Yah, but think of the poor string theorists. Here they spend 30 years working on it, and they stack the department hiring processes so they will not be criticized for never have created a testable conjecture. Now some data comes in and half their theories crash.
Funding. Remember the recent China-Russia high-speed rail deal. The Russians and Chinese have always had a deep mistrust of each other. To do this deal, the Russians had to let the Chinese own part of the Russian projects. This sort of thing between the two has never happened in all of history.
China has 1.5 trillion dollars of US paper. Obama promised the Chinese we would defend the dollar, but the federal reserve has a weak dollar policy and the Chinese are unhappy.. The dollar has gone down more twenty percent over either the past year or since Obama has taken office. I figure the Chinese have lost 300 billion as a result.
So I suspect the funding will be there when it is time to build it. The only sensible thing for the Chinese to do with this money is to invest in infrastructure and science drivers.
so, look at apollo. Was the money spent on that inflationary? No, because there was all sorts of economic payoff. A sovereign government can spend all sorts of money "it does not have" on infrastructure and focused science-driver projects and not be inflationary because of all the economic payback. But you cannot do it if you are a monetarist. On the other hand, bailing out speculators seems to make sense to a monetarist. Go figure.
I use openbsd. The latest version has tor in the ports tree. I expect to try it, but I hear that tor is presently sort of slow.
I have a couple dedicated servers at hosting companies. I have thought about making them tor "nodes", but as best I can figure out, it is a bit of a hassle for the full tor server to coexist with lots of server protocols.
So the numbers went from maybe 180 million doses to 28 million doses. Maybe many people consider this a shortage. Also, significant delays.
Personal story: So I am 63, have a couple relevant health conditions, and so tomorrow I get to go downtown and get a free and convenient H1N1 flu shot from the public health people. If I were 65 and had a couple relevant health conditions, I could not do this. My 87 year-old mother and 98 year old step-father cannot do this. Just the rules, which I think is an effort to accomodate the shortage.
My mother was not feeling well this morning. She fell and called for help. For reasonable reasons, I called 911. She turned out to be pretty much okay and since she refused to go to a hospital, it pretty much ends there. But the 911 guys suggested it might be the flu.
I was downtown at the grocery store yesterday and the manager says a lot of people are coming in with the flu.
Now how come there is a shortage of flu vaccine? Well, the cite says it was because production is complex.
What they do not report is that we used to maintain government facilities to handle vaccine production. With a free enterprise argument this was closed. Might have been about the same time that Rumsfield was privatizing the military. Anyway, it turns out private US companies do not have the capability to produce much vaccine. So the vaccine is coming in from overseas. There we are competing for the vaccine against a world-wide demand. Further is there was a really big crisis, the local government would probably short-stop the vaccine doses.
Rumsfield ended up paying for high-priced private contractors. We still do a lot of that. I suspect we are paying a high-prices for the vaccines. And I doubt we have heard the full story on the delays.
For you free-enterprise ideologues, you probably support military security. There are all kinds of security. For instance, food security. I recall that the Soviets had smallpox loaded missiles targeted at the West Coast of the US. Do you really want public health services dependent on overseas sources? Well, some of you probably think H1N1 is a government created plot. And others think the vaccine is some sort of government plot. So maybe my argument is not convincing. So I guess you get your choice of how you die. Fortunately for you, you probably will not die this time from the flu.
I have thought a bit about control of information, not just corporate control.
Google is developing a firefox plug-in for adding additional information to established web sites by viewers. "Helpful comments". Well, that is google.
I seem to recall this was done in a less restricted way perhaps five years ago by someone, it went through some courts and was considered legal, basically because it was a user choice to install the plug-in. Probably got the story from slashdot.
Writing a fire-fox plug-in is not in my skill set, but I favor this idea. For requirements, I would start with
1) user can chose his hosting server 2) anonymous 3) user moderated, perhaps with a slashdot model, since that is all I am really familiar with.
The plug-in would on request show a random comment, with a bias on how recent the comment was and moderation state.
Might actually become widely used. I am sure the Obama people would like to post anonymous comments on the fox web site.:)
Running a popular server might even be profitable.
I would be interested in comments on this idea, particularly requirements comments.
As it happens, I have a math degree, including statistics. I took a lot of physics and still remember painfully calculating standard deviations and such. You can tell it was a long time ago. An amusing note: A client has a conjecture and after four years I think we might have enough data to test it. But I am not looking forward to relearning how to test it, but as least now I have a spreadsheet.
Thus, your metaphor is unconvincing. Why not a deck of cards where the hearts are adaptive?
Anyhow, this is sort of a unique experiment and there seems to be enough data that statistical significance tests on this issue might say something interesting. You seem very sure that there is no adaptiveness potential, on what basis you did not say. Presumedly, it is one of those established truths. Since it is a unique experiment, established truths should be reverified as possible to see if they still apply. And such a nice experiment. Even very nicely reproducible, if you are willing to spend 21 years doing it.
So, I got some cites. One is the really radical Wall Street Journal. Somehow I doubt that you will bother to reference the originals. So I wonder why you bother to complain. In fact, I regard facts as poor things, if they do not have context. Leave aside bullshit claims that Obama is a socialist. Leave aside partisanship. Leave aside free-enterprise ideology. Leave aside the federal decifit, The relevant context is what happens in a depression. Or maybe, for you, the only facts that count are those you hear on the national news programs.
