comes no where near solving your deficit problem sadly. Combined iraq and afghanistan are only costing about 12 billion dollars a month http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf (= 144 billion per year = 1/10th of the budget deficit). The whole of the TSA is an 8.1 billion dollar, per year, budget.
Well ok, guantanamo bay costs so little it's hard to count monetarily.
Actually, if you axed the ENTIRE war.. I'm sorry defence department, you'd still be running a deficit. You'd have to axe the entire defense department twice over to eliminate the deficit.
Addressing unemployment is not trivial. What exactly can the government do? Business don't hire people until they have both cash, and orders they can't easily fill with current staffing levels. The government can directly employ people, through stimulus plans or the like, but that is essentially expanding the government (even if they are largely one off construction costs they come with carrying/maintenance costs). I suppose the government could try and fund business ventures it intends to sell off, or just invest in (think hoover dam or other public 'utilities' type business) but that's an enormously risky thing to do with public money. If anything the current uncertainty created by the deficit and political posturing is the most serious issue the government can address that is effecting unemployment. If, come august 2nd, or just generally some non specific not to distant point in the future the government has to stop paying bills as it currently does, either by shrinking the government in a new budget, or defaulting on obligations or the like, all of the businesses (and their employees) that rely on affected federal contracts are going to be in deep shit, fast. That uncertainty drives down confidence and it means companies that rely, either directly or indirectly on the government for revenue aren't going to hire permanent employees. Otherwise, at this point, there isn't much they can do. Trying to offer hiring incentives, (say subsidizing wages), causes all sorts of inflationary problems, and it just makes the debt problem worse. Raising taxes could (depending on how exactly taxes are raised) cut personal spending, which means less revenue, and again, less jobs in some sectors. It's not like this is some easy problem with known miracle solutions they're just too stupid to implement, even if politicians give that impression a lot. The only other thing the US could do would be to start putting up trade barriers. That's a short term solution that causes a huge long term problem (which looks very much like the problem faced now where someone in china or india can work for 1/20 or 1/50th what an american can, and suddenly it becomes prohibitively expensive to do any business in the US), there's probably some sensible things the european and north american governments could do, notably on environmental and labour policy that would sort some things out, but demanding that china sign on to Kyoto CO2 cuts, or allow labour unions or the like poses problems with the US party in charge of Congress not wanting to do those things either.
If it were me... and admittedly it's a pie in the sky notion. I would immediately build a national health service modelled on, well, the NHS in the UK (essentially, it would simply expand Medicare, or the VA to everyone in the US), raise taxes to meet the % of GDP currently paid for by americans (16% of GDP, of which about 10% is from the government already). But healthcare in other countries runs 8-10% of GDP for single payer insurance, so you'd pick up extra revenue 6-8% of GDP, give everyone healthcare (which reduces business costs), and be left with a 4-6% of GDP deficit, which is reasonably managable. Oh, and fuck all of those managers running the insurance companies now, deny them unemployment, they've robbed americans enough as it is.
When people lose jobs they move from paying taxes to collecting unemployment. In a somewhat oversimplified way, if you go from 5% unemployment to 10%, your outlays have increased not a 5% increase in government spending, much more than that, a couple of percent of GDP, and your revenue has fallen by 5%.
Then you have extra spending, for things like bailouts, stimulus (some of which essentially comes out of the unemployment insurance you're paying) and so on.
Oh, and all the while because companies are making less money, employees aren't getting as many raises etc. (even though government employees and contracts will have raises in their contracts from before the contraction), so corporations and people aren't paying as much in taxes.
The net effect for the US is that spending went up a bit, from something like 22 to 25% of GDP, where revenue when down, from about 17 or 18 to about 15%. And suddenly you go from having a deficit of 4% of GDP (which was about 450-500 billion dollars a year) due to unnecessary tax cuts and irresponsible borrowing, to having a deficit of close to 10% of GDP - (which is about 30% of the budget).
Importantly though, where I am in canada, we went from 0% deficit (with a mild surplus) to ~4 or 5% of GDP deficit, just like the US. The situation in the US is magnified because of the various cut taxes and increase spending policies before the 2008 recession.
