As to lost documentation... I'm actually finding a lot of information about those suits and I would be very surprised if the manufacturer doesn't have more.
We know all the materials that were used and how they were joined together. I don't think it has been lost actually.
The company assisting Nasa with this still makes space suits for nasa.
If I tapped a shotgun to the front of a car, would that make the car a tank? No?
Okay, so why does attaching a hand gun to a remote controlled helicopter make it an armed "drone".
These things aren't even drones. Are they autonomous? Nope. Do they have any kind of artificial intelligence? Only to assist with hovering and gyroscopic stabilization... I wouldn't call that AI.
So first off, it isn't a drone. And second off... people could have glued a gun to remote controlled anything ages ago. Why is this suddenly a problem?
Who cares.
Here is where I will care... when the flying thing is ACTUALLY a drone. Aka it is autonomous. If the thing can fly around and play "the most dangerous game" then that's another story. Dude wires a hand gun into a remote controlled helicopter? I give zero shits. People get so worked up about stuff that is less dangerous than other stuff.
Like look at all the people worried about guns but for no apparent reason everyone has forgotten that it is really easy to either make or buy high explosives. Which means you can make giant frag grenades.
And if the remote controlled helicopter thing is just the scariest thing you can imagine... then imagine one of these things dropping a five pound frag bomb on your face.
This is one of the reasons I'm not afraid of the terrorists. The horror and darkness of my own demons makes the stuff the terrorists come up with sound cute by comparison. I mean, just stop and access your own darkness for a moment and think of the worst thing you could actually build if you were a terrorist and then compare it to the stuff the terrorists have already done. They highjacked four planes and got 3 thousand people dead... okay... that's something. Really pissed the US off so it has that going for it. But I can think of a few things off the top of my head that I could do multiple times that would kill that many and more especially in densely populated cities. Would I do it? I'm not actually a monster so of course not. But I can emulate such a creature. I'd never give the damned thing agency. But the outright horrors I can dream up without even trying very hard implies that the current crop of terrorists are in fact terrible at their jobs.
Remember that guy that was randomly shooting someone every couple days. It went on for weeks? THAT was smarter than a lot of the terrorist stuff. Doesn't kill a lot of people but it creates HUGE panic. But if you want to just get a body count... restaurants. Many have hundreds of people in them at a time. They're totally undefended. You could flatten the whole building. What is anyone going to do to stop you.
... We let people bring the phones in... we simply make it physically impossible for them to connect to secure systems.
The wifi is an entirely separate network maintained for people to do whatever with their phones or personal laptops. The actual secure network is wired... and has a lot of internal security on it making it hard to connect to anything without the admin authorizing the connection.
So you can bring your phone and go nuts with it. It won't connect to any of the work stations. You can plug the USB in and all it will do is provide power. You can't do a file transfer via USB. You can plug mice or keyboards into those ports. That works. File transfer... no. You also can't install anything on them either. You also can't use company workstations to go to apple.com and download the drivers. And even if you could, you couldn't download the drivers to the workstation. You could download them to a file server. But they'd have to be executed form the file server... and the workstations can only run executables and scripts that are on the white list. If the executable is not named a certain thing, in a certain folder, and fits certain other perameters.... it will not run. Period.
And again... you couldn't go to apple.com in the first place.
Point is... you can't connect an iphone to the workstation to transfer files in either direction. Same thing for thumb drives or anything of that nature.
The workstations are locked down such that you can use internal company databases, use a few programs that are understood to be important for certain tasks and access a whitelisted series of webpages that are run under similiarly parnaoid principles.
Let me be very clear here, any network that is so insecure that some stupid user can walk in, stick a thumb drive into a machine they have access to, and steal information or corrupt the network... that's not a secure network. That's rookie bullshit.
If your techs don't know how to tweak USB drivers to control what the USB can and cannot do... then consider locking the workstations in little cages so the users can't physically get at the ports. And if any ports are exposed still... consider filling them with epoxy or simply popping the case open and unplugging the ports from the motherboard assuming they're on a break out board.
Long story short, users in a high security environment should not be able to copy things on to USB sticks, CDRs, or whatever. As in... CANNOT. Not "not allow".. not "against company policy"... not "did you read the memo"... I mean "not" as in this is a three foot thick titanium bank vault that opens on a time lock type "no fucking unauthorized access".
That's how you do security. And one more thing. If you don't have someone in the office that is paid to maintain a fire arm and the skill to use it properly... you are also not in a high security environment.
Real high security means everything needs to be wired up tight enough that it will give the "Mission Impossible Force" trouble... and if they get caught... you need to be able to put a pistol against their heads and tell them to back away slowly from the server.
This sounds extreme to people that don't understand high security. For those that understand high security this is humdrum. Its Tuesday. Its this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Extreme? If you're not used to it. If you're being as paranoid as possible at all times then it becomes normal.
I am told to assume all employees could be stealing, sabotaging, or spying.
I assume everyone is a cheat, a liar, and a thief. Not because I really think they are that, but because that is the job. I give someone access, and I have to make sure they can't fuck over the system. As in... CANNOT.
Many say it can't be stopped... those that say that simply don't know that it can be done if you're willing to not pussy foot around and be serious about it.
Its funny how there are ideologies even in tech. I'm about to get bombarded by people that say it is BLASPHEMY to say you can lock a system down this tightly. HERESY... cannot be done... not one of them has ever tried.
