NASA's bound to shrink. Particularly if you start from a baseline of the "mid-60s." Medicare, which takes up a very large and ever-increasing proportion of the budget, was not even passed until '65. Social Security was much less expensive because in the mid-60s most baby Boomers were still in High School. If you add in the recent mania for balancing the budget solely by cutting that pesky non-defense discretionary spending (and nobody actually seriously proposes cutting either a) Social Security, b) Medicare, or c) the Defense Department), there is absolutely no way NASA's getting a $5 Billion a year budget increase. Given increased partisanship, the fact that the non-Presidential party almost always controls at least one House, that nobody in the other party wants the President to be able to take credit for a moon-shot, and that the American people hear NASA's in the $18 Billion range and think that is a lot of fucking money; the politics of getting increased NASA funding are hideous.
Now if the President, and the Congress were the same party; and a) the low-taxes hawk, b) the deficit hawks, or c) both could be convinced to shut up for 10 goddamn years and let the government pay for nice things (note: in the 60s we had much higher taxes and much higher government spending due to 'Nam and LBJ's Great Society) we could do something about that.
But if that happens it will almost certainly have to be a Republican President, because it's very difficult for Democrats to win the House, and it would have to be a truly great politician with a strong commitment to space exploration because the GOP base is a) more anti-tax then the Dems, b) more anti-deficit then the Dems, and c) not particularly enamored with government spending on principle, and d) not that fond of scientists. You'd almost need a couple years of 5% economic growth because that would wipe out the deficit and let the President spend money without pissing off low taxes people or deficit hawks.
Silly you. You have apparently read the article and not the summary. This is slashdot. We skim the summary while ignoring the article, and if we're lucky we understand half of the summary. I have no clue what the article says, but the last sentence of the summary was "Would academic scientists in publicly funded institutions be so interested in the cocoa bean if the chocolate industry wasn't supporting so much of the research?" And my answer to that question is hell yes, even if the science isn't.
"Feeding half your friends from your chocolate stash for three months, measuring the hell out of them once a week, then massaging the data into something click-baitable" is not an example of real science. Even the MythBusters would at least be testing something very specific (i.e.: testing chocolate's effects on blood-pressure), based on a fairly good understanding of the what should happen theoretically, rather then doing a battery of tests and BSing the results into something marketable.
But quite a few real scientists would do something like that, even absent grant-funding, just to get their names in the paper.
Chocolate/wine/dogs/etc. are not always the best things to research in scientific terms, but they are some of the very best ways for a mediocre scientist in an obscure field to get his name in the paper.
Why bother finding a cure for cancer (which is really fucking hard), when you can feed half your friends from your chocolate stash for three months, measure the hell out of them once a week, then massage the data into something click-baitable, and *poof* you now meet Wikipedia's standards for notability.
None of the skills we're talking about is "entirely useless." The guy who knows what's wrong with his washer, and whether a relatively simple physical fix will work, has an actual advantage over the guy who just has to buy a new one. Sewing is actually probably more useful then the repair skills this thread is supposed to be about, because almost all the time sewing shit back together is actually practical. Spending hundreds on a proprietary electronic part, and then putting an hour or two into a) removing the faulty part, b) putting the good part in, and c) putting the rest of the appliance back together is just not practical for an appliance that can be replaced with a better model for $500.
But in the modern world you just don't need these skills. You can function fine without them. They're like balancing a checkbook, or cursive handwriting, plain old printing handwriting, knowing what a spavined mare looks like, etc. They impress people, and are somewhat useful, but nobody should freak out that they're going away,
So you're arguing you're an economist, but you're also arguing that the supply and demand curves don't work? Seriously, taxes cannot increase the cost you are willing to pay for labor. They can affect the willingness of laborers to work, but that's a much more minimal effect then you were claiming to illustrate in your original post.
Moreover you've just contradicted yourself. An efficient system to produce widgets has no slack in it. It produces exactly as many widgets as needed every day. This means that if you show up with a rush order for widgets, an efficient system will not give them to you at normal cost. The ones in production at the moment, and the next few batches are all already sold. The efficient system can rush you extras, but it will charge you extra because a) it can and efficiant businesses are supposed to charge more when they can, and b) it incurs real extra costs (ie: overtime to produce new widgets, or breaking contracts with current buyers to give you those widgets) in delivering to you. It would be extremely inefficient for the system to have widgets just waiting for you, because some days nobody would show up with a last-minute order.
Which means that if your goal is efficiency in health spending, the system that forced somebody to pay extra for a procedure now rather then wait a couple months is the one you prefer.
Which in turn means that, according to the evidence you presented yourself, the government-run system is more efficient then the free market.
They don't talk about this issue because you've got the economics wrong.
The government cannot force people to pay more then they want for labor in a market system. It is a free market. If I refuse to pay more then $10 an hour, and I know the government is gonna tax me 10%, and then take another 20% from the laborer, I will end up paying roughly $9, and the worker will take home about $7. The problem caused for me by the government's tax rate isn't that it increases my cost directly, it's that it's probably harder for me to get workers for $7 an hour take-home then it would be for $10.
OTOH, that $3 taxes is probably being spent on something. And if that something is something he was spending money on before anyway then his demand for take-home pay went down in roughly the amount of the tax.