The question of what to cut is not simple. The government signs contracts in many cases years in advance for things. Take the example of the two new british aircraft carriers - for companies to build them required certain commitments that they wouldn't go bankrupt building all the stuff needed for these ships. So the UK government is committed to buy these aircraft carriers, that is to say, they wrote into the contract penalties and so on if one side backs out they have to pay, a lot. In the end it's cheaper for them to finish buying the carriers than to cancel the contracts (note there is politics here that in writing the contract they want to ensure the ship gets built even if someone else comes into office) . The US is the same way. Sign a 5 year deal with Boeing or dell for aircraft and computers and you're stuck paying for it, even if the economy tanks (that does have the benefit of keeping all those people employed however). Because of these contracts you can't just cut whatever, even if you wanted to. The big deal in the US is medicare, medicaid and defence, which are, by law, entitlement programmes the US cannot just not fund. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/#usgs302a has neat info graphics. There's a lot on there that's very hard to be rid of.
in general the iphone keyboard makes using #$_*! etc and CaPitaLiz3d passwords harder than it should, which tends to lead to bad security. I'd be interested to know how many people use the same iphone 4 digit code as their PIN for their debit. though it looks like the phone lock is more of a 'get me past this lock quickly', which says a lot about how people want to use their phones.
Kids today know more about sex than their parents do, and indulge in superstitious behaviors far less, generally speaking, and we're considerably better off because of it.
Because we require a 3rd party, set up and run by the government (aka schools) to teach those things....
It isn't possible for parents to live their childrens lives 30 seconds before they do with a little swear word buzzer, even if they want to. They must have a trust relationship with a 3rd party, that that book they're reading, that show they're watching, that that website they go to isn't going to suddenly start showing something radically out of step with what they did before. Just because you send a kid to a set of 'google approved' or 'government approved' or library approved websites doesn't mean they can't also see something else. The point of childrens programming, childrens sections etc. is to find a subset of things that is nearly universally agreed upon, as being definitely OK, it's up to parents if they want to go outside that, but the role of the 3rd party is to provide the trust relationship.
No, the reason for that is so that the incompetent don't have to parent, so that politicians can grandstand
No, it isn't. Well ok, politicians grandstand every chance they get. It pools the resources of competent parents into establishing material they can all trust. The point is that if it airs before 9PM you can be confident that if you haven't seen this episode, or these commercials before, you aren't suddenly trying to explain to your kid material you weren't planning on, or don't want to, or don't think they're ready for. Trying to explain to an 8 year old why those burned corpses of mercenaries are hanging from a bridge in some foreign country *is not an experience you want*, ever. Well maybe you do. that's your choice to make. But you know that until 9pm stuff like that shouldn't be on TV without at least a warning in advance about it, so if you don't want to be rapidly changing the channel or trying to explain random stuff, you don't need do.
it is precisely the role of a 3rd party. That's why there are rules on what can be on TV and radio stations at various hours and so on, it's why bookstores and libraries offer kids sections, it's why companies explicitly make media for children. A 3rd party should establish a brand and a trust relationship with it's customers about what sorts of content they can access through this service - whether that is an aggregation or search of content creators or creating there own.
It may not be the role of google though. They seem to prefer to solve problems with computer algorithms, not with people. That doesn't lend itself to kids stuff for the oft mentioned reason that screwing it up can go badly, fast, and it's much easier to sneak stuff past a computer algorithm than a person.
It's the same problem as the desktop OS question: What should the OS do? For years the debate was whether or not it should even a have a front end GUI for lots of tasks (that does slow it down after all). But at some point an OS is just a tool to launch and facilitate applications. On a device like a phone you need to bake in some phone software to go with it. But really, how much do you want the OS to do?
Reaching feature parity with what the operating system itself (and the relevant bundled tools) does shouldn't be that much of a jump for MS. Apparently it is, but it shouldn't be.
MS at one point was good at copying ideas from the competition, and rolling them out fast. WP7, not so much. Until you see feature parity between Droid/iPhone/WP7 they're going to have a ways to go.
Now, to be fair to MS, they seem to be plodding along, there seems to be some, as yet undisclosed, strategy here for next year, or I would have expected Nokia to have a WP7 out the door already. That or they're both grossly incompetent, which is highly likely at this point, but either way, I'm guessing the big Windows phone push from MS and the manufacturers is going to be next year rather than this.
Constitutions, laws, courts, upper houses of hereditary unelected rich, monarchs, are all decidedly undemocratic systems and serve as effective counter weights to the will of the masses, even multiple tiers of democracy pose profoundly deep questions about what democracy *is*. As I said, does world democracy take precedence over amercian democracy? Does american democracy take precedence over alaskan democracy and so on.