1. Your opening argument is that you don't value the opinions of other people and therefore have no interest in their commentary?
Why are you posting here if you're not interested in the opinions of others? What you're telling me here is that you're a confused individual that probably shouldn't be posting. Or made a stupid insult that you didn't realize had self destructive consequences. You tell me.
Nothing but non-falsifiable arguments and ad hominem?
Are you afraid to match wits with me so you only make statements that cannot be proven right or wrong? Or are you so emotionally twisted up that you can't think straight? Or is it that YOU are so ignorant that you don't realize that you're making non-falsifiable statements that are by definition incapable of being valid logic?
A non-falsifiable argument is a fallacy by definition, fucktard.
... yes, they're saying that Zimbabwe or similar third world countries have high rates while first world countries such as the US for example have relatively low rates.
you only cite the US as low when you compare us against European states and as the link pointed out, the numbers are not recorded the same way and so can't be compared directly.
What is funny is that you don't realize you've outed yourself as a liar here. Its sad... you have mistaken stubbornness with a strong argument.
The change was in your mind. Not in mine. Consider bulls competing for a harem of females.
The stronger more powerful bull claims the harem as his right. However, the females in the harem do not need to stay in it or to allow the bull to mate with them. A female will need to stand and allow the male access to her vagina or how can he straddle her?
What is more, such females will often refuse to breed with what they think is an inferior bull. If there are no bulls around and then one is introduced that is very small and sick looking than even if he has no competition he will probably not be permitted to breed.
What is more social status is something that the women do not directly control. It is something controlled by the society and often controlled by powerful people in the society. if I award you high status in my society as someone that is even higher status... such as a king or a chief or whatever... your ability to attract a mate is improved simply because I gave you favor.
Now if I give you negative favor... if I say bad things about you... if I say you're a bad person or you hurt the tribe or you have some deficnecy that makes you a poor human specimen then your breeding opportunities decrease.
You seem unable to think in anything but absolutes. Genetics is not about absolutes but rather tendencies.
Some children are born with webbed hands like a frog. Does that mean that genetically and evolutionary we are under pressure to NOT have webbed hands? No. It just means you get mutants and then there are going to be people with very slightly webbed hands. It doesn't hurt them so evolution doesn't care one way or the other.
You seem to be only able to think black and white terms which renders your entire thought process incompetent for this discussion. Evolution is not black and white especially when you look at an entire species and the phenotypes that are more or less common.
We don't have just one blood type, one hair color, or one set of viral immunities. Certain things are more or less common to the extent they are important. But there aren't really any absolutes.
As to genetic death, you might as well talk about food then. Your pathetic desperate attempt to have a point on the issue by throwing random shit against the wall to see if it sticks is stupid.
Stop doing it.
As to the sex argument... you had so many typos and grammatical errors in this portion of your post that I couldn't figure out what you were even saying. Correct your post and I'll review it again.
As to squirting semen into vaginas... that is genetically what men are encourage to do and what women are encouraged to get men to fight for... and the fact that it doesn't result in a baby unless the woman permits it to is not accounted for in male psychology or genetics.
The slutty girl that will hop on anyone's bone is still considered worth having sex with by male evolutionary psychology because the system hasn't been updated to account for the fact that she's on the pill/will abort anything.
If it were updated... she'd be uninteresting. You might go for the religious girl that has a moral objection to birth control or you might go for someone else that has such low self esteem that they won't take the pill or abort because they're too lazy or apathetic. Or you might go for the girls that want to hop on the welfare immediately after school and that's easier to do as a teen mother than it is a non teen mother.
You're not thinking of this in terms of successful reproduction and absent that you can't really discuss evolution.
It depends entirely on how you frame the question. In certain contexts either system is superior. You can't say either one is objectively superior to the other in all contexts.
This is an over simplified argument you're pushing which has no utility in a real discussion. it is little more than a political talking point used to validate a given bias. I could share my own biases in this matter but they'd be equally meaningless and inaccurate.
My superiority to you in this matter is that I know what I don't know and I know better the problems with framing the question. You believe you have the answers and you believe your simplistic question has no flaws in it. This is obviously ignorance on your part.
Be more emotionally detached. Don't be such a drama queen. Think the issue through. You're not. And it is poisoning your ability to speak on this issue intelligently.
If there is a specific aspect of the US system you wish to talk about then we can do that. If you try to talk about the US generally, I will break down the issue into specific and then discuss them separately so we can get some idea of what is going on.
The "world" as you term it is mostly holding that opinion out of a mixture of ignorance and envy.
The Aussies would be in some trouble without the US there to add steel to the status quo that you depend upon.
The Aussies have to my knowledge never had to defend themselves alone. You went right from the shelter of the British Empire to our tender embrace. Care to imagine what facing off against the Imperial Japanese alone would have been like without the US or British to give you a hope in hell?
I don't say any of this to be mean or to upset you. I just find it very hard to take such opinions seriously when they do not have any grasp of the issues or the stakes.
I don't think right and left mean anything in the modern american context.
Right wing meant pro nobility and arisotrocy. Where as left wing meant pro liberty, peasant rights, rule of law, etc.
A great many of the people that call themselves right or left are either actually left or right by historical definitions and I don't think the terms right and left are helpful anymore because they mean what people mean them to mean but those meanings are not contextually obvious or consistent.