Virtually every big city reports that the closure of emergency care centers over the past decade has created emergency situations where ambulances are told to take patients to another hospital, further away, because they have no room. We have covered this in EIR over the last two years or so. The LA Times has covered it, also. More critical is the elimination of surge capacity. Also see the Nurses' organizations reports on shortages of nurses in the country. Add to that the MD shortage in rural areas, and the closure of rural hospitals, which gets some coverage in the media.
Here are a couple of slugs from the Oct. 6, 2009 briefing:
Obama Discovers There's More Than One Way to Kill the Elderly: Shut Down Nursing Homes
Oct. 5 (LPAC)--The entire national system of 16,000 nursing homes, which house close to 1.9 million people, is on the edge of collapse. Although the immediate trigger of the crisis is depression-driven cutbacks in reimbursements to nursing homes from Medicare and Medicaid--even before Obama's Nazi IMAC board is implemented--the actually underlying cause is the total shift in "social standard" that was introduced after FDR's death, where productive American households (including community care for their elderly) were replaced with the insanity of globalization, as Lyndon LaRouche explained in remarks reported in the lead of this briefing.
Last week, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) enacted a Medicare rate adjustment that cuts an estimated $16 billion in nursing home funding over the next 10 years, on top of state-level cuts from Medicaid. In 2008, Medicaid payments by states to nursing homes already fell short by $12 per patient per day--nearly $4.2 billion in unreimbursed costs for Medicaid- allowed expenses, according to the AHCA (American Health Care Association).
"We're really teetering on the edge of what we see as the collapse of the long-term care system," Deborah Chernoff, spokeswoman for District 1199 of the New England Health Care Employees Union in Connecticut, told AP. Eli Feldman, CEO of the Metropolitan Jewish Health System in New York City, reported that his company had to lay off about 200 of its 1,000 employees at three nursing homes in Brooklyn, because the state cut Medicaid funding by 10%-14%. Said Feldman: "We understand there's a recession/depression, but this is not health reform... and the victims are basically the people who live in the facilities. The Legislature basically says, 'Too sick, too old, too bad."
LaRouche today observed: "What you're seeing now is a Malthusian process which is coming to the acutely Malthusian phase, right now with this crisis." [dns]
Public Health Job Losses Are Threatening H1N1 Vaccination Ability
Oct. 5, 2009 (LPAC)--The first shipment (600,000 doses) of H1N1 ("swine flu") vaccine started shipping from the Federal government today, but the nationwide public health infrastructure the United States once had for delivering a mass vaccination campaign to the population, is disappearing. The {Wall Street Journal) gives numbers on its collapse, and quotes University of Minnesota public health expert Michael Osterholm, that the Federal de
what is the difference between adaptive mutations and random mutations? My understanding of evolutionary theory is that it says evolution is driven first by random mutations, and then the adaptive ones are preserved. So I see a distinction, but the naming here seems a little off-center.
Now I further figure that if the mutations are random, then their adaptiveness is random. Was adaptiveness potential less used up at the beginning of the experiment, thus it was more likely for a random mutation to be adaptive?
Assuming fixed tech, the world has always been finite and we go extinct. Maybe run out of mastadons. Comparisons with animal populations does not work, because humans can make new fundamental discoveries about the universe, and from that we get a lot of new tech. Animals do not have much new tech, if any. They have to do genetic changes.
I think a useful goal is maximizing potential population density per unit area. Obviously we need a good way to figure out how much of the potential we want to use.
As to area, the obvious next step for the species is a big colony on mars. Just as obvious, we do not have the tech so we cannot do it right now. Maybe the biggest technical limitation is our reliance on chemical rockets. Recalling how much economic pay back we got from Apollo, debt to do this is non-inflationary over the long haul. It needs to be long term and low interest. Sovereign countries can do this sort of thing. At the moment, this is the main limitation. But it does not work if do not have new real scientific discoveries as part of the process. Looking at what established scientists say about Lerner's approach, pretty much all negative, we can easily conclude success in this venture by Livermore would represent a new real scientific discovery. Livermore efforts here might be successful, but the main idea is to fund a number of relevant interesting projects, many of which might be small-scale.
This might be interesting to you. Maybe you could calculate human population density per area, assuming equal distribution. I think much of the world is pretty empty. Off hand, I think of the Shahara, Mongolia, and Sibera. Maybe the number would be interesting to you.
Well, I got them in a phone call yesterday. I did an email to my source and he complained I am was making him work. He says they came from the Executive Intelligence Review. Last I looked they often have cites, but at the moment, I have not a clue. But my source said he would look them up tomorrow. It is after all Sunday at the moment. So you might get something.
Here are some facts I believe in. They all came in Monday.
Last Sunday, Coho Hall, Detroit Michigan, The local government proposed a money give-away to the truly desperate. They had forms to fill out. They had money for 3500 people. 65,000 people showed up. Depending on who you cite, it was either a riot or a near-riot. In any case, 6 people were taken away in ambulences. Look at the front page of the Monday Detriot Free Press, maybe under a headline like Hell in Detroit.
Monday's frontpage Bloomberg, a really radical paper. A title like Dollar at Redline. It mentions that US banks are going into euros.