Ok you want substance of how to do it? Power should be balance both geographically, and between classes of people (rich and poor). A unelected, hereditary house of lords - chosen to give the rich a direct hand in government, so they aren't buying it , with an elected, by evenly distributed democratic districts for the commons. Written constitutions only work in the long run when they say nothing of substance, so we can forget about those, otherwise they just bind people to antiquated ideas. If the two houses cannot agree, or manage to actually pass necessary laws (like a budget) power should be reserved in a hereditary sovereign, who is prepared, from birth, for the possibility of balancing the interests of competing factions (including their own). There should be a single federal entity, and some local government. The more tiers of government there are, the more likely you are to have unnecessary infighting and squabbling over who should do what. Let us call this big, bicameral legislature 'parliament' - it, and more to the point, it's laws when signed by the sovereign are supreme, and the law exists to enforce the law. All of this can change as technology eliminates the need for any part of government, or adds a need for new parts.
Ultimately all government relies on the nobility of the people who run it. Recognizing, accepting, and building a system which fosters that is the only way to make a functioning society. That's why supporting dictators in other countries is not always a bad thing. If festering under the surface is Al Qaeda or the Nazi party you have a problem. If 'the people' would love to just nuke pakistan, regardless of consequences (whether you're an indian or an american) that needs to be prevented. You're hoping that the nutcases will go the way of much of south america, and eventually come to their senses, without the shooting part that was required in germany and Japan. The US has, festering under its surface a lot of very dangerous, ignorant nutters, and they aren't getting any less ignorant or less crazy under Obama. Of course they exist here in canada too, just not quite as many of them, but in india their equivalents are an actual, overt political force, as, on occasion, they have been in France.
ones tolerance for how much of a balance against the pure will of the people is certainly a very big topic. What should be in a constitution, what should be decided by courts, what should be in a referendum vs what should be up to representatives only and so on.
I wasn't trying to write a treatise in short form. Most people are not relatively reasonable. With the possible exception of Sweden, Norway, and swizterland pretty much every notably sized democracy has a series of black stains of choices made by the people at the expense of others. (I would separate swiss collaboration with the nazi's as not an option particularly presented to the people). In the extreme the people chose to put Nazi's, communists and the like in power. But on a more mundane, day to day basis the people of democratic europe chose to carve up other peoples territory for themselves, the US, well, that's pretty obvious all the horrible stuff they've gotten up to along with the europeans.
It's not like systems of government are binary choices between democracy and 'other'. There is a whole spectrum of choices in how to allocate the powers of government. As I said, democracy belongs as a part of effective government, but people are easily swayed to equally crazy and great things, the point of building good systems is to prevent the bad and facilitate the good. To use the US as an example, if the US has democratically chosen representatives who would prefer the government default than to borrow more money (before the next budget) poses enormous problem for the people who made a democratic, but ultimately bad choice. It may be that they chose poorly because the system has left them ill informed, but nonetheless, they have chosen. Of course that system can feed on its own incompetence. If the government starts running out of money it then has to choose which bills to pay, and which to not pay, further exacerbating the problem as debts accumulate and interest rates go up on the money it *can* borrow and then you're more in debt.
Laws, courts, constitutions, monarchs, upper houses of lords are all balances of power against democracy, as are tyrants. I tend to prefer the british system of about 20 years ago - a balance of power between the masses of people and the people who have money, with some geographic representation (how seats are aportioned) and reserve powers in a monarch when the democratic bodies cannot organize themselves out of a brown paper bag. A system that has evolved over the last 400 years or so (since end of the english civil war) has had it's ups and downs of course, but I think they got close to that sweet spot of balancing all of the relevant interests, the people, the rich, the courts the monarchy etc.
I was focused more on the sciences. The peace prize is a whole other problem.
My gut feeling on the peace prize, is that, in general, anyone who actually deserves it probably isn't alive or free to receive it, at it's mostly just poking a stick in the eye of whomever is opposed to who you awarded it too. And public criticism is usually not the patch to success of oppressive regimes where the peace prizes actually deserve to go.
In many ways I suppose it exemplifies the problem the UN faces. It's much harder to quantify the value of preventing a war, than winning or losing it. In Nobel's time the notion of making peace etc. was somewhat different than it is today, and I don't really know how a prize really makes sense anymore.
I don't know about the universities you're at, but around here every prof is his or her own research group. They may have some grad students, there may be a handful of faculty supposedly working on any given problem, but in practice it's usually a very small group of people who actually do the work, usually one or 2. That does happen in industry too of course.
There are big collaborations, the neutrino observatories for example. But the particle accelerators and neutrino observatories themselves aren't really the research, there's some there, but the core research is finding the results of using the accelerators. This is, in my view, different from the computer hardware industry, where the research is to produce the item, and the data taken with, or from it, is up to the end user. The thousands of engineers and scientists involved in designing and building the latest CPU's are really doing great work, at producing a product. The science nobels are for discovery and description, any discovery or description deserving a nobel probably falls under physics already (memristor for example). Discovering a new algorithm falls into the ACM Turing category.