Tell me what you mean by "right wing".
Also, by most definitions the Nazis were left wing to the extent that they were pro equality... amongst the race they liked... believed in a great deal of economic redistribution... and so long as you weren't countering the state they had rights. They also were anti the old establishment.
Would I call them right wing or left wing? I don't think right and left apply.
I think a better means of dividing people accurately would be the difference between authoritarians and libertarians.
That is the real right and left as far as I am concerned.
Those that wish to tell you how to live your life and regulate your life are authoritarians. Those that will leave you alone and do what you want are libertarians.
That is the only meaning I can see there. Right and left are irrelevant. We have no nobility.
As I previously pointed out, military spending in the US has not increased remarkably and is not the dominant item on the budget. Healthcare subsidies dwarf defense spending.
And regardless, if you want to cut military spending, then you need to tell me what specifically you want to cut.
As to why we have to defend other countries at all. Excellent point. Tell the 50 or so countries we've agreed to defend that they're on their own now.
Guess what is going to happen? Their military spending is going to go up.
And that shatters the stupid statistical argument against the US. People say "look at how much they spend"... yes... because we defend half the fucking world. And given what we do, the price paid for it is a bargain. We do it for very very cheap all things considered. If they were all doing it themselves the collective spending by all those countries would dwarf what we're throwing at it.
now you could argue that these countries should pay us for the protection we offer. And some do actually. Japan is a good example. But most don't... if you can figure out how to get the other 49 or so countries to pay anything I'd like to hear it. They're getting the security for free as it is and you can hear them bitch about it even when they're getting it for free.
So how you're going to get them to pay a dime... I do not know.
Also factor into your calculations the cost of a world war which would be higher without the US riding herd. Which is cheaper? US security or WW3? Tell me.
As to the Russians running wild in Eastern Europe, no they're not. They're screwing with border nations. But they could be fucking with poland if we pull out. They're not.
As to this idea to give more buying options to the chiefs... Yes... but we've done that before you know. And the current regime was set up to address problems with that idea. And that creates new problems.
Is the new better or worse than the old? Its debatable. The point is that there are problems with any system and you have to be willing to accept those as the price paid when you adopt them.
Have free speech in a country and people are going to say stupid or crazy shit. You have to accept that. Price of admission.
You want to have the bureaucrats run the military? Then don't be surprised when they make typical bureaucrat decisions like the idea to save money by combining all planes into one with the F35. That is typical bureaucrat thinking. But then the military has their own way of doing things that some people have a problem with... such as not wanting to replace anything that is battle tested with something that isn't. Do you know how long it took to get militaries to stop carrying swords?
Every organizational structure or regime or culture is going to have problems. Not all are equal and you have to choose between them so you find something you prefer. However... keep in mind... whatever you choose is going to have cons as well as pros. And you need to accept those until you find a better way.
Every department is guilty of it... the noterity is a product of the media emphazies a common issue in the government in some things and burying it in others. If you dig into any department you find this. The waste is predictable more by the size of the budget than by what they're doing.
You can expect a good 20 percent bullshit in every department at a minmum. But cutting their budget by 20 percent won't have the bullshit cut first. Rather, vital services will be cut first as a power ploy and revenge tactic by the institution. This is why cities that have budget shortfalls cut education and police. Not because they can't cut something else that people won't mind or that should have been cut in the first place. But by cutting police and schools they can create a media firestorm that will get people to agree to higher taxes to save the children etc.
And every federal department is the same way.
Which is why if you want to control spending in them you have to get into the details and not cut the general budget but cut a specific program that you think needs to be axed.
If you're not doing that then you've very little that is constructive to contribute to the situation because any cutting that does not involve discrete and specific attribution will result in vital services getting prioritized for cuts or things that are not wasteful being cut while the pork is left untouched.
In the last general budget dispute in the US, the US president ordered park rangers across the country for forbid Americans from entering national parks. On the argument that this would save money. He went even so far as to bar people in Washington DC from seeing capital monuments because they're in the same general department.
It was a transparent political ploy that mostly backfired. I think we had some park rangers pull guns on a bus load of old people because they wanted to take pictures at a park.
Not only did this order not save money, it cost money... a lot of money. Why did Obama do it? To make a dishonest political argument. And I'm not saying this to attack Obama. I'm saying it because this is COMMON. It is typical. It is systematic. It is endemic. This is what we get all the time whenever we try to have cuts.
Which is why general cuts are stupid. You cut specific programs. You scale back government responsibilities. You cancel purchases... or shut the fuck up.
No, they're not the VA... That's just government funding through the universities that uses the VA as test subjects.
The VA is involved to the extent that they provide people with those injuries along with the funding from the federal government to do the work. But the actual brains are supplied by the universities and the private medical firms.
I grant that FEDERAL FUNDING is important for that research and that wounded solders from the VA are vital to the research. But that's your contribution here. Money and damaged people.
As to adequate funding being all you need... then why is the public education system so shitty? It sends more per pupil than most other countries and many of the places with the worst problems in the US system spend even more per pupil.
The money is meaningless without accountability, flexibility, competence, and integrity.
We know the VA has accountability issues. We know they have flexibility issues. We know they have competence issues. And we of course know they have integrity issues.