BTW, actual reality disagrees with you on the efficiency of government spending in some sectors. Low health costs, for example, are strongly correlated with the level of government involvement in the system. The UK's NHS, in which private medical practices are illegal is lower cost then Canadian Medicare (in which private payment for medical services is virtually unheard of) is lower cost then us.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Most of them go back to basic economics. When you're sick your demand for health care is virtually infinite, therefore you'll pay anything, therefore the price a doctor can get is incredibly high. If there's some government body dictating what he can charge, or paying him itself, the cost can be kept relatively low by decree. If there isn't he can hire a bunch of six-figure business consultants to help him convince patients that his costs are 20% higher every year.
If I was a betting man I'd bet he wouldn't only be complaining about handyman skills.
Women of his generation knew how to fix clothes. They could sew on patches, darn a sock, shank a button, etc. They needed to do this because back when he was born (probably the late 19th century) it would have been extremely unusual for people to have more then a couple sets of clothing and it would have been prohibitively expensive to travel all the way to town because Billy got a hole in his sock.
In theory most woman of the Baby Boom generation were taught how to do this in Home Ec., but it just doesn't make sense to repair clothes when every-damn-body has dozens of the damn things in the closet and you can get a new one for pocket money.
As time goes on the life-skills you need to function change, and the old generation always bitches to high heaven that the new generation can't do the old life-skills.
My "actual data" would of course entail my relatives and friends, who indeed can "fix shit", while the current generation is mostly useless in that regard. Can't solder, can't crimp, can't change an oil filter or even headlight bulb, can't measure nor cut nor fasten lumber, etc. etc.
You've got a really weird group of relatives and friends. My parents, step-mom, and assorted aunts and uncles include 8 people in the Baby Boom generation and approximately 0 know what crimping is. Dad and his brothers may be able to change an oil filter or headlight, but they long ago concluded that it made a lot more sense to pay somebody else to do that shit.
OTOH, a couple of my cousins can do most of that shit. Alan Lee has actually started business providing do-it-yourself services to people like my Uncle Alan.
You do realize that in the 20s what we call Middle English and Early/Middle Scots were all considered different dialects of English? The decision to change the terminology referring to Scots from "dialect" to "language" was not due to Linguists running some complex Comparative Linguistics program on their computers and concluding that the degree of influence between Scottish dialects of English and English-English were X% higher then the Standard Linguistics Differential Test (Note: there is no such test), it was because Unionism got much much weaker in recent decades. To quote the first paragraph of Wikipedia on the issue:
Because there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots.[8] Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects do exist, these often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other.[9] Scots is often regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English, yet it has its own distinct dialects.[8] Alternatively, Scots is sometimes treated as a distinct Germanic language, in the way Norwegian is closely linked to, yet distinct from, Danish.[8]
In my Grandma's day staunch Unionists dominated Scots politics, so arguments that the language the Scots spoke was merely a dialect of the same language that Londoners speak were taken extremely seriously. Nowadays everyone is a Nationalist to some extent or other, so they come down on the opposite side of the entirely arbitrary question of where one language stops and another begins.
As for language groups, try the North Germanic Group. The Romance and Slavic language families are also pretty well-known for high mutual intelligibility. You learn Italian and you can't really have a full conversation with a Brazilian, but you could probably find out where your hotel is. And I haven't mentioned the Serbian/Croat/Bosniak, Malay/Indonesian, Urdu/Hindi language comboes. In all three cases it';s possible to converse with someone for literally hours in one before you figure out they think they're speaking another language.
OTOH when I took two of my yankee friends to see Gosford Park back in the early 2000s the only British accent they understood at all was from the guy who was playing an American pretending to be Scottish. There are Americans I can't understand. Even in Cleveland about once every six months I meet somebody whose black vernacular is so strong I have to tell them to spell out the words they're saying (my favorite was the guy who said "A-new-tees and Roya-tees" and apparently meant "Annuities and Royalties," my black boss and several black co-workers could not figure out what that guy meant).
So the Scousers will start talking like Scandinavians, Cockney will die out, and the US South will forget "ain't"? Not bloody likely.
The educated elite speaking solely the standard version of English is probably going to be much higher then the Latin-onlies, but there's no way in hell America's white working class is going to Foreignize their accents. Much less the black working class.
I believe you missed the most important bit of the argument: Iceland likes being it's weird little self. You guys really like that you're different.
You are proud as peacocks when you're explaining how some great phenomena that affected the world happened slightly differently in Iceland. Thus you coin new words in Icelandic for new things, and insist on creating lengthy Slashdot threads on how strange other languages are for borrowing their neighbor's terms.
The Canadians, Swedes, etc. are all proud of their unique institutions, but they generally don't see a need to add a new word to global dictionary just so they say they did it. It can actually be quite difficult to convince people from either country to stop telling you they're a normal democracy just like every-damn-body-else, and start telling you what's unique about their countries.
Keep in mind that languages strongly influenced by history.
English, for example, has had extremely strong influence from French due to (among other things), the Norman Conquest, multiple centuries of the Kings of England thinking their main job was as a Peer of France for various French Peerages, France's strong technical lead over the Brits until roughly 1850, etc. When French hasn't been strong in England the go-to language was ussually Latin. So it would be extremely surprising to find a technical term invented in English that was not damn close to French. A major reason English vocabulary books have to be two to three times the length of their equivalents in other languages is that most of French is technically an English word for something.