M1 now, twice what it was a year ago.
Bank lending 24% less than a year ago. As I recall, we were in a credit crunch then.
20% of auto parts manufactures in bankruptcy. Maybe 50% more coming. No demand.
Manufacturing shutting down. They cannot get short term credit for day to day operations.
I doubt that any of this is going to be reported by your favorite national tv anchor. So maybe none of it counts for you. On the other hand, even an empericist should tend to take note. An easy historical comparision is that the economy is disintegrating at a more rapid rate than in the historical parallels.
But facts without theory do not mean much, IMO. For a nice reputable theorist, consult Galbriath. He had a nice op-ed in the Washington Post a few months ago. Right on. He is even a white house economic advisor.
For good policy, look at what Volker said maybe a month ago. He is not one of my favorite people, but said something useful. I think he is a Republican.
Riech?, used to be clinton's labor secretary, has been all over this month saying two useful things. Probably a dem.
Neither is saying enough.
You suggested I was a Faither. Assuming you are in the United States, it might be enough to note I am not a Christian. But I eveh googled the word and could not quite figure out the reference. It is true that in a secular situation, someone once said I had a lot of faith. I am pretty much Leibnizian, with some twists. Pretty much all of my adult church-going has been Unitarian-Universalist, which might have some common elements with what little I read of Faithology. You may have figured out that I am not a reductionist, which may be the core of your complaint. If it is simply a religious slam, fine, but pragmatically I favor looking at what people do, rather than their particular religious beliefs. After all, most religious beliefs are based on something like revelation, which I do not particularly object to, but I doubt either of us has much of a way to have an impact on it.
As far as Christianity is concerned, I think it just fine, but there have always been for various reasons a lot of christians who are not christians. This last I regard as solveable. Then again, I have a lot of faith.:)
Oh, an odd note. The nearest UU church is now 30 miles away and I am a lazy sort. I am thinking about going to the local Minonnite church. Somewhat related to the Amish. I figure I can put up with the god-talk and one of the ministers is a childhood friend. I would trust him for ethical advice. A reasonable and knowledgeable sort of guy. Anyway, though they are somewhat technophobe, they mind their own business and do not cause any trouble. I suspect you would approve of them.
You speak of political corruption, motivated by profits. I agree with the observation. But more relevant to our present situation is that Glass-Speigel was repealed in 1998 and derivatives were legalized in 1990. No doubt some corruption was involved. But these sort of outcomes flow out of what is called liberal economic theory, maybe they call it neo-liberalism now. This analysis provides a basis for a program that would halt the economic disintegration in a day. On the other hand, you did not provide any useful solution. I think this is a characteristic of populism.
I agree that the present populist movement has a strong component of religious mortality noise. But I do not recall that progressivism had a big component of morality noise. Interesting to note that Nancy Polinski? considers herself a progressive in the historical sense. Yet she personally stopped a useful, fairly minor, reformist bill a few year back. At the time, it would have avoided this mess. Now dramatic changes are required.
Interesting. Do you the think the closure of almost 20% of our hospitals this past decade and the lay-offs this year of 50,000 public health workers has anything to do with the mortality rate?
While I agree with your general thrust, I might have a datum that undermines your specific arguement. I have the impression that the US no longer has the capacity to produce the necessary volumes of flu vaccine and we get it from foreign companies. Since as far as I know, the foreign companies are not big financial speculators, I do not see a great political incentive to make them rich.
On the other hand, if the US in fact no longer has the capacity to produce the necessary volumes of flu vaccines, I suggest you should find that more troubling than a little price-gouging.
I would classify your approach as populist and I know of no history where populism had good outcomes.
Did you know that flue shots give you immunity for about a year? On the other hand, getting the flu gives you immunity to that strain and some immunity to closely related strains for a lifetime.
As to the general argument, if it is submitted to a peer reviewed journal and it was that poor of a study, she will get slapped up on the side of the head. That is how science works. On the other hand, it is not guaranteed to work correctly. Even in math, errors slip through peer-review. And of course we have systematic failures like global warming studies.
I was a group health member for many years. I would speak well of it,. But mainly I wanted to speak to the perjogative "group death". It happens group health started up about 1948. The local AMA hated it. They did things like kick the group health docs out of the chapter. And so on. This phrase "group death" was their invention. So consider the source.
Oh group health is a coop, One thing you might approve of is that they do not pay inflated salaries to their executives.
HMOs are a recent invention. Nixon I think. A government cost cutting technique. Like living wills and the current health reform plans. Now the typical HMO use the general prac docs as a gateway barrier to seeing a specialist. Group Health does not use that technique.
But they are what is called an evidence based medicine approach. You will not get experimental procedures there. For instance, stomach stapling has been around for quite a while. Only in the past few years has it become an approved procedure at group health. Evidence based medicine virtues and defects could generate quite a little debate. For instance, Obahma likes it and presumedly the way he would implement it would discredit the concept for a generation. But I kind of think Group Health is honest about analyzing the evidence. But I do not really know. But I do know I do not want my doc trying out the latest fad on me or deciding on my drugs based on drug company marketing campaigns. Drug company marketing techniques to docs could be a subject in itself.