So given that we can't audit what they're doing because they falsify records, they are tend to not change things unless forced to even though it is against the interests of their patients, we know that at the very least their managers have competence issues, and their integrity is very difficult to defend... you think I'm going to feel good about not only just handing them a blank check but also running the entire national healthcare system under the same regime?
As to the oligarchs of South Korea... can you justify that statement... on what basis do you say they are an oligarchy?
As to Western Europe... its so deeply in our shells of interlocking protection that it is little more than a credit to our defense that they don't even think there is a threat. How many thousands of years of war did Europe endure... against themselves and against anyone that could reach their territory. And you think that's all over now? Peace forever?
If we hadn't backed europe during the cold war stalin would have grabbed greece and then continued working his way west. Churchill didn't beg the US for help for nothing.
You say we're all done now because the USSR is done? You said the same thing after the Germans fell the first time. But you know what... I'm sick enough of the entire issue to just agree with you out of spite.
There we go. That's where we cut the budget. Leave NATO and abandon western europe entirely.
You've convinced me. We can save money there. Brilliant.
We'll keep the faith with England... they're still trying... but large portions of Europe are unworthy of having American blood spilled in their names.
No you little strawmanning shit. This is the third or forth time in a row you've strawmanned me.
What I did say was that it is more complicate than that and you can't just take the budget of an entire department and say "reduce spending by X". You have to look at what they do, what you want them to do, what you don't want them to do, what all of those things cost, and then you can cut the things that you don't want them to do and reduce their budget by associating the thing you told them not do that was costing X with the money you're taking out of the budget.
Color the skin doesn't matter... that they the native doctors are being squeezed out by cheap imports is... we're seeing the same thing without H1B visa thing which we talk about all the time.
I also compared what you pay your english doctors to what we and the canadians pay ours. You pay half what we do. Half.
Now, if you are an english doctor, can just immigrate to the US and make DOUBLE. So no... you are underpaying your doctors or the US and canada are over paying ours.
Its one of the two. And that has to have some relevance to what we spend on healthcare. Unless you think labor costs being DOUBLE or HALF has no baring on anything.
You're not half as clever as you think you are... Just fyi. You keep coming off like you're sharp as a tack... but you're a dull one... or at least all your posts thus far have been indications of such.
The issue with not being able to get prompt scans is an issue we've heard from the Canadians. There are quite a few hospitals in the US that actually have a majority canadian patient list. And mostly as you say it is screening. MRIs etc.
That situation is one of the many reasons we look upon the calls for socialization with skepticism. If its so great we ask... why are the canadians coming over here to get this service and sometimes even treatement.
A big thing as I remember was the distinction between heart port and open heart surgery. I don't know if this is still the case, but the US adopted and trained people to do heart PORT surgery before anyone else. I think we developed and it naturally was adopted in the US first. It is apparently more expensive mostly because it requires different tools and retraining. Though the actual costs once that is taken care of are less than open heart.
The issue is that open heart involves cutting the rip cage open to get access to the heart. While heart port surgery sends fiddly little tools in through the gaps in the rib cage. Recovery times for open heart are at least a month or more. And heart port surgery has people out of the hospital in days.
Point is... there was a time when if you wanted heart port surgery you had to go to the US to get it. And that meant higher survival rates, quicker recovery times, fewer lingering problems because of the trauma of the open heart operation. Etc.
I believe there are a lot of things the US medical system does that are innovative. The robotic surgery projects are mostly in the US. We're working with gene therapy treatments. We are grafting electronic sensors to human nerves to allow direct brain interfaces with sensors and servos.
Is the socialized care better? I think it is contextual and depending on how you frame the question you'll get different answers.
As to the cost differences... I think a lot of that is the result of the way the medical industry is regulated in the US and less that we're not socialized.
as to insurance companies negociating with hospitals... first that is not a general release of pricing is it?
And second, the big problem with the insurance system is that it is no one's money.
The insurance companies don't really care what they pay the hospitals so long as all the other insurance companies have to pay a very similar amount. it isn't their money.
It's YOUR money. if the hospitals raise prices then the insurance companies raise premiums so they don't have to actually pay more because it isn't their money.
And the patients don't see it as their money often as not without high deductables because they think its the insurance company's money because the costs of the insurance are already set and won't change based on whatever they decide to do in the hospital on any given day.
So the costs are hidden and no one thinks of the money as theirs. This is a situation RIPE for problems.
Now here are some ways to fix this.
1. Have the hospitals disclose rates on their website in a comprehensible and comprehensive way. Here someone will say it is complicated... everything is complicated. And yet any businesses will average the costs so that they can form a simplified price list that they're happy to collect on average because over all their customers it works out to a decent profit.
2. Instead of having the insurance companies paying the hospital have them pay the patient. That is... you break an arm, and the insurance company has a certain amount of money that they just give you if you did that. If you spend less fixing your broken arm than the insurance company gave you than you personally are rewarded by keeping a bit more of your own money. And if you spend more than you have to pay more.
I can go on but just doing these two things would hugely control costs. Patients would be able to send market signals to the hospitals on a patient to patient basis. This would improve the efficiency of medicine hugely.
As to the flaw in my reasoning that all quality is basically equal... its less of a flaw then you think. When you have a problem most people just go to the nearest medical provider and get treatment there. You have to do quite a bit of research to figure out if one doctor is better than another and even then it is very subjective. The reality is that whether or not all medical care is actually equal, it is treated that way by the market in most cases. And thus from the market's perspective, it is generally considered to be equal.