OTOH Iceland is an isolated country. Historically if you wanted to be influenced by interesting technical things, and you were born in Iceland, you moved to Copenhagen. They're perversely proud that their Christianization under the Norwegians consisted mostly of them chiseling some Saint's names on the Temples until the Norwegian King went away (they swear they didn't even change priests), and even today they technically don't have last names.
Of course most English technical terms would be the same as the French, and of course the only Icelander who gave a shit about electricity in 1850 convinced his countrymen to use a solely Icelandic word for it. If he'd been the kind of guy who didn't think Iceland being it's weird little self was important he'd have been in Denmark.
100 years isn't so interesting, maybe after a 1000 years.
By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other. Even today, try getting a Brit and a Texan into the same room and see if they can communicate. English will just become the root for a bunch of new languages, like Latin was the basis for the Romance languages.
Perhaps there was some convergence during the brief period of broadcast media over the last century, but even that is fragmenting into smaller groups as people tune in to more localized youtube channels... you won't have everyone tuning into a single "impartial" news source anymore with anchors with relatively neutral accents from the midwest.
People like using language to separate themselves from each other.
Keep in mind that English accents in actual Britain are already more diverse then several language groups. In fact one of them has been promoted a language. When my grandmother grew up in Arbroath in the 20s and 30s everyone in the County spoke English with a pronounced Scots accent. Now they speak the Scots language.
If you add in the rest of the empire you get accents so strong they could easily be languages in their own right -- such as Singlish and Hinglish -- and people who simply speak with such a strong local accent they are difficult to understand (even Indians speaking English proper tend to have a very strong accent to American and British ears, because they learn it to talk the each-other not you, white boy).
But there's still a huge amount of people who can speak English with a small enough accent that you will be able to understand them. What's goi9ng on is there's an international English accent, which you can hear most easily if you talk to a Swede or Norwegian, and is somewhere between Britain's RP and the Midwest/California accent American newscasters use.
So I suspect that's what'll happen in the future. It'll be like Latin in 700-1800, There'll be dozens of distinct dialects on their way to becoming languages spoken by people who don't want to be particularly important, but anyone who does want to be important will learn the Standard Accent so he can talk to foreigners.
If used properly they should probably be given to newish customers who have a difficult problem the front-line support guys will need to escalate to Tier 2 anyway. But these ones were being handed out to important people solely because those people are important, so I'd say they're by definition being used for "bribery purposes."
The bribe here isn't in the fact that Rep. Jackass and Sen. Blowhard have actually been given something great normal people don't have access to, it's that Jackass and Blowhard think they've been given access to something great normal people don't have. That's a hell of an ego boost, and it'll make those two guys a lot more sympathetic to the guy who handed them the card. In many ways it's the ideal bribe -- in monetary terms it's worth virtually nothing (maybe $10), but it's recipients probably think it's worth a lot because they think it will allow them to totally bypass the most hated customer service system in the country.
One Congresscritter is actually way more powerful in the US System then most. In Canada, for example, most MPs can't be re-elected unless the Prime Minister signs a piece of paper endorsing them. Why? Because he's head of the Conservative Party, more MPs are Conservative, and to appear on the ballot in Canada your party leader has to sign your nomination papers. They aren't completely his creatures (after all, they can always start a new party), but this really tends to cut down on the Parliament-insisting-on-doing-shit-a-way-slightly-different-then-the-PM's-way thing.
His problem is going to be that there's a deficit, so new money will have to come from elsewhere in the budget (or be added to the deficit), and it's highly unlikely that both Obama and the Republican Congress can agree on which program to cut to fund NASA.
But NASA's problem has always been that Congress are full of cheap bastards who'd rather cut taxes $10 Billion then add $10 Billion to NASA's budget. The rest tend to be frivolous bastards who'd much rather fund early childhood education with that $10 Billion then build rockets.
He's going to have some money (at some point the economic growth we've been experiencing will be reflected in a much reduced-deficit, and if Congress was smart they'd use some of that money to fund things like space exploration and infrastructure repair), but with the current laser-like focus of every-goddamn-body on deficit reduction he'll have a devil of a time coming up with $10 Billion in new money without a) cvutting programs Obama Likes (which will get the bill through Congress, but then get it vetoed), or b) not using the money to pay down the deficit (which will make it virtually impossible for the bill to get out of his Subcommittee, and could provoke a veto).
Don't bother becoming an expert. Certain Latin American countries are actually significantly more depressing then Africa, which is actually doing quite well at the moment. They had precisely the same opportunity we did to become ultra-rich global powers, and they wasted it in petty territorial disputes with each-other.
The ones who've moved on in the disputes (Chile, and Brazil) are doing great. Way better then us. They have peace on their borders, growing economies, democratic governments, and in a few decades they will be as rich per capita as the US. The others...
Let's just say it's really hard to grow your economy when your foreign policy of the last 50 or 100 years is based entirely on the principle that it's unfair that some other country defend it's territory from your righteous invasion force with modern weapons that cost money. Argentina's obsession with the Falklands is well known, and inexplicable to anyone who looks at the situation through the lens of what would be good for the two peoples involved (Falkanders, and Argentinians). Argentina is a temperamental Spanish-speaking Republic. The Falklands are people by sheep farmers who hate a) the Spanish language, b) change, and c) any form of government that does not include Her majesty the Queen.