I am a fdr type guy. So I read the cite. Probably cops, but maybe just degenerate. Pretty much technophile, which I admit might play well on slashdot. Support sustainable whatever. Notice they liked the post-sputnik era, but as far as I can tell, just become we put an emphasis on science and engineering. Liked the tech bubble, and that is just inexplicable. Did not mention Roosevelt's big industrial push like the TVA project. Pretty much just anti-corruption. No program. They had a comments section, so I posted a few questions. On the positive side, they talked about the physical economy and its relation to the financial sector. Of course, I suspect their definition of the physical economy.
So I will just ask you. Do you think we are in a Depression? If so, how do you propose to stop the process? An economic forcast by you for the rest of the year might situate how urgently you feel about it.
I think you use the word politics in a more narrow sense than I do. I think you in effect use it to refer to partisan politics.
I can say a couple nice things about Republicans. Volker a couple weeks ago said something useful about the economy. Ron Paul has a necessary bill to audit the fed with 300 cosponsors. With that number, it has bipartisan support. But he is not a fighter, so Barney Frank came up to him, put his arm around Paul's shoulder and easily convinced Paul to allow his bill to be merged with Frank's. The bill is not likely to be seen again. As it happens, the Dem leadership is greatly afraid of this bill.
I heard something today that should give you some hope. As it happens I have not watched broadcast or cable tv for 30 years. But where I am living now, Fox is always blaring. I looked at it bit for maybe a month to form an opinion and then ignored it. But I still catch snippets. I heard Dick Morris on the Factor show actually tell most of the relevant truth about the health bill. The Republicans have know this for months. What is happening that now they float it? And it actually gets reported.
But I figure congress critters on both sides are largely buckets of warm spit. I put my faith in a rare social phenomena. It was last seen in October 1989, in the DDR. In the US, Birmingham, 1963. But now it started again in the US in August 2009.
Huh? end of the post-war era means more that. Sort of a parochial view IMO. I figure the dollar will be in free fall. Sure the stock market will crash.
Okay, physical economy is deflationary, M1 is hyper-inflationary, and financial instruments are inflating faster than M1. Pretty classic. Aside from being dumb, you cannot print enough money to clear the speculative debts. The debts cannot be repaid. Looking at everything, I conclude the best historical analogy is Weimar 1923. The last banknote the Weimar Republic printed was a 100 trillion mark note. It is only an analogy, but rather suggestive.
The process, even at this late date, can be stopped in a day. Reich, secretary of labor under Clinton, has been all over recently with two of the three things that need to happen. Even Volker has said useful things not very long ago.
You are basically right and your comments are useful.
Still, I think politics has a place in an economic discussion. After all, economic policy gets implemented by the use of some form of politics.
Another reason is a recent experience. I have pretty good dem credentials. There was a discussion of jobless rates somewhere else. I noted that during the first 9 months of the Obama administration, we lost 5 million jobs. During the first nine months of the FDR administration, we gained 5 million jobs. That was pretty much the post. Nice official figures. I got lambasted heavily by one lady for being partisan and so on. She blamed it all on Bush. Go figure.
Anyway, I knew the Bush Sr idea was passed with bipartisan support and I should have said that.
I heard yesterday that M1, today, as compared to a year ago, has more then doubled. I call it Bernanke money. I wonder if the mass media will report this. Bloomberg? had a front page article yesterday with a title like Dollar at Red-Line. Relevantly, it reports that US Banks are dumping the dollar for Euros. I suspect the same banks that got bailed out.
Still, while Bernanke money will screw us, it is best treated as an incompetent response to a disaster. For causes, look to the repeal of Glass-Steigel in 1988 and the legalization of derivatives in 1990. Both were in response to the 1987 crisis. Oh, for Bush lovers, the last was Bush Sr's bright idea.
Actually, six factoids came in yesterday. Again, do not hold your breath to hear about them in the mass media. Together, they lead me to the conclusion that the economy is disintegrating faster than in the historical precedents. So I will venture a prediction: October is likely the end of the post-war era.
Also consider the possibility that this is an effect of austerity programs. The department may be under a lot of pressure to cut expenditures. A particular reason might be draconian federal audits. I do not keep up on this sort of thing anymore, but I have heard stories that the federal auditors can be real ass-holes. General government stupidity is always a good explanation, but during a Depression, austerity-driven stupidity is also pretty good.
Again, note that movies were someone else's example. My example was from physics. I just commented on a "near-universally recognized" problem and used it to cite an absence of creativity, which I happen to think is a general and fundamental problem. The physics issue also I think reflects a fundamental problem.
I find it interesting that people like to focus on a small criticism of movies. Think how much I would be abused if I attacked games,:)
Anyway, in 1940 I think the Hollywood star system was in full swing.
I do not know much biology. I confess I googled. I will allow that characterizing DNA in 1953 is a fundamental theory, though perhaps we should go back to Mendelev. This would put my 60 year figure for physics a little off when it comes to biology. But perhaps because of my ignorance I do not know of comparable new discoveries more recently. As far as I can tell, something like sequencing the human genome is new tools elaborating on an old theory. I have noted a tendency to confuses new tools with new fundamental theory. However, you said fundamental science, not new fundamental theory, and you might well be right.
Slashdot Mirror
Yah, but think of the poor string theorists. Here they spend 30 years working on it, and they stack the department hiring processes so they will not be criticized for never have created a testable conjecture. Now some data comes in and half their theories crash.