As to manipulating statistics such as death rates etc... of course. Anyone that understands statistics understands that you can't understand the number unless you understand the methodology under which it was collected, calibrated, filtered, and executed.
This is why I have to take so many statistics so lightly. The methodology for so many of them is either unknown, intentionally hidden, misrepresented, or so complicated that I can't actually understand it. And if I can't understand the methodology than the number outputted by the system is likewise something I can't evaluate.
Two statistical studies could be talking about something and one outputs a number of X and another outputs a number of 2 * X... which one is right? Without understanding how they got to those numbers there is no way to know what any of it actually means.
Disclosure of that sort of information is frequently garbage.
You sloppy statistical methodology in journalism, government, and even academia. Mostly in the soft sciences but occasionally in the moderately hard science. You rarely see it in the actually hard sciences. Bullshit math is too easily detected in hard science.
... no. Break down the budget. We can talk about what each thing we do costs and then you can tell me what you want me to cut.
Who gets fucked? Do we fuck Europe? Fuck Eastern Europe? Fuck Israel or Saudi Arabia? Fuck South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, or Australia? Who do we fuck?
You don't just take the full budget and sight unseen cut it.
You have to go into the projects and programs and tasks and tell me what you don't want us to do anymore.
I can give you one that I think we could probably scrap... the JSF could be scrapped.
We can't get the money back already spent on it but we can stop dropping more money down that pit.
Now. I'd also scale back or get rid of the DHS.
What do you want the US to not do?
A lot of people want the US to deal with ISIS for example... europeans are asking us to do that. They say go to war as often to us as they tell us not to... without irony or self awareness.
And if we go to war with ISIS that will cost money. Could Germany fight Isis or England or France? Nope. They can't even fight some shitty band of barbarians in the desert.
But we can... Tell me. What do you want the US to stop doing. Forget the money. You don't even begin to understand what that means.
As Cicero said "The Sinews of War are Infinite Money.". To retain an ability to go to war we need to spend more.
What is more, you mostly talking about our spending in absolute terms. In relative terms our spending isn't even that much by european standards.
The UK spends something like 2.2 percent of their GDP on their military and the US spends about 3.5 percent.
Are you really going to bitch endlessly about a 1.3 percent difference?
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Can you connect that to your comment to islam please?
Almost none of them do and this thing with a gun attached to it almost certainly doesn't.
You might as well call ALL airplanes drones on that logic because SOME planes have drone like autopilots.
But we don't do that because its silly.
Some planes are drones.
Most planes are just planes.
This thing is a remote controlled gyro stabilized helicopter.
As to lost documentation... I'm actually finding a lot of information about those suits and I would be very surprised if the manufacturer doesn't have more.
We know all the materials that were used and how they were joined together. I don't think it has been lost actually.
The company assisting Nasa with this still makes space suits for nasa.
Non-falsifiable arguments and insults, Davy.
Or we could just let them get genocided and masturbate to the news footage of them getting skull fucked by barbarians.
The pro Palestine lobby is adorable. yes yes... the jews are the evil ones... lets let Hamas run wild.
What could possibly go wrong there?
You're too dumb to breed.
If I tapped a shotgun to the front of a car, would that make the car a tank? No?
Okay, so why does attaching a hand gun to a remote controlled helicopter make it an armed "drone".
These things aren't even drones. Are they autonomous? Nope. Do they have any kind of artificial intelligence? Only to assist with hovering and gyroscopic stabilization... I wouldn't call that AI.
So first off, it isn't a drone. And second off... people could have glued a gun to remote controlled anything ages ago. Why is this suddenly a problem?
Who cares.
Here is where I will care... when the flying thing is ACTUALLY a drone. Aka it is autonomous. If the thing can fly around and play "the most dangerous game" then that's another story. Dude wires a hand gun into a remote controlled helicopter? I give zero shits. People get so worked up about stuff that is less dangerous than other stuff.
Like look at all the people worried about guns but for no apparent reason everyone has forgotten that it is really easy to either make or buy high explosives. Which means you can make giant frag grenades.
And if the remote controlled helicopter thing is just the scariest thing you can imagine... then imagine one of these things dropping a five pound frag bomb on your face.
This is one of the reasons I'm not afraid of the terrorists. The horror and darkness of my own demons makes the stuff the terrorists come up with sound cute by comparison. I mean, just stop and access your own darkness for a moment and think of the worst thing you could actually build if you were a terrorist and then compare it to the stuff the terrorists have already done. They highjacked four planes and got 3 thousand people dead... okay... that's something. Really pissed the US off so it has that going for it. But I can think of a few things off the top of my head that I could do multiple times that would kill that many and more especially in densely populated cities. Would I do it? I'm not actually a monster so of course not. But I can emulate such a creature. I'd never give the damned thing agency. But the outright horrors I can dream up without even trying very hard implies that the current crop of terrorists are in fact terrible at their jobs.
Remember that guy that was randomly shooting someone every couple days. It went on for weeks? THAT was smarter than a lot of the terrorist stuff. Doesn't kill a lot of people but it creates HUGE panic. But if you want to just get a body count... restaurants. Many have hundreds of people in them at a time. They're totally undefended. You could flatten the whole building. What is anyone going to do to stop you.