Every 60s liberal voted for the guy who started that war twice. They voted for the guy who started on the path that led us to the war once. They strongly supported the war until the 60s were almost over because without the War Johnson doesn't have the credibility to pass any Civil Rights Acts, Medicare, etc.
70s liberalism's claims of pacifism are quite similar to current conservative claims that they're isolationists opposed to high government spending in principle.
In 99% of fantasy the story is BS. Evil arose sometime in the past, a complex and confusing prophecy appeared telling how to defeat it, the prophesied one (who just happens to be a character who is sympathetic to most American teenagers) and a merry band of friends appear, have various startling adventures in which nobody important ever dies, and defeat the evil by fulfilling the prophecy. They fulfill the prophecy literally, which turns out to be subtly different then the way everyone thought. The only reason to read the story is the characters because it's a boring story. And that means that the series would suck if they killed one of the characters halfway through.
OTOH, George RR Martin's books are solely about the story. The story is a story of the total collapse of Westerosi society, the human destruction it leaves in it's wake, the difficulty of combining a system dependent on purely honorable behavior by all political players and the human reality of frequent dishonorable conduct, etc. The characters are important in that they make us care about the Red Wedding in a way that you don't care about the Black dinner. If he didn't kill off characters at fairly regular intervals he'd be telling a much different story, and while the characters would be much more rewarding, the story itself would be incredibly boring.
That said, I also stopped reading the books after I finished the one with the Red Wedding. I have torrented all the episodes, but I haven;t watched them.
That's part of the appeal for long-term readers. I like that you can figure out precisely which historical figure he is talking about from wikipedia and a hard copy of the book. As an American all I knew about the French Revolution was that a) the King died, b) Jefferson was for it, c) Adams was against it, and d) Napoleon was involved. Thanks to the Harrington books I actually read some on it, and it was fascinating history.
Game of Thrones probably has as much historical inspiration in it as the Honor Harrington series, but unless you've studied Medieval history (particularly the Wars of the Roses) quite thoroughly already you ain't gonna figure it out. You're just gonna think that it's a cool story.
Their rebelliousness against hereditary privilege, monarchy, and all the other things we love to claim make America so much better then the UK is greatly exaggerated.
The highest ranking British Nobleman involved on either side during the war was Lord Stirling, who joined the rebels partly because the Brits refused to acknowledge him as his distant cousin's heir because a missing cousin with a better claim . In terms of noble rank he was actually outranked by at least one of his fellow American Major Generals, Lafayette, because a Marquis outranks an Earl.
I'm not suggesting it as a defence, I'm suggesting that it's very lazy policing to fabricate a false crime and charge for that in the first place instead of going after a real crime. Would the guy have done it otherwise? How the hell would we ever know? Going after real crime is harder, but the objective is not supposed to be to fill prisons, it's supposed to be to prevent or solve crimes instead of adding to the list with faked up ones.
If he wasn't giving the info to a Federal informant he would not have been caught until he started taking pictures of the schematics. Even then he may not have actually gotten caught, if he could think of a good story. At which point our equivalent of the Death Star plans, with their one weak spot (he told this guy precisely where to hit the ship to sink it and kill everyone aboard), are already in the hands of some dude who knew Arabic, said he was Egyptian government, and had $3k.
Which is why we have an aggressive counter-intelligence service that has managed to convince almost all people with a) security clearance and b) common sense that c) the dude claiming to be a Finnish intelligence agent offering them money for information is actually FBI, and therefore d) they should immediately report him to their superiors. Which results in e) the one time those tricky Finns actually try some shit like this they get caught.
If this guy was some idiot who'd just converted to Islam, talked tough, and then went along with a government sting because the informant guilt-tripped him; I'd be more sympathetic to your argument. Native-grown Islamist terrorist-plots in the US are almost always some mentally unstable dude going on a rampage, and the operation I just described can't prevent those. OTOH, we do have plenty of foreign governments willing to pay our people for information. And we do need to deter that as much as possible.
It's almost entirely pining for a coastline. They didn't call it a Navy back in '65. It was the Army's River and lake force. It got promoted to "Naval Force," but was unofficially knows as the Bolivian Armada, in '66; and was made it's own service in the 90s.
Since then they've insisted on celebrating the "Day of the Sea," their regional allies curry favor by saying they want to "swim in Bolivian seas," Morales is still trying to get them a deal to access the sea, etc.
If you follow international news at all, much of the Bolivia news involves pining for the sea. Some of it involves Coca, indigenous bitching about America's excessive influence in prior governments, white bitching about America's lack of influence in the current government, but a whole lot of it involves somebody important in Bolivia claiming that the entire country's lives would be oh-so-wonderful if only those aforementioned rich white guys could have their own personal merchant fleets staffed by the aforementioned poor red guys.
I'm from Michigan. Titicaca is a glorified pond. Most countries with rivers don't call the dudes who patrol those rivers a "Navy." But then most countries with rivers have a coast-line, so they have a Navy.
If they want to call it a Navy that's their sovereign right. But the rest of us have the equally sacred right to look at them funny.