Funding. Remember the recent China-Russia high-speed rail deal. The Russians and Chinese have always had a deep mistrust of each other. To do this deal, the Russians had to let the Chinese own part of the Russian projects. This sort of thing between the two has never happened in all of history.
China has 1.5 trillion dollars of US paper. Obama promised the Chinese we would defend the dollar, but the federal reserve has a weak dollar policy and the Chinese are unhappy.. The dollar has gone down more twenty percent over either the past year or since Obama has taken office. I figure the Chinese have lost 300 billion as a result.
So I suspect the funding will be there when it is time to build it. The only sensible thing for the Chinese to do with this money is to invest in infrastructure and science drivers.
Too bad we are not yet sensible.
so, look at apollo. Was the money spent on that inflationary? No, because there was all sorts of economic payoff. A sovereign government can spend all sorts of money "it does not have" on infrastructure and focused science-driver projects and not be inflationary because of all the economic payback. But you cannot do it if you are a monetarist. On the other hand, bailing out speculators seems to make sense to a monetarist. Go figure.
I use openbsd. The latest version has tor in the ports tree. I expect to try it, but I hear that tor is presently sort of slow.
I have a couple dedicated servers at hosting companies. I have thought about making them tor "nodes", but as best I can figure out, it is a bit of a hassle for the full tor server to coexist with lots of server protocols.
Still, it seems like the "right" thing to do.
So the numbers went from maybe 180 million doses to 28 million doses. Maybe many people consider this a shortage. Also, significant delays.
Personal story: So I am 63, have a couple relevant health conditions, and so tomorrow I get to go downtown and get a free and convenient H1N1 flu shot from the public health people. If I were 65 and had a couple relevant health conditions, I could not do this. My 87 year-old mother and 98 year old step-father cannot do this. Just the rules, which I think is an effort to accomodate the shortage.
My mother was not feeling well this morning. She fell and called for help. For reasonable reasons, I called 911. She turned out to be pretty much okay and since she refused to go to a hospital, it pretty much ends there. But the 911 guys suggested it might be the flu.
I was downtown at the grocery store yesterday and the manager says a lot of people are coming in with the flu.
Now how come there is a shortage of flu vaccine? Well, the cite says it was because production is complex.
What they do not report is that we used to maintain government facilities to handle vaccine production. With a free enterprise argument this was closed. Might have been about the same time that Rumsfield was privatizing the military. Anyway, it turns out private US companies do not have the capability to produce much vaccine. So the vaccine is coming in from overseas. There we are competing for the vaccine against a world-wide demand. Further is there was a really big crisis, the local government would probably short-stop the vaccine doses.
Rumsfield ended up paying for high-priced private contractors. We still do a lot of that. I suspect we are paying a high-prices for the vaccines. And I doubt we have heard the full story on the delays.
For you free-enterprise ideologues, you probably support military security. There are all kinds of security. For instance, food security. I recall that the Soviets had smallpox loaded missiles targeted at the West Coast of the US. Do you really want public health services dependent on overseas sources? Well, some of you probably think H1N1 is a government created plot. And others think the vaccine is some sort of government plot. So maybe my argument is not convincing. So I guess you get your choice of how you die. Fortunately for you, you probably will not die this time from the flu.
I have thought a bit about control of information, not just corporate control.
Google is developing a firefox plug-in for adding additional information to established web sites by viewers. "Helpful comments". Well, that is google.
I seem to recall this was done in a less restricted way perhaps five years ago by someone, it went through some courts and was considered legal, basically because it was a user choice to install the plug-in. Probably got the story from slashdot.
Writing a fire-fox plug-in is not in my skill set, but I favor this idea. For requirements, I would start with
1) user can chose his hosting server
2) anonymous
3) user moderated, perhaps with a slashdot model, since that is all I am really familiar with.
The plug-in would on request show a random comment, with a bias on how recent the comment was and moderation state.
Might actually become widely used. I am sure the Obama people would like to post anonymous comments on the fox web site. :)
Running a popular server might even be profitable.
I would be interested in comments on this idea, particularly requirements comments.
As it happens, I have a math degree, including statistics. I took a lot of physics and still remember painfully calculating standard deviations and such. You can tell it was a long time ago. An amusing note: A client has a conjecture and after four years I think we might have enough data to test it. But I am not looking forward to relearning how to test it, but as least now I have a spreadsheet.
Thus, your metaphor is unconvincing. Why not a deck of cards where the hearts are adaptive?
Anyhow, this is sort of a unique experiment and there seems to be enough data that statistical significance tests on this issue might say something interesting. You seem very sure that there is no adaptiveness potential, on what basis you did not say. Presumedly, it is one of those established truths. Since it is a unique experiment, established truths should be reverified as possible to see if they still apply. And such a nice experiment. Even very nicely reproducible, if you are willing to spend 21 years doing it.
So, I got some cites. One is the really radical Wall Street Journal. Somehow I doubt that you will bother to reference the originals. So I wonder why you bother to complain. In fact, I regard facts as poor things, if they do not have context. Leave aside bullshit claims that Obama is a socialist. Leave aside partisanship. Leave aside free-enterprise ideology. Leave aside the federal decifit, The relevant context is what happens in a depression. Or maybe, for you, the only facts that count are those you hear on the national news programs.