... We let people bring the phones in... we simply make it physically impossible for them to connect to secure systems.
The wifi is an entirely separate network maintained for people to do whatever with their phones or personal laptops. The actual secure network is wired... and has a lot of internal security on it making it hard to connect to anything without the admin authorizing the connection.
So you can bring your phone and go nuts with it. It won't connect to any of the work stations. You can plug the USB in and all it will do is provide power. You can't do a file transfer via USB. You can plug mice or keyboards into those ports. That works. File transfer... no. You also can't install anything on them either. You also can't use company workstations to go to apple.com and download the drivers. And even if you could, you couldn't download the drivers to the workstation. You could download them to a file server. But they'd have to be executed form the file server... and the workstations can only run executables and scripts that are on the white list. If the executable is not named a certain thing, in a certain folder, and fits certain other perameters.... it will not run. Period.
And again... you couldn't go to apple.com in the first place.
Point is... you can't connect an iphone to the workstation to transfer files in either direction. Same thing for thumb drives or anything of that nature.
The workstations are locked down such that you can use internal company databases, use a few programs that are understood to be important for certain tasks and access a whitelisted series of webpages that are run under similiarly parnaoid principles.
Let me be very clear here, any network that is so insecure that some stupid user can walk in, stick a thumb drive into a machine they have access to, and steal information or corrupt the network... that's not a secure network. That's rookie bullshit.
If your techs don't know how to tweak USB drivers to control what the USB can and cannot do... then consider locking the workstations in little cages so the users can't physically get at the ports. And if any ports are exposed still... consider filling them with epoxy or simply popping the case open and unplugging the ports from the motherboard assuming they're on a break out board.
Long story short, users in a high security environment should not be able to copy things on to USB sticks, CDRs, or whatever. As in... CANNOT. Not "not allow".. not "against company policy"... not "did you read the memo"... I mean "not" as in this is a three foot thick titanium bank vault that opens on a time lock type "no fucking unauthorized access".
That's how you do security. And one more thing. If you don't have someone in the office that is paid to maintain a fire arm and the skill to use it properly... you are also not in a high security environment.
Real high security means everything needs to be wired up tight enough that it will give the "Mission Impossible Force" trouble... and if they get caught... you need to be able to put a pistol against their heads and tell them to back away slowly from the server.
This sounds extreme to people that don't understand high security. For those that understand high security this is humdrum. Its Tuesday. Its this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Extreme? If you're not used to it. If you're being as paranoid as possible at all times then it becomes normal.
I am told to assume all employees could be stealing, sabotaging, or spying.
I assume everyone is a cheat, a liar, and a thief. Not because I really think they are that, but because that is the job. I give someone access, and I have to make sure they can't fuck over the system. As in... CANNOT.
Many say it can't be stopped... those that say that simply don't know that it can be done if you're willing to not pussy foot around and be serious about it.
Its funny how there are ideologies even in tech. I'm about to get bombarded by people that say it is BLASPHEMY to say you can lock a system down this tightly. HERESY... cannot be done... not one of them has ever tried.
1. Your opening argument is that you don't value the opinions of other people and therefore have no interest in their commentary?
Why are you posting here if you're not interested in the opinions of others? What you're telling me here is that you're a confused individual that probably shouldn't be posting. Or made a stupid insult that you didn't realize had self destructive consequences. You tell me.
Nothing but non-falsifiable arguments and ad hominem?
Are you afraid to match wits with me so you only make statements that cannot be proven right or wrong? Or are you so emotionally twisted up that you can't think straight? Or is it that YOU are so ignorant that you don't realize that you're making non-falsifiable statements that are by definition incapable of being valid logic?
A non-falsifiable argument is a fallacy by definition, fucktard.
Try again. This time with less stupid.
... yes, they're saying that Zimbabwe or similar third world countries have high rates while first world countries such as the US for example have relatively low rates.
you only cite the US as low when you compare us against European states and as the link pointed out, the numbers are not recorded the same way and so can't be compared directly.
What is funny is that you don't realize you've outed yourself as a liar here. Its sad... you have mistaken stubbornness with a strong argument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The change was in your mind. Not in mine. Consider bulls competing for a harem of females.
The stronger more powerful bull claims the harem as his right. However, the females in the harem do not need to stay in it or to allow the bull to mate with them. A female will need to stand and allow the male access to her vagina or how can he straddle her?
What is more, such females will often refuse to breed with what they think is an inferior bull. If there are no bulls around and then one is introduced that is very small and sick looking than even if he has no competition he will probably not be permitted to breed.
What is more social status is something that the women do not directly control. It is something controlled by the society and often controlled by powerful people in the society. if I award you high status in my society as someone that is even higher status... such as a king or a chief or whatever... your ability to attract a mate is improved simply because I gave you favor.
Now if I give you negative favor... if I say bad things about you... if I say you're a bad person or you hurt the tribe or you have some deficnecy that makes you a poor human specimen then your breeding opportunities decrease.
You seem unable to think in anything but absolutes. Genetics is not about absolutes but rather tendencies.
Some children are born with webbed hands like a frog. Does that mean that genetically and evolutionary we are under pressure to NOT have webbed hands? No. It just means you get mutants and then there are going to be people with very slightly webbed hands. It doesn't hurt them so evolution doesn't care one way or the other.