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More like faith that the government in question will honour it's obligations at roughly the purchasing parity value of the money and not rapidly deflate their currency (by printing money). Their ability to repay is backed by not just gold but the whole assets of the country (since the government can tax anything theoretically).
Much of its value comes from the fact that you can't 'run out of cash' with fiat money, which was a problem after 1800 when the population wordwide started to explode but gold and silver production didn't quite line up. It dodges wacky inflation and deflation caused by local supply of gold and silver or other precious metals and so on. And with constant, small inflation (because deflation is really bad, you're better to err on the side of inflation), you can decrease the value of debt over time both personal and government.
You're absolutely spot on that it assumes a trust in the government to collect fees to pay debts. The problem we're seeing in greece right now is that a country with 140% of GDP debt is running ~15% of GDP deficits (this is a sort of odd statistic, because different countries have different levels of government that can acquire debt, so it's hard to compare to anyone else), and a parliament that seems unwilling to go along with raising tax revenue, or cutting spending, they can't deflate the currency (being part of the Euro, it would be like maryland or indiana teetering on bankrupcy, all 3 of which represent about 2% of the bigger monetary union), and with a shrinking economy it's not clear how they'll pay back the money. Of course it's a bit like a person with credit card debt. If someone would lend them money at 1% interest they can probably sort themselves out, but if they have to pay 16 -20% they simply cannot manage 160, 170% of GDP debt (that would be like the ENTIRE US federal budget going to pay off interest on debt). It's also not clear how exactly greece can default on it's debt, because it's all in euros. Which creates even more uncertainty, and makes it harder for them to borrow money. Oh, and the government isn't agreeing to the terms the people offering them money at low interest want... so ya. Though I suppose from the perspective of greece the Euro isn't really fiat, since they can't really change its value (it would be like one of the Caribbean islands that uses US dollars, sure, it's Fiat for the US, and the Euro is for France/Ger/ITA/SPA but greece.. they don't have much say or influence).
From everything I can tell, neither medicaid nor medicare provide bad, or inefficient care. There are, like any system, inefficiencies, and errors. But overall they seem to do pretty well for the problem they are tasked with. Medicare would save a bunch of money if covered everyone over 60 rather than over 65, but you aren't going to convince politicians of that, and it would be even more efficient if it was anyone over 50.
I'm not an american, but we all have the same biases about perception of care. We think that latest drug/treatment/scan whatever is the best way to do go. We think that you want the top graduate from medical school etc. In practice those don't necessarily equate to the best benefit to patients, nor the best cost effective care. Lots of drugs are expensive re-engineers of existing drugs, and aren't any better, but people want them anyway. Paying a doctor 250k/year when you could pay 175k who had an academic average 5% lower doesn't necessarily equate to worse medical care. A good system objectively assesses what is the most effective way to deliver care with the money available, and tries to work past the publics biases. That's an unpleasant exercise in statistics - the media always loves that one case in a million that goes catastrophically wrong, but is not an overall picture of health care performance. It's important when judging how well a system is doing to ignore media sensationalism, and focus on how the systems judge themselves against each other, and how they are doing overall with the budgets they have.
Sure, medicare, medicaid, the NHS, the french health system, the canadian health system all have things that can be improved. But overall they seem to do pretty well.
$1500 is a lot when you're out of work. And more to the point, how often can that 1500 re-occur? Admittedly I'm in canada so we don't treat people like they'll have to pay out of pocket. But my best friend at 29 had cancer. He was admitted, sent home, re-admitted to hospital several times in a week, and 3 times in one day. It wasn't even that the hospital was trying to be rid of him, he just had a lot of different parts of his body failing in different ways and they'd solve one problem, send him home (because the feeling is you recover better at home) and 2 days later something else would go wrong.
He's sorted out health wise now. But that's beside the point. If you end up in hospital multiple times in a month, how often will your insurance re-bill you.
What does "full coverage" mean? Prescription drugs? Do you have a co-pay? If you have a deductible of 1500 in hospital care (or something like that) it's certainly not 'full'. What if you go to a hospital in a different city than where you live? Does your insurance company approve (or not) of places you can go? Also, under what conditions can they drop your coverage. That was the trick with my friend, as he learned through friends in various support groups. In the US the first time you get cancer you're probably covered by insurance. But the moment they think you're cured for 3 months they drop your ass like a rock, and no one else will touch you with a 100 metre, I'm sorry, foot, pole, and then you're in deep shit.