Virtually every big city reports that the closure of emergency care centers over the past decade has created emergency situations where ambulances are told to take patients to another hospital, further away, because they have no room. We have covered this in EIR over the last two years or so. The LA Times has covered it, also. More critical is the elimination of surge capacity. Also see the Nurses' organizations reports on shortages of nurses in the country. Add to that the MD shortage in rural areas, and the closure of rural hospitals, which gets some coverage in the media.
Here are a couple of slugs from the Oct. 6, 2009 briefing:
Obama Discovers There's More Than One Way to Kill the Elderly:
Shut Down Nursing Homes
Oct. 5 (LPAC)--The entire national system of 16,000 nursing ... and the
homes, which house close to 1.9 million people, is on the edge of
collapse. Although the immediate trigger of the crisis is
depression-driven cutbacks in reimbursements to nursing homes
from Medicare and Medicaid--even before Obama's Nazi IMAC board
is implemented--the actually underlying cause is the total shift
in "social standard" that was introduced after FDR's death, where
productive American households (including community care for
their elderly) were replaced with the insanity of globalization,
as Lyndon LaRouche explained in remarks reported in the lead of
this briefing.
Last week, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services (CMS) enacted a Medicare rate adjustment that cuts an
estimated $16 billion in nursing home funding over the next 10
years, on top of state-level cuts from Medicaid. In 2008,
Medicaid payments by states to nursing homes already fell short
by $12 per patient per day--nearly $4.2 billion in unreimbursed
costs for Medicaid- allowed expenses, according to the AHCA
(American Health Care Association).
"We're really teetering on the edge of what we see as the
collapse of the long-term care system," Deborah Chernoff,
spokeswoman for District 1199 of the New England Health Care
Employees Union in Connecticut, told AP. Eli Feldman, CEO of the
Metropolitan Jewish Health System in New York City, reported that
his company had to lay off about 200 of its 1,000 employees at
three nursing homes in Brooklyn, because the state cut Medicaid
funding by 10%-14%. Said Feldman: "We understand there's a
recession/depression, but this is not health reform
victims are basically the people who live in the facilities. The
Legislature basically says, 'Too sick, too old, too bad."
LaRouche today observed: "What you're seeing now is a
Malthusian process which is coming to the acutely Malthusian
phase, right now with this crisis." [dns]
Public Health Job Losses Are Threatening H1N1 Vaccination Ability
Oct. 5, 2009 (LPAC)--The first shipment (600,000 doses) of H1N1
("swine flu") vaccine started shipping from the Federal
government today, but the nationwide public health infrastructure
the United States once had for delivering a mass vaccination
campaign to the population, is disappearing. The {Wall Street
Journal) gives numbers on its collapse, and quotes University of
Minnesota public health expert Michael Osterholm, that the
Federal de
what is the difference between adaptive mutations and random mutations? My understanding of evolutionary theory is that it says evolution is driven first by random mutations, and then the adaptive ones are preserved. So I see a distinction, but the naming here seems a little off-center.
Now I further figure that if the mutations are random, then their adaptiveness is random. Was adaptiveness potential less used up at the beginning of the experiment, thus it was more likely for a random mutation to be adaptive?
Assuming fixed tech, the world has always been finite and we go extinct. Maybe run out of mastadons. Comparisons with animal populations does not work, because humans can make new fundamental discoveries about the universe, and from that we get a lot of new tech. Animals do not have much new tech, if any. They have to do genetic changes.
I think a useful goal is maximizing potential population density per unit area. Obviously we need a good way to figure out how much of the potential we want to use.
As to area, the obvious next step for the species is a big colony on mars. Just as obvious, we do not have the tech so we cannot do it right now. Maybe the biggest technical limitation is our reliance on chemical rockets. Recalling how much economic pay back we got from Apollo, debt to do this is non-inflationary over the long haul. It needs to be long term and low interest. Sovereign countries can do this sort of thing. At the moment, this is the main limitation. But it does not work if do not have new real scientific discoveries as part of the process. Looking at what established scientists say about Lerner's approach, pretty much all negative, we can easily conclude success in this venture by Livermore would represent a new real scientific discovery. Livermore efforts here might be successful, but the main idea is to fund a number of relevant interesting projects, many of which might be small-scale.
This might be interesting to you. Maybe you could calculate human population density per area, assuming equal distribution. I think much of the world is pretty empty. Off hand, I think of the Shahara, Mongolia, and Sibera. Maybe the number would be interesting to you.
Note that I did not really make an argument.
Well, I got them in a phone call yesterday. I did an email to my source and he complained I am was making him work. He says they came from the Executive Intelligence Review. Last I looked they often have cites, but at the moment, I have not a clue. But my source said he would look them up tomorrow. It is after all Sunday at the moment. So you might get something.
Here are some facts I believe in. They all came in Monday.
Last Sunday, Coho Hall, Detroit Michigan, The local government proposed a money give-away to the truly desperate. They had forms to fill out. They had money for 3500 people. 65,000 people showed up. Depending on who you cite, it was either a riot or a near-riot. In any case, 6 people were taken away in ambulences. Look at the front page of the Monday Detriot Free Press, maybe under a headline like Hell in Detroit.
Monday's frontpage Bloomberg, a really radical paper. A title like Dollar at Redline. It mentions that US banks are going into euros.