You seem to be only able to think black and white terms which renders your entire thought process incompetent for this discussion. Evolution is not black and white especially when you look at an entire species and the phenotypes that are more or less common.
We don't have just one blood type, one hair color, or one set of viral immunities. Certain things are more or less common to the extent they are important. But there aren't really any absolutes.
As to genetic death, you might as well talk about food then. Your pathetic desperate attempt to have a point on the issue by throwing random shit against the wall to see if it sticks is stupid.
Stop doing it.
As to the sex argument... you had so many typos and grammatical errors in this portion of your post that I couldn't figure out what you were even saying. Correct your post and I'll review it again.
As to squirting semen into vaginas... that is genetically what men are encourage to do and what women are encouraged to get men to fight for... and the fact that it doesn't result in a baby unless the woman permits it to is not accounted for in male psychology or genetics.
The slutty girl that will hop on anyone's bone is still considered worth having sex with by male evolutionary psychology because the system hasn't been updated to account for the fact that she's on the pill/will abort anything.
If it were updated... she'd be uninteresting. You might go for the religious girl that has a moral objection to birth control or you might go for someone else that has such low self esteem that they won't take the pill or abort because they're too lazy or apathetic. Or you might go for the girls that want to hop on the welfare immediately after school and that's easier to do as a teen mother than it is a non teen mother.
You're not thinking of this in terms of successful reproduction and absent that you can't really discuss evolution.
It depends entirely on how you frame the question. In certain contexts either system is superior. You can't say either one is objectively superior to the other in all contexts.
This is an over simplified argument you're pushing which has no utility in a real discussion. it is little more than a political talking point used to validate a given bias. I could share my own biases in this matter but they'd be equally meaningless and inaccurate.
My superiority to you in this matter is that I know what I don't know and I know better the problems with framing the question. You believe you have the answers and you believe your simplistic question has no flaws in it. This is obviously ignorance on your part.
Be more emotionally detached. Don't be such a drama queen. Think the issue through. You're not. And it is poisoning your ability to speak on this issue intelligently.
If there is a specific aspect of the US system you wish to talk about then we can do that. If you try to talk about the US generally, I will break down the issue into specific and then discuss them separately so we can get some idea of what is going on.
The "world" as you term it is mostly holding that opinion out of a mixture of ignorance and envy.
The Aussies would be in some trouble without the US there to add steel to the status quo that you depend upon.
The Aussies have to my knowledge never had to defend themselves alone. You went right from the shelter of the British Empire to our tender embrace. Care to imagine what facing off against the Imperial Japanese alone would have been like without the US or British to give you a hope in hell?
I don't say any of this to be mean or to upset you. I just find it very hard to take such opinions seriously when they do not have any grasp of the issues or the stakes.
Define right wing please.
I don't think right and left mean anything in the modern american context.
Right wing meant pro nobility and arisotrocy. Where as left wing meant pro liberty, peasant rights, rule of law, etc.
A great many of the people that call themselves right or left are either actually left or right by historical definitions and I don't think the terms right and left are helpful anymore because they mean what people mean them to mean but those meanings are not contextually obvious or consistent.
Tell me what you mean by "right wing".
Also, by most definitions the Nazis were left wing to the extent that they were pro equality... amongst the race they liked... believed in a great deal of economic redistribution... and so long as you weren't countering the state they had rights. They also were anti the old establishment.
Would I call them right wing or left wing? I don't think right and left apply.
I think a better means of dividing people accurately would be the difference between authoritarians and libertarians.
That is the real right and left as far as I am concerned.
Those that wish to tell you how to live your life and regulate your life are authoritarians. Those that will leave you alone and do what you want are libertarians.
That is the only meaning I can see there. Right and left are irrelevant. We have no nobility.
As I previously pointed out, military spending in the US has not increased remarkably and is not the dominant item on the budget. Healthcare subsidies dwarf defense spending.
And regardless, if you want to cut military spending, then you need to tell me what specifically you want to cut.
Be specific or eat a dick.
Who are we cutting out of our defense treaties for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Pick someone you want to fuck over. Lets hear it.
As to why we have to defend other countries at all. Excellent point. Tell the 50 or so countries we've agreed to defend that they're on their own now.
Guess what is going to happen? Their military spending is going to go up.
And that shatters the stupid statistical argument against the US. People say "look at how much they spend"... yes... because we defend half the fucking world. And given what we do, the price paid for it is a bargain. We do it for very very cheap all things considered. If they were all doing it themselves the collective spending by all those countries would dwarf what we're throwing at it.
now you could argue that these countries should pay us for the protection we offer. And some do actually. Japan is a good example. But most don't... if you can figure out how to get the other 49 or so countries to pay anything I'd like to hear it. They're getting the security for free as it is and you can hear them bitch about it even when they're getting it for free.
So how you're going to get them to pay a dime... I do not know.
Also factor into your calculations the cost of a world war which would be higher without the US riding herd. Which is cheaper? US security or WW3? Tell me.
As to the Russians running wild in Eastern Europe, no they're not. They're screwing with border nations. But they could be fucking with poland if we pull out. They're not.
As to this idea to give more buying options to the chiefs... Yes... but we've done that before you know. And the current regime was set up to address problems with that idea. And that creates new problems.