If you're homeless you should qualify for medicaid, I don't live there, but I know a couple of people in the US on medicaid, and I know they're on medicaid because it has kept them alive and in good care.
agreed. It's a systematic refusal to proactively spend money on repairs, and to only reactively spend money when you get caught after a problem.
At 14% growth they will double their wages every 5 years.
As they increase in wages, they will tend to slow down, because they are converging on the US per capita income, but then as you see most other places do pretty well after you hit about 75% of US wages on an overall average.
They're investing heavily in R&D, but they absolutely have to catch up. They're investing in energy, both renewable and nuclear, they're investing in transport - notably as you say, high speed rail. And they're innovating on small scales. They're taking that glass you want manufactured, and making it better, 10% cheaper, 10% stronger, whatever it is. They're not going to wake up tomorrow and decide they're going to put a man on mars by 2020 with any hope of success. Much of their intellectual capital is invested in people policies, or, put another way, where, in the west our great minds are trying to build some physical or software thing to solve a problem, in china they are trying to build policy and procedure. How do you cope with too many people? How do you prevent 100 million people from all trying to move to one massive unsustainable city, how do build and education system with an ever shrinking potential enrolment (but huge numbers of people coming out of rural areas). How do you build a political system that can balance the will of illiterate masses with the need to build and create a modern society (and drag said illiterate masses into the modern society). I think we have seen enormous innovation from china, just not on problems you or I care about all that much. But some poor bugger in india, or vietnam, or even europe (all of whom have much higher population density overall that mainland china) will want that insight in policy and society. China is also big, but largely (like australia) uninhabited, they face huge social problems with cities and trying to balance the needs of farmers etc.
Oh, and they've done a great job innovating a way to take money from us, grab the Americans by the balls, and then keep getting more money. They've secured resources from places the rest of us won't touch, they've misdirected the americans into underestimating them at every turn geopolitically, they've figured out how to steal pretty much every secret we've had that was important. Those are all innovations. Not necessarily the sort you were looking for, but ones not to be underestimated either.
ya, and as we've seen, the big boys who lease lines to the aforementioned boutique sellers are working hard to make sure they aren't going to be selling unlimited for much longer.
Cutting spending is cutting jobs, even if they are bad, or involuntary jobs. There's no easy way around that. That was my point. What the long term budget of the US should look like, presumably not spending 5% of GDP on defence (and coming more in line with everyone else in NATO at like 2%) might be in order. But the broader future question of how to deal with china on less money, when they get far more 'bang for the buck' so to speak is well beyond economics.
The best thing they could have done for jobs and the economy would have been to attach unfreezing credit as a condition of bailout funds to rich banks. They can still make demands on banking and finance, they just have to be a bit more blunt about it now. I doubt it'll happen though since our politicians are too fond of the taste of Wall streets ass.
Requiring they lend money poses its own problems. Mostly that you drive up the risks associated with it.
An offshore labour tax would simply be illegal and unworkable. What exactly defines 'offshore'? Factories in China produce stuff for china as well as europe as well as the US, and most of those, including the well known foxconn aren't owned by the US at all. It's a business to business transaction. Secondly what right does the US have to dictate labour prices to me? Oh and you'd be handing a *huge* advantage to foreign corporations who don't have to play by those rules. Like I said, with all trade barriers it's a short term benefit which creates a huge long term disparity. No one wants to pay $25 for socks they can buy for $1 now, the enormous cost to effective buying power would change up the US a lot. And probably not for the better, since everywhere else that still had free trade would still be doing the $1 sock thing.
I was trying to come out neither for nor against stimulus, only discussing its consequences, and of course my pie in the sky solution is impossible. Evidence based decision making is beyond the capacity of US elected representatives.
I think every semi democratic country in the world has at least one party that wants to privatize utilities, and to push all of these things onto the private sector. Putting the internet as a public utility creates a slew of problems that the government now can, and will be expected to, monitor the content moving over its network.
Other way around. Because there's no added cost, the 'cap the user' is being spread like wildfire. It's easy to justify to the public, they can charge enormous sums for it, and there's dick all you can do about it.
We've had caps in canada on the big carriers for nearly a decade. When netflix launched in canada they all *lowered* their caps. You poor bastards down south might be catching up to the anti-competitive bullshit that we've had since windows XP launched.
of course, wasteful spending is bad. But that comes no where near solving your deficit problem sadly. Combined iraq and afghanistan are only costing about 12 billion dollars a month http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf (= 144 billion per year = 1/10th of the budget deficit). The whole of the TSA is an 8.1 billion dollar, per year, budget.
Well ok, guantanamo bay costs so little it's hard to count monetarily.