M1 now, twice what it was a year ago.
Bank lending 24% less than a year ago. As I recall, we were in a credit crunch then.
20% of auto parts manufactures in bankruptcy. Maybe 50% more coming. No demand.
Manufacturing shutting down. They cannot get short term credit for day to day operations.
I doubt that any of this is going to be reported by your favorite national tv anchor. So maybe none of it counts for you. On the other hand, even an empericist should tend to take note. An easy historical comparision is that the economy is disintegrating at a more rapid rate than in the historical parallels.
But facts without theory do not mean much, IMO. For a nice reputable theorist, consult Galbriath. He had a nice op-ed in the Washington Post a few months ago. Right on. He is even a white house economic advisor.
For good policy, look at what Volker said maybe a month ago. He is not one of my favorite people, but said something useful. I think he is a Republican.
Riech?, used to be clinton's labor secretary, has been all over this month saying two useful things.
Probably a dem.
Neither is saying enough.
You suggested I was a Faither. Assuming you are in the United States, it might be enough to note I am not a Christian. But I eveh googled the word and could not quite figure out the reference. It is true that in a secular situation, someone once said I had a lot of faith. I am pretty much Leibnizian, with some twists. Pretty much all of my adult church-going has been Unitarian-Universalist, which might have some common elements with what little I read of Faithology. You may have figured out that I am not a reductionist, which may be the core of your complaint. If it is simply a religious slam, fine, but pragmatically I favor looking at what people do, rather than their particular religious beliefs. After all, most religious beliefs are based on something like revelation, which I do not particularly object to, but I doubt either of us has much of a way to have an impact on it.
As far as Christianity is concerned, I think it just fine, but there have always been for various reasons a lot of christians who are not christians. This last I regard as solveable. Then again, I have a lot of faith. :)
Oh, an odd note. The nearest UU church is now 30 miles away and I am a lazy sort. I am thinking about going to the local Minonnite church. Somewhat related to the Amish. I figure I can put up with the god-talk and one of the ministers is a childhood friend. I would trust him for ethical advice. A reasonable and knowledgeable sort of guy. Anyway, though they are somewhat technophobe, they mind their own business and do not cause any trouble. I suspect you would approve of them.
You speak of political corruption, motivated by profits. I agree with the observation. But more relevant to our present situation is that Glass-Speigel was repealed in 1998 and derivatives were legalized in 1990. No doubt some corruption was involved. But these sort of outcomes flow out of what is called liberal economic theory, maybe they call it neo-liberalism now. This analysis provides a basis for a program that would halt the economic disintegration in a day. On the other hand, you did not provide any useful solution. I think this is a characteristic of populism.
I agree that the present populist movement has a strong component of religious mortality noise. But I do not recall that progressivism had a big component of morality noise. Interesting to note that Nancy Polinski? considers herself a progressive in the historical sense. Yet she personally stopped a useful, fairly minor, reformist bill a few year back. At the time, it would have avoided this mess. Now dramatic changes are required.
Interesting. Do you the think the closure of almost 20% of our hospitals this past decade and the lay-offs this year of 50,000 public health workers has anything to do with the mortality rate?
While I agree with your general thrust, I might have a datum that undermines your specific arguement. I have the impression that the US no longer has the capacity to produce the necessary volumes of flu vaccine and we get it from foreign companies. Since as far as I know, the foreign companies are not big financial speculators, I do not see a great political incentive to make them rich.
On the other hand, if the US in fact no longer has the capacity to produce the necessary volumes of flu vaccines, I suggest you should find that more troubling than a little price-gouging.
I would classify your approach as populist and I know of no history where populism had good outcomes.
Group Healthy is a coop. I find it hard to consider them profit-focused.
Pretty poor data on your part.
Did you know that flue shots give you immunity for about a year? On the other hand, getting the flu gives you immunity to that strain and some immunity to closely related strains for a lifetime.
As to the general argument, if it is submitted to a peer reviewed journal and it was that poor of a study, she will get slapped up on the side of the head. That is how science works. On the other hand, it is not guaranteed to work correctly. Even in math, errors slip through peer-review. And of course we have systematic failures like global warming studies.
I was a group health member for many years. I would speak well of it,. But mainly I wanted to speak to the perjogative "group death". It happens group health started up about 1948. The local AMA hated it. They did things like kick the group health docs out of the chapter. And so on. This phrase "group death" was their invention. So consider the source.
Oh group health is a coop, One thing you might approve of is that they do not pay inflated salaries to their executives.
HMOs are a recent invention. Nixon I think. A government cost cutting technique. Like living wills and the current health reform plans. Now the typical HMO use the general prac docs as a gateway barrier to seeing a specialist. Group Health does not use that technique.
But they are what is called an evidence based medicine approach. You will not get experimental procedures there. For instance, stomach stapling has been around for quite a while. Only in the past few years has it become an approved procedure at group health. Evidence based medicine virtues and defects could generate quite a little debate. For instance, Obahma likes it and presumedly the way he would implement it would discredit the concept for a generation. But I kind of think Group Health is honest about analyzing the evidence. But I do not really know. But I do know I do not want my doc trying out the latest fad on me or deciding on my drugs based on drug company marketing campaigns. Drug company marketing techniques to docs could be a subject in itself.