Now if they weren't still bitching about a War they lost in 1883 I'd be much more likely to take their Navy seriously, but as it is they just seem childish. They lost a war back before their grandparents were born (and they have a very young population, so for most of them it's probably before their great-grandparents were born), they don't have the military or diplomatic capacity to win the territory back, so they would be much better served focusing on fixing things they can actually fix.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA's bound to shrink. Particularly if you start from a baseline of the "mid-60s." Medicare, which takes up a very large and ever-increasing proportion of the budget, was not even passed until '65. Social Security was much less expensive because in the mid-60s most baby Boomers were still in High School. If you add in the recent mania for balancing the budget solely by cutting that pesky non-defense discretionary spending (and nobody actually seriously proposes cutting either a) Social Security, b) Medicare, or c) the Defense Department), there is absolutely no way NASA's getting a $5 Billion a year budget increase. Given increased partisanship, the fact that the non-Presidential party almost always controls at least one House, that nobody in the other party wants the President to be able to take credit for a moon-shot, and that the American people hear NASA's in the $18 Billion range and think that is a lot of fucking money; the politics of getting increased NASA funding are hideous.
Now if the President, and the Congress were the same party; and a) the low-taxes hawk, b) the deficit hawks, or c) both could be convinced to shut up for 10 goddamn years and let the government pay for nice things (note: in the 60s we had much higher taxes and much higher government spending due to 'Nam and LBJ's Great Society) we could do something about that.
But if that happens it will almost certainly have to be a Republican President, because it's very difficult for Democrats to win the House, and it would have to be a truly great politician with a strong commitment to space exploration because the GOP base is a) more anti-tax then the Dems, b) more anti-deficit then the Dems, and c) not particularly enamored with government spending on principle, and d) not that fond of scientists. You'd almost need a couple years of 5% economic growth because that would wipe out the deficit and let the President spend money without pissing off low taxes people or deficit hawks.
Silly you. You have apparently read the article and not the summary. This is slashdot. We skim the summary while ignoring the article, and if we're lucky we understand half of the summary. I have no clue what the article says, but the last sentence of the summary was "Would academic scientists in publicly funded institutions be so interested in the cocoa bean if the chocolate industry wasn't supporting so much of the research?" And my answer to that question is hell yes, even if the science isn't.
"Feeding half your friends from your chocolate stash for three months, measuring the hell out of them once a week, then massaging the data into something click-baitable" is not an example of real science. Even the MythBusters would at least be testing something very specific (i.e.: testing chocolate's effects on blood-pressure), based on a fairly good understanding of the what should happen theoretically, rather then doing a battery of tests and BSing the results into something marketable.
But quite a few real scientists would do something like that, even absent grant-funding, just to get their names in the paper.
Chocolate/wine/dogs/etc. are not always the best things to research in scientific terms, but they are some of the very best ways for a mediocre scientist in an obscure field to get his name in the paper.
Why bother finding a cure for cancer (which is really fucking hard), when you can feed half your friends from your chocolate stash for three months, measure the hell out of them once a week, then massage the data into something click-baitable, and *poof* you now meet Wikipedia's standards for notability.
None of the skills we're talking about is "entirely useless." The guy who knows what's wrong with his washer, and whether a relatively simple physical fix will work, has an actual advantage over the guy who just has to buy a new one. Sewing is actually probably more useful then the repair skills this thread is supposed to be about, because almost all the time sewing shit back together is actually practical. Spending hundreds on a proprietary electronic part, and then putting an hour or two into a) removing the faulty part, b) putting the good part in, and c) putting the rest of the appliance back together is just not practical for an appliance that can be replaced with a better model for $500.
But in the modern world you just don't need these skills. You can function fine without them. They're like balancing a checkbook, or cursive handwriting, plain old printing handwriting, knowing what a spavined mare looks like, etc. They impress people, and are somewhat useful, but nobody should freak out that they're going away,
So you're arguing you're an economist, but you're also arguing that the supply and demand curves don't work? Seriously, taxes cannot increase the cost you are willing to pay for labor. They can affect the willingness of laborers to work, but that's a much more minimal effect then you were claiming to illustrate in your original post.
Moreover you've just contradicted yourself. An efficient system to produce widgets has no slack in it. It produces exactly as many widgets as needed every day. This means that if you show up with a rush order for widgets, an efficient system will not give them to you at normal cost. The ones in production at the moment, and the next few batches are all already sold. The efficient system can rush you extras, but it will charge you extra because a) it can and efficiant businesses are supposed to charge more when they can, and b) it incurs real extra costs (ie: overtime to produce new widgets, or breaking contracts with current buyers to give you those widgets) in delivering to you. It would be extremely inefficient for the system to have widgets just waiting for you, because some days nobody would show up with a last-minute order.
Which means that if your goal is efficiency in health spending, the system that forced somebody to pay extra for a procedure now rather then wait a couple months is the one you prefer.
Which in turn means that, according to the evidence you presented yourself, the government-run system is more efficient then the free market.
They don't talk about this issue because you've got the economics wrong.
The government cannot force people to pay more then they want for labor in a market system. It is a free market. If I refuse to pay more then $10 an hour, and I know the government is gonna tax me 10%, and then take another 20% from the laborer, I will end up paying roughly $9, and the worker will take home about $7. The problem caused for me by the government's tax rate isn't that it increases my cost directly, it's that it's probably harder for me to get workers for $7 an hour take-home then it would be for $10.
OTOH, that $3 taxes is probably being spent on something. And if that something is something he was spending money on before anyway then his demand for take-home pay went down in roughly the amount of the tax.