Actually, if you axed the ENTIRE war.. I'm sorry defence department, you'd still be running a deficit. You'd have to axe the entire defense department twice over to eliminate the deficit.
Addressing unemployment is not trivial. What exactly can the government do? Business don't hire people until they have both cash, and orders they can't easily fill with current staffing levels. The government can directly employ people, through stimulus plans or the like, but that is essentially expanding the government (even if they are largely one off construction costs they come with carrying/maintenance costs). I suppose the government could try and fund business ventures it intends to sell off, or just invest in (think hoover dam or other public 'utilities' type business) but that's an enormously risky thing to do with public money. If anything the current uncertainty created by the deficit and political posturing is the most serious issue the government can address that is effecting unemployment. If, come august 2nd, or just generally some non specific not to distant point in the future the government has to stop paying bills as it currently does, either by shrinking the government in a new budget, or defaulting on obligations or the like, all of the businesses (and their employees) that rely on affected federal contracts are going to be in deep shit, fast. That uncertainty drives down confidence and it means companies that rely, either directly or indirectly on the government for revenue aren't going to hire permanent employees. Otherwise, at this point, there isn't much they can do. Trying to offer hiring incentives, (say subsidizing wages), causes all sorts of inflationary problems, and it just makes the debt problem worse. Raising taxes could (depending on how exactly taxes are raised) cut personal spending, which means less revenue, and again, less jobs in some sectors. It's not like this is some easy problem with known miracle solutions they're just too stupid to implement, even if politicians give that impression a lot. The only other thing the US could do would be to start putting up trade barriers. That's a short term solution that causes a huge long term problem (which looks very much like the problem faced now where someone in china or india can work for 1/20 or 1/50th what an american can, and suddenly it becomes prohibitively expensive to do any business in the US), there's probably some sensible things the european and north american governments could do, notably on environmental and labour policy that would sort some things out, but demanding that china sign on to Kyoto CO2 cuts, or allow labour unions or the like poses problems with the US party in charge of Congress not wanting to do those things either.
If it were me... and admittedly it's a pie in the sky notion. I would immediately build a national health service modelled on, well, the NHS in the UK (essentially, it would simply expand Medicare, or the VA to everyone in the US), raise taxes to meet the % of GDP currently paid for by americans (16% of GDP, of which about 10% is from the government already). But healthcare in other countries runs 8-10% of GDP for single payer insurance, so you'd pick up extra revenue 6-8% of GDP, give everyone healthcare (which reduces business costs), and be left with a 4-6% of GDP deficit, which is reasonably managable. Oh, and fuck all of those managers running the insurance companies now, deny them unemployment, they've robbed americans enough as it is.
When people lose jobs they move from paying taxes to collecting unemployment. In a somewhat oversimplified way, if you go from 5% unemployment to 10%, your outlays have increased not a 5% increase in government spending, much more than that, a couple of percent of GDP, and your revenue has fallen by 5%.
Then you have extra spending, for things like bailouts, stimulus (some of which essentially comes out of the unemployment insurance you're paying) and so on.
Oh, and all the while because companies are making less money, employees aren't getting as many raises etc. (even though government employees and contracts will have raises in their contracts from before the contraction), so corporations and people aren't paying as much in taxes.
The net effect for the US is that spending went up a bit, from something like 22 to 25% of GDP, where revenue when down, from about 17 or 18 to about 15%. And suddenly you go from having a deficit of 4% of GDP (which was about 450-500 billion dollars a year) due to unnecessary tax cuts and irresponsible borrowing, to having a deficit of close to 10% of GDP - (which is about 30% of the budget).
Importantly though, where I am in canada, we went from 0% deficit (with a mild surplus) to ~4 or 5% of GDP deficit, just like the US. The situation in the US is magnified because of the various cut taxes and increase spending policies before the 2008 recession.
The question of what to cut is not simple. The government signs contracts in many cases years in advance for things. Take the example of the two new british aircraft carriers - for companies to build them required certain commitments that they wouldn't go bankrupt building all the stuff needed for these ships. So the UK government is committed to buy these aircraft carriers, that is to say, they wrote into the contract penalties and so on if one side backs out they have to pay, a lot. In the end it's cheaper for them to finish buying the carriers than to cancel the contracts (note there is politics here that in writing the contract they want to ensure the ship gets built even if someone else comes into office) . The US is the same way. Sign a 5 year deal with Boeing or dell for aircraft and computers and you're stuck paying for it, even if the economy tanks (that does have the benefit of keeping all those people employed however). Because of these contracts you can't just cut whatever, even if you wanted to. The big deal in the US is medicare, medicaid and defence, which are, by law, entitlement programmes the US cannot just not fund. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/#usgs302a has neat info graphics. There's a lot on there that's very hard to be rid of.
right now there are 4 keyboard screens, which would work just as well with 2 that take up the entire screen, rather than half it takes up now.
in general the iphone keyboard makes using #$_*! etc and CaPitaLiz3d passwords harder than it should, which tends to lead to bad security. I'd be interested to know how many people use the same iphone 4 digit code as their PIN for their debit. though it looks like the phone lock is more of a 'get me past this lock quickly', which says a lot about how people want to use their phones.