I am a fdr type guy. So I read the cite. Probably cops, but maybe just degenerate. Pretty much technophile, which I admit might play well on slashdot. Support sustainable whatever. Notice they liked the post-sputnik era, but as far as I can tell, just become we put an emphasis on science and engineering. Liked the tech bubble, and that is just inexplicable. Did not mention Roosevelt's big industrial push like the TVA project. Pretty much just anti-corruption.
No program. They had a comments section, so I posted a few questions. On the positive side, they talked about the physical economy and its relation to the financial sector. Of course, I suspect their definition of the physical economy.
So I will just ask you. Do you think we are
in a Depression? If so, how do you propose to stop the process? An economic forcast by you for the rest of the year might situate how urgently you feel about it.
I think you use the word politics in a more narrow sense than I do. I think you in effect use it to refer to partisan politics.
I can say a couple nice things about Republicans. Volker a couple weeks ago said something useful about the economy. Ron Paul has a necessary bill to audit the fed with 300 cosponsors. With that number, it has bipartisan support. But he is not a fighter, so Barney Frank came up to him, put his arm around Paul's shoulder and easily convinced Paul to allow his bill to be merged with Frank's. The bill is not likely to be seen again. As it happens, the Dem leadership is greatly afraid of this bill.
I heard something today that should give you some hope. As it happens I have not watched broadcast or cable tv for 30 years. But where I am living now, Fox is always blaring. I looked at it bit for maybe a month to form an opinion and then ignored it. But I still catch snippets. I heard Dick Morris on the Factor show actually tell most of the relevant truth about the health bill. The Republicans have know this for months. What is happening that now they float it? And it actually gets reported.
But I figure congress critters on both sides are largely buckets of warm spit. I put my faith in a rare social phenomena. It was last seen in October 1989, in the DDR. In the US, Birmingham, 1963. But now it started again in the US in August 2009.
Huh? end of the post-war era means more that. Sort of a parochial view IMO. I figure the dollar will be in free fall. Sure the stock market will crash.
Okay, physical economy is deflationary, M1 is hyper-inflationary, and financial instruments are inflating faster than M1. Pretty classic. Aside from being dumb, you cannot print enough money to clear the speculative debts. The debts cannot be repaid. Looking at everything, I conclude the best historical analogy is Weimar 1923. The last banknote the Weimar Republic printed was a 100 trillion mark note. It is only an analogy, but rather suggestive.
The process, even at this late date, can be stopped in a day. Reich, secretary of labor under Clinton, has been all over recently with two of the three things that need to happen. Even Volker has said useful things not very long ago.
Thank you for your reply.
You are basically right and your comments are useful.
Still, I think politics has a place in an economic discussion. After all, economic policy gets implemented by the use of some form of politics.
Another reason is a recent experience. I have pretty good dem credentials. There was a discussion of jobless rates somewhere else. I noted that during the first 9 months of the Obama administration, we lost 5 million jobs. During the first nine months of the FDR administration, we gained 5 million jobs. That was pretty much the post. Nice official figures. I got lambasted heavily by one lady for being partisan and so on. She blamed it all on Bush. Go figure.
Anyway, I knew the Bush Sr idea was passed with bipartisan support and I should have said that.
I heard yesterday that M1, today, as compared to a year ago, has more then doubled. I call it Bernanke money. I wonder if the mass media will report this. Bloomberg? had a front page article yesterday with a title like Dollar at Red-Line. Relevantly, it reports that US Banks are dumping the dollar for Euros. I suspect the same banks that got bailed out.
Still, while Bernanke money will screw us, it is best treated as an incompetent response to a disaster. For causes, look to the repeal of Glass-Steigel in 1988 and the legalization of derivatives in 1990. Both were in response to the 1987 crisis. Oh, for Bush lovers, the last was Bush Sr's bright idea.
Actually, six factoids came in yesterday. Again, do not hold your breath to hear about them in the mass media. Together, they lead me to the conclusion that the economy is disintegrating faster than in the historical precedents. So I will venture a prediction: October is likely the end of the post-war era.
Also consider the possibility that this is an effect of austerity programs. The department may be under a lot of pressure to cut expenditures. A particular reason might be draconian federal audits. I do not keep up on this sort of thing anymore, but I have heard stories that the federal auditors can be real ass-holes. General government stupidity is always a good explanation, but during a Depression, austerity-driven stupidity is also pretty good.
Again, note that movies were someone else's example. My example was from physics. I just commented on a "near-universally recognized" problem and used it to cite an absence of creativity, which I happen to think is a general and fundamental problem. The physics issue also I think reflects a fundamental problem.
I find it interesting that people like to focus on a small criticism of movies. Think how much I would be abused if I attacked games, :)
Anyway, in 1940 I think the Hollywood star system was in full swing.
I do not know much biology. I confess I googled. I will allow that characterizing DNA in 1953 is a fundamental theory, though perhaps we should go back to Mendelev. This would put my 60 year figure for physics a little off when it comes to biology. But perhaps because of my ignorance I do not know of comparable new discoveries more recently. As far as I can tell, something like sequencing the human genome is new tools elaborating on an old theory. I have noted a tendency to confuses new tools with new fundamental theory. However, you said fundamental science, not new fundamental theory, and you might well be right.