BTW, actual reality disagrees with you on the efficiency of government spending in some sectors. Low health costs, for example, are strongly correlated with the level of government involvement in the system. The UK's NHS, in which private medical practices are illegal is lower cost then Canadian Medicare (in which private payment for medical services is virtually unheard of) is lower cost then us.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Most of them go back to basic economics. When you're sick your demand for health care is virtually infinite, therefore you'll pay anything, therefore the price a doctor can get is incredibly high. If there's some government body dictating what he can charge, or paying him itself, the cost can be kept relatively low by decree. If there isn't he can hire a bunch of six-figure business consultants to help him convince patients that his costs are 20% higher every year.
If I was a betting man I'd bet he wouldn't only be complaining about handyman skills.
Women of his generation knew how to fix clothes. They could sew on patches, darn a sock, shank a button, etc. They needed to do this because back when he was born (probably the late 19th century) it would have been extremely unusual for people to have more then a couple sets of clothing and it would have been prohibitively expensive to travel all the way to town because Billy got a hole in his sock.
In theory most woman of the Baby Boom generation were taught how to do this in Home Ec., but it just doesn't make sense to repair clothes when every-damn-body has dozens of the damn things in the closet and you can get a new one for pocket money.
As time goes on the life-skills you need to function change, and the old generation always bitches to high heaven that the new generation can't do the old life-skills.
My "actual data" would of course entail my relatives and friends, who indeed can "fix shit", while the current generation is mostly useless in that regard. Can't solder, can't crimp, can't change an oil filter or even headlight bulb, can't measure nor cut nor fasten lumber, etc. etc.
You've got a really weird group of relatives and friends. My parents, step-mom, and assorted aunts and uncles include 8 people in the Baby Boom generation and approximately 0 know what crimping is. Dad and his brothers may be able to change an oil filter or headlight, but they long ago concluded that it made a lot more sense to pay somebody else to do that shit.
OTOH, a couple of my cousins can do most of that shit. Alan Lee has actually started business providing do-it-yourself services to people like my Uncle Alan.
You do realize that in the 20s what we call Middle English and Early/Middle Scots were all considered different dialects of English? The decision to change the terminology referring to Scots from "dialect" to "language" was not due to Linguists running some complex Comparative Linguistics program on their computers and concluding that the degree of influence between Scottish dialects of English and English-English were X% higher then the Standard Linguistics Differential Test (Note: there is no such test), it was because Unionism got much much weaker in recent decades. To quote the first paragraph of Wikipedia on the issue:
Because there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots.[8] Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects do exist, these often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other.[9] Scots is often regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English, yet it has its own distinct dialects.[8] Alternatively, Scots is sometimes treated as a distinct Germanic language, in the way Norwegian is closely linked to, yet distinct from, Danish.[8]
In my Grandma's day staunch Unionists dominated Scots politics, so arguments that the language the Scots spoke was merely a dialect of the same language that Londoners speak were taken extremely seriously. Nowadays everyone is a Nationalist to some extent or other, so they come down on the opposite side of the entirely arbitrary question of where one language stops and another begins.
As for language groups, try the North Germanic Group. The Romance and Slavic language families are also pretty well-known for high mutual intelligibility. You learn Italian and you can't really have a full conversation with a Brazilian, but you could probably find out where your hotel is. And I haven't mentioned the Serbian/Croat/Bosniak, Malay/Indonesian, Urdu/Hindi language comboes. In all three cases it';s possible to converse with someone for literally hours in one before you figure out they think they're speaking another language.
OTOH when I took two of my yankee friends to see Gosford Park back in the early 2000s the only British accent they understood at all was from the guy who was playing an American pretending to be Scottish. There are Americans I can't understand. Even in Cleveland about once every six months I meet somebody whose black vernacular is so strong I have to tell them to spell out the words they're saying (my favorite was the guy who said "A-new-tees and Roya-tees" and apparently meant "Annuities and Royalties," my black boss and several black co-workers could not figure out what that guy meant).
So the Scousers will start talking like Scandinavians, Cockney will die out, and the US South will forget "ain't"? Not bloody likely.
The educated elite speaking solely the standard version of English is probably going to be much higher then the Latin-onlies, but there's no way in hell America's white working class is going to Foreignize their accents. Much less the black working class.
I believe you missed the most important bit of the argument: Iceland likes being it's weird little self. You guys really like that you're different.
You are proud as peacocks when you're explaining how some great phenomena that affected the world happened slightly differently in Iceland. Thus you coin new words in Icelandic for new things, and insist on creating lengthy Slashdot threads on how strange other languages are for borrowing their neighbor's terms.
The Canadians, Swedes, etc. are all proud of their unique institutions, but they generally don't see a need to add a new word to global dictionary just so they say they did it. It can actually be quite difficult to convince people from either country to stop telling you they're a normal democracy just like every-damn-body-else, and start telling you what's unique about their countries.
Keep in mind that languages strongly influenced by history.
English, for example, has had extremely strong influence from French due to (among other things), the Norman Conquest, multiple centuries of the Kings of England thinking their main job was as a Peer of France for various French Peerages, France's strong technical lead over the Brits until roughly 1850, etc. When French hasn't been strong in England the go-to language was ussually Latin. So it would be extremely surprising to find a technical term invented in English that was not damn close to French. A major reason English vocabulary books have to be two to three times the length of their equivalents in other languages is that most of French is technically an English word for something.