Kids today know more about sex than their parents do, and indulge in superstitious behaviors far less, generally speaking, and we're considerably better off because of it.
Because we require a 3rd party, set up and run by the government (aka schools) to teach those things....
It isn't possible for parents to live their childrens lives 30 seconds before they do with a little swear word buzzer, even if they want to. They must have a trust relationship with a 3rd party, that that book they're reading, that show they're watching, that that website they go to isn't going to suddenly start showing something radically out of step with what they did before. Just because you send a kid to a set of 'google approved' or 'government approved' or library approved websites doesn't mean they can't also see something else. The point of childrens programming, childrens sections etc. is to find a subset of things that is nearly universally agreed upon, as being definitely OK, it's up to parents if they want to go outside that, but the role of the 3rd party is to provide the trust relationship.
No, the reason for that is so that the incompetent don't have to parent, so that politicians can grandstand
No, it isn't. Well ok, politicians grandstand every chance they get. It pools the resources of competent parents into establishing material they can all trust. The point is that if it airs before 9PM you can be confident that if you haven't seen this episode, or these commercials before, you aren't suddenly trying to explain to your kid material you weren't planning on, or don't want to, or don't think they're ready for. Trying to explain to an 8 year old why those burned corpses of mercenaries are hanging from a bridge in some foreign country *is not an experience you want*, ever. Well maybe you do. that's your choice to make. But you know that until 9pm stuff like that shouldn't be on TV without at least a warning in advance about it, so if you don't want to be rapidly changing the channel or trying to explain random stuff, you don't need do.
that's not an appropriate role for a third party.
it is precisely the role of a 3rd party. That's why there are rules on what can be on TV and radio stations at various hours and so on, it's why bookstores and libraries offer kids sections, it's why companies explicitly make media for children. A 3rd party should establish a brand and a trust relationship with it's customers about what sorts of content they can access through this service - whether that is an aggregation or search of content creators or creating there own.
It may not be the role of google though. They seem to prefer to solve problems with computer algorithms, not with people. That doesn't lend itself to kids stuff for the oft mentioned reason that screwing it up can go badly, fast, and it's much easier to sneak stuff past a computer algorithm than a person.
It's the same problem as the desktop OS question: What should the OS do? For years the debate was whether or not it should even a have a front end GUI for lots of tasks (that does slow it down after all). But at some point an OS is just a tool to launch and facilitate applications. On a device like a phone you need to bake in some phone software to go with it. But really, how much do you want the OS to do?
Reaching feature parity with what the operating system itself (and the relevant bundled tools) does shouldn't be that much of a jump for MS. Apparently it is, but it shouldn't be.
MS at one point was good at copying ideas from the competition, and rolling them out fast. WP7, not so much. Until you see feature parity between Droid/iPhone/WP7 they're going to have a ways to go.
Now, to be fair to MS, they seem to be plodding along, there seems to be some, as yet undisclosed, strategy here for next year, or I would have expected Nokia to have a WP7 out the door already. That or they're both grossly incompetent, which is highly likely at this point, but either way, I'm guessing the big Windows phone push from MS and the manufacturers is going to be next year rather than this.
At the TeV scale anyway.
You can pretty easily get a particle accelerator that will fit in your yard, it's just not going to be powerful enough to see anything new.
As I say in reply to someone else below.
Constitutions, laws, courts, upper houses of hereditary unelected rich, monarchs, are all decidedly undemocratic systems and serve as effective counter weights to the will of the masses, even multiple tiers of democracy pose profoundly deep questions about what democracy *is*. As I said, does world democracy take precedence over amercian democracy? Does american democracy take precedence over alaskan democracy and so on.