OTOH Iceland is an isolated country. Historically if you wanted to be influenced by interesting technical things, and you were born in Iceland, you moved to Copenhagen. They're perversely proud that their Christianization under the Norwegians consisted mostly of them chiseling some Saint's names on the Temples until the Norwegian King went away (they swear they didn't even change priests), and even today they technically don't have last names.
Of course most English technical terms would be the same as the French, and of course the only Icelander who gave a shit about electricity in 1850 convinced his countrymen to use a solely Icelandic word for it. If he'd been the kind of guy who didn't think Iceland being it's weird little self was important he'd have been in Denmark.
100 years isn't so interesting, maybe after a 1000 years.
By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other. Even today, try getting a Brit and a Texan into the same room and see if they can communicate. English will just become the root for a bunch of new languages, like Latin was the basis for the Romance languages.
Perhaps there was some convergence during the brief period of broadcast media over the last century, but even that is fragmenting into smaller groups as people tune in to more localized youtube channels... you won't have everyone tuning into a single "impartial" news source anymore with anchors with relatively neutral accents from the midwest.
People like using language to separate themselves from each other.
Keep in mind that English accents in actual Britain are already more diverse then several language groups. In fact one of them has been promoted a language. When my grandmother grew up in Arbroath in the 20s and 30s everyone in the County spoke English with a pronounced Scots accent. Now they speak the Scots language.
If you add in the rest of the empire you get accents so strong they could easily be languages in their own right -- such as Singlish and Hinglish -- and people who simply speak with such a strong local accent they are difficult to understand (even Indians speaking English proper tend to have a very strong accent to American and British ears, because they learn it to talk the each-other not you, white boy).
But there's still a huge amount of people who can speak English with a small enough accent that you will be able to understand them. What's goi9ng on is there's an international English accent, which you can hear most easily if you talk to a Swede or Norwegian, and is somewhere between Britain's RP and the Midwest/California accent American newscasters use.
So I suspect that's what'll happen in the future. It'll be like Latin in 700-1800, There'll be dozens of distinct dialects on their way to becoming languages spoken by people who don't want to be particularly important, but anyone who does want to be important will learn the Standard Accent so he can talk to foreigners.
If used properly they should probably be given to newish customers who have a difficult problem the front-line support guys will need to escalate to Tier 2 anyway. But these ones were being handed out to important people solely because those people are important, so I'd say they're by definition being used for "bribery purposes."
The bribe here isn't in the fact that Rep. Jackass and Sen. Blowhard have actually been given something great normal people don't have access to, it's that Jackass and Blowhard think they've been given access to something great normal people don't have. That's a hell of an ego boost, and it'll make those two guys a lot more sympathetic to the guy who handed them the card. In many ways it's the ideal bribe -- in monetary terms it's worth virtually nothing (maybe $10), but it's recipients probably think it's worth a lot because they think it will allow them to totally bypass the most hated customer service system in the country.
One Congresscritter is actually way more powerful in the US System then most. In Canada, for example, most MPs can't be re-elected unless the Prime Minister signs a piece of paper endorsing them. Why? Because he's head of the Conservative Party, more MPs are Conservative, and to appear on the ballot in Canada your party leader has to sign your nomination papers. They aren't completely his creatures (after all, they can always start a new party), but this really tends to cut down on the Parliament-insisting-on-doing-shit-a-way-slightly-different-then-the-PM's-way thing.
His problem is going to be that there's a deficit, so new money will have to come from elsewhere in the budget (or be added to the deficit), and it's highly unlikely that both Obama and the Republican Congress can agree on which program to cut to fund NASA.
But NASA's problem has always been that Congress are full of cheap bastards who'd rather cut taxes $10 Billion then add $10 Billion to NASA's budget. The rest tend to be frivolous bastards who'd much rather fund early childhood education with that $10 Billion then build rockets.
He's going to have some money (at some point the economic growth we've been experiencing will be reflected in a much reduced-deficit, and if Congress was smart they'd use some of that money to fund things like space exploration and infrastructure repair), but with the current laser-like focus of every-goddamn-body on deficit reduction he'll have a devil of a time coming up with $10 Billion in new money without a) cvutting programs Obama Likes (which will get the bill through Congress, but then get it vetoed), or b) not using the money to pay down the deficit (which will make it virtually impossible for the bill to get out of his Subcommittee, and could provoke a veto).
Don't bother becoming an expert. Certain Latin American countries are actually significantly more depressing then Africa, which is actually doing quite well at the moment. They had precisely the same opportunity we did to become ultra-rich global powers, and they wasted it in petty territorial disputes with each-other.
The ones who've moved on in the disputes (Chile, and Brazil) are doing great. Way better then us. They have peace on their borders, growing economies, democratic governments, and in a few decades they will be as rich per capita as the US. The others...
Let's just say it's really hard to grow your economy when your foreign policy of the last 50 or 100 years is based entirely on the principle that it's unfair that some other country defend it's territory from your righteous invasion force with modern weapons that cost money. Argentina's obsession with the Falklands is well known, and inexplicable to anyone who looks at the situation through the lens of what would be good for the two peoples involved (Falkanders, and Argentinians). Argentina is a temperamental Spanish-speaking Republic. The Falklands are people by sheep farmers who hate a) the Spanish language, b) change, and c) any form of government that does not include Her majesty the Queen.