Ok you want substance of how to do it? Power should be balance both geographically, and between classes of people (rich and poor). A unelected, hereditary house of lords - chosen to give the rich a direct hand in government, so they aren't buying it , with an elected, by evenly distributed democratic districts for the commons. Written constitutions only work in the long run when they say nothing of substance, so we can forget about those, otherwise they just bind people to antiquated ideas. If the two houses cannot agree, or manage to actually pass necessary laws (like a budget) power should be reserved in a hereditary sovereign, who is prepared, from birth, for the possibility of balancing the interests of competing factions (including their own). There should be a single federal entity, and some local government. The more tiers of government there are, the more likely you are to have unnecessary infighting and squabbling over who should do what. Let us call this big, bicameral legislature 'parliament' - it, and more to the point, it's laws when signed by the sovereign are supreme, and the law exists to enforce the law. All of this can change as technology eliminates the need for any part of government, or adds a need for new parts.
Ultimately all government relies on the nobility of the people who run it. Recognizing, accepting, and building a system which fosters that is the only way to make a functioning society. That's why supporting dictators in other countries is not always a bad thing. If festering under the surface is Al Qaeda or the Nazi party you have a problem. If 'the people' would love to just nuke pakistan, regardless of consequences (whether you're an indian or an american) that needs to be prevented. You're hoping that the nutcases will go the way of much of south america, and eventually come to their senses, without the shooting part that was required in germany and Japan. The US has, festering under its surface a lot of very dangerous, ignorant nutters, and they aren't getting any less ignorant or less crazy under Obama. Of course they exist here in canada too, just not quite as many of them, but in india their equivalents are an actual, overt political force, as, on occasion, they have been in France.
ones tolerance for how much of a balance against the pure will of the people is certainly a very big topic. What should be in a constitution, what should be decided by courts, what should be in a referendum vs what should be up to representatives only and so on.
I wasn't trying to write a treatise in short form. Most people are not relatively reasonable. With the possible exception of Sweden, Norway, and swizterland pretty much every notably sized democracy has a series of black stains of choices made by the people at the expense of others. (I would separate swiss collaboration with the nazi's as not an option particularly presented to the people). In the extreme the people chose to put Nazi's, communists and the like in power. But on a more mundane, day to day basis the people of democratic europe chose to carve up other peoples territory for themselves, the US, well, that's pretty obvious all the horrible stuff they've gotten up to along with the europeans.
It's not like systems of government are binary choices between democracy and 'other'. There is a whole spectrum of choices in how to allocate the powers of government. As I said, democracy belongs as a part of effective government, but people are easily swayed to equally crazy and great things, the point of building good systems is to prevent the bad and facilitate the good. To use the US as an example, if the US has democratically chosen representatives who would prefer the government default than to borrow more money (before the next budget) poses enormous problem for the people who made a democratic, but ultimately bad choice. It may be that they chose poorly because the system has left them ill informed, but nonetheless, they have chosen. Of course that system can feed on its own incompetence. If the government starts running out of money it then has to choose which bills to pay, and which to not pay, further exacerbating the problem as debts accumulate and interest rates go up on the money it *can* borrow and then you're more in debt.
Laws, courts, constitutions, monarchs, upper houses of lords are all balances of power against democracy, as are tyrants. I tend to prefer the british system of about 20 years ago - a balance of power between the masses of people and the people who have money, with some geographic representation (how seats are aportioned) and reserve powers in a monarch when the democratic bodies cannot organize themselves out of a brown paper bag. A system that has evolved over the last 400 years or so (since end of the english civil war) has had it's ups and downs of course, but I think they got close to that sweet spot of balancing all of the relevant interests, the people, the rich, the courts the monarchy etc.
I was focused more on the sciences. The peace prize is a whole other problem.
My gut feeling on the peace prize, is that, in general, anyone who actually deserves it probably isn't alive or free to receive it, at it's mostly just poking a stick in the eye of whomever is opposed to who you awarded it too. And public criticism is usually not the patch to success of oppressive regimes where the peace prizes actually deserve to go.
In many ways I suppose it exemplifies the problem the UN faces. It's much harder to quantify the value of preventing a war, than winning or losing it. In Nobel's time the notion of making peace etc. was somewhat different than it is today, and I don't really know how a prize really makes sense anymore.
I don't know about the universities you're at, but around here every prof is his or her own research group. They may have some grad students, there may be a handful of faculty supposedly working on any given problem, but in practice it's usually a very small group of people who actually do the work, usually one or 2. That does happen in industry too of course.
There are big collaborations, the neutrino observatories for example. But the particle accelerators and neutrino observatories themselves aren't really the research, there's some there, but the core research is finding the results of using the accelerators. This is, in my view, different from the computer hardware industry, where the research is to produce the item, and the data taken with, or from it, is up to the end user. The thousands of engineers and scientists involved in designing and building the latest CPU's are really doing great work, at producing a product. The science nobels are for discovery and description, any discovery or description deserving a nobel probably falls under physics already (memristor for example). Discovering a new algorithm falls into the ACM Turing category.