Every 60s liberal voted for the guy who started that war twice. They voted for the guy who started on the path that led us to the war once. They strongly supported the war until the 60s were almost over because without the War Johnson doesn't have the credibility to pass any Civil Rights Acts, Medicare, etc.
70s liberalism's claims of pacifism are quite similar to current conservative claims that they're isolationists opposed to high government spending in principle.
I think you've got it backwards.
In 99% of fantasy the story is BS. Evil arose sometime in the past, a complex and confusing prophecy appeared telling how to defeat it, the prophesied one (who just happens to be a character who is sympathetic to most American teenagers) and a merry band of friends appear, have various startling adventures in which nobody important ever dies, and defeat the evil by fulfilling the prophecy. They fulfill the prophecy literally, which turns out to be subtly different then the way everyone thought. The only reason to read the story is the characters because it's a boring story. And that means that the series would suck if they killed one of the characters halfway through.
OTOH, George RR Martin's books are solely about the story. The story is a story of the total collapse of Westerosi society, the human destruction it leaves in it's wake, the difficulty of combining a system dependent on purely honorable behavior by all political players and the human reality of frequent dishonorable conduct, etc. The characters are important in that they make us care about the Red Wedding in a way that you don't care about the Black dinner. If he didn't kill off characters at fairly regular intervals he'd be telling a much different story, and while the characters would be much more rewarding, the story itself would be incredibly boring.
That said, I also stopped reading the books after I finished the one with the Red Wedding. I have torrented all the episodes, but I haven;t watched them.
That's part of the appeal for long-term readers. I like that you can figure out precisely which historical figure he is talking about from wikipedia and a hard copy of the book. As an American all I knew about the French Revolution was that a) the King died, b) Jefferson was for it, c) Adams was against it, and d) Napoleon was involved. Thanks to the Harrington books I actually read some on it, and it was fascinating history.
Game of Thrones probably has as much historical inspiration in it as the Honor Harrington series, but unless you've studied Medieval history (particularly the Wars of the Roses) quite thoroughly already you ain't gonna figure it out. You're just gonna think that it's a cool story.
Their rebelliousness against hereditary privilege, monarchy, and all the other things we love to claim make America so much better then the UK is greatly exaggerated.
The highest ranking British Nobleman involved on either side during the war was Lord Stirling, who joined the rebels partly because the Brits refused to acknowledge him as his distant cousin's heir because a missing cousin with a better claim . In terms of noble rank he was actually outranked by at least one of his fellow American Major Generals, Lafayette, because a Marquis outranks an Earl.
For the record, I have no clue what he's talking about either.
I'm not suggesting it as a defence, I'm suggesting that it's very lazy policing to fabricate a false crime and charge for that in the first place instead of going after a real crime. Would the guy have done it otherwise? How the hell would we ever know? Going after real crime is harder, but the objective is not supposed to be to fill prisons, it's supposed to be to prevent or solve crimes instead of adding to the list with faked up ones.
If he wasn't giving the info to a Federal informant he would not have been caught until he started taking pictures of the schematics. Even then he may not have actually gotten caught, if he could think of a good story. At which point our equivalent of the Death Star plans, with their one weak spot (he told this guy precisely where to hit the ship to sink it and kill everyone aboard), are already in the hands of some dude who knew Arabic, said he was Egyptian government, and had $3k.
Which is why we have an aggressive counter-intelligence service that has managed to convince almost all people with a) security clearance and b) common sense that c) the dude claiming to be a Finnish intelligence agent offering them money for information is actually FBI, and therefore d) they should immediately report him to their superiors. Which results in e) the one time those tricky Finns actually try some shit like this they get caught.
If this guy was some idiot who'd just converted to Islam, talked tough, and then went along with a government sting because the informant guilt-tripped him; I'd be more sympathetic to your argument. Native-grown Islamist terrorist-plots in the US are almost always some mentally unstable dude going on a rampage, and the operation I just described can't prevent those. OTOH, we do have plenty of foreign governments willing to pay our people for information. And we do need to deter that as much as possible.
It's almost entirely pining for a coastline. They didn't call it a Navy back in '65. It was the Army's River and lake force. It got promoted to "Naval Force," but was unofficially knows as the Bolivian Armada, in '66; and was made it's own service in the 90s.
Since then they've insisted on celebrating the "Day of the Sea," their regional allies curry favor by saying they want to "swim in Bolivian seas," Morales is still trying to get them a deal to access the sea, etc.
If you follow international news at all, much of the Bolivia news involves pining for the sea. Some of it involves Coca, indigenous bitching about America's excessive influence in prior governments, white bitching about America's lack of influence in the current government, but a whole lot of it involves somebody important in Bolivia claiming that the entire country's lives would be oh-so-wonderful if only those aforementioned rich white guys could have their own personal merchant fleets staffed by the aforementioned poor red guys.
I'm from Michigan. Titicaca is a glorified pond. Most countries with rivers don't call the dudes who patrol those rivers a "Navy." But then most countries with rivers have a coast-line, so they have a Navy.
If they want to call it a Navy that's their sovereign right. But the rest of us have the equally sacred right to look at them funny.
Now if they weren't still bitching about a War they lost in 1883 I'd be much more likely to take their Navy seriously, but as it is they just seem childish. They lost a war back before their grandparents were born (and they have a very young population, so for most of them it's probably before their great-grandparents were born), they don't have the military or diplomatic capacity to win the territory back, so they would be much better served focusing on fixing things they can actually fix.