Is the new better or worse than the old? Its debatable. The point is that there are problems with any system and you have to be willing to accept those as the price paid when you adopt them.
Have free speech in a country and people are going to say stupid or crazy shit. You have to accept that. Price of admission.
You want to have the bureaucrats run the military? Then don't be surprised when they make typical bureaucrat decisions like the idea to save money by combining all planes into one with the F35. That is typical bureaucrat thinking. But then the military has their own way of doing things that some people have a problem with... such as not wanting to replace anything that is battle tested with something that isn't. Do you know how long it took to get militaries to stop carrying swords?
Every organizational structure or regime or culture is going to have problems. Not all are equal and you have to choose between them so you find something you prefer. However... keep in mind... whatever you choose is going to have cons as well as pros. And you need to accept those until you find a better way.
Every department is guilty of it... the noterity is a product of the media emphazies a common issue in the government in some things and burying it in others. If you dig into any department you find this. The waste is predictable more by the size of the budget than by what they're doing.
You can expect a good 20 percent bullshit in every department at a minmum. But cutting their budget by 20 percent won't have the bullshit cut first. Rather, vital services will be cut first as a power ploy and revenge tactic by the institution. This is why cities that have budget shortfalls cut education and police. Not because they can't cut something else that people won't mind or that should have been cut in the first place. But by cutting police and schools they can create a media firestorm that will get people to agree to higher taxes to save the children etc.
And every federal department is the same way.
Which is why if you want to control spending in them you have to get into the details and not cut the general budget but cut a specific program that you think needs to be axed.
If you're not doing that then you've very little that is constructive to contribute to the situation because any cutting that does not involve discrete and specific attribution will result in vital services getting prioritized for cuts or things that are not wasteful being cut while the pork is left untouched.
In the last general budget dispute in the US, the US president ordered park rangers across the country for forbid Americans from entering national parks. On the argument that this would save money. He went even so far as to bar people in Washington DC from seeing capital monuments because they're in the same general department.
It was a transparent political ploy that mostly backfired. I think we had some park rangers pull guns on a bus load of old people because they wanted to take pictures at a park.
Not only did this order not save money, it cost money... a lot of money. Why did Obama do it? To make a dishonest political argument. And I'm not saying this to attack Obama. I'm saying it because this is COMMON. It is typical. It is systematic. It is endemic. This is what we get all the time whenever we try to have cuts.
Which is why general cuts are stupid. You cut specific programs. You scale back government responsibilities. You cancel purchases... or shut the fuck up.
No, they're not the VA... That's just government funding through the universities that uses the VA as test subjects.
The VA is involved to the extent that they provide people with those injuries along with the funding from the federal government to do the work. But the actual brains are supplied by the universities and the private medical firms.
I grant that FEDERAL FUNDING is important for that research and that wounded solders from the VA are vital to the research. But that's your contribution here. Money and damaged people.
As to adequate funding being all you need... then why is the public education system so shitty? It sends more per pupil than most other countries and many of the places with the worst problems in the US system spend even more per pupil.
The money is meaningless without accountability, flexibility, competence, and integrity.
We know the VA has accountability issues.
We know they have flexibility issues.
We know they have competence issues.
And we of course know they have integrity issues.
So given that we can't audit what they're doing because they falsify records, they are tend to not change things unless forced to even though it is against the interests of their patients, we know that at the very least their managers have competence issues, and their integrity is very difficult to defend... you think I'm going to feel good about not only just handing them a blank check but also running the entire national healthcare system under the same regime?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Ignorance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Had the soviets been strained to expand they would not have engaged in a program to expand communism globally.
The cold war would not have happened. It did because the soviets wanted to expand and the US contained them as best as we could.
That was the cold war.
A decades long international siege.
If you don't want to inform yourself that is your own prerogative but it undermines your credibility to claim an opinion of any note.
As to the oligarchs of South Korea... can you justify that statement... on what basis do you say they are an oligarchy?
As to Western Europe... its so deeply in our shells of interlocking protection that it is little more than a credit to our defense that they don't even think there is a threat. How many thousands of years of war did Europe endure... against themselves and against anyone that could reach their territory. And you think that's all over now? Peace forever?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If we hadn't backed europe during the cold war stalin would have grabbed greece and then continued working his way west. Churchill didn't beg the US for help for nothing.
You say we're all done now because the USSR is done? You said the same thing after the Germans fell the first time. But you know what... I'm sick enough of the entire issue to just agree with you out of spite.
There we go. That's where we cut the budget. Leave NATO and abandon western europe entirely.
You've convinced me. We can save money there. Brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We'll keep the faith with England... they're still trying... but large portions of Europe are unworthy of having American blood spilled in their names.
No you little strawmanning shit. This is the third or forth time in a row you've strawmanned me.
What I did say was that it is more complicate than that and you can't just take the budget of an entire department and say "reduce spending by X". You have to look at what they do, what you want them to do, what you don't want them to do, what all of those things cost, and then you can cut the things that you don't want them to do and reduce their budget by associating the thing you told them not do that was costing X with the money you're taking out of the budget.
THAT is how you do it if you're a human being with a functioning fucking brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Color the skin doesn't matter... that they the native doctors are being squeezed out by cheap imports is... we're seeing the same thing without H1B visa thing which we talk about all the time.
I also compared what you pay your english doctors to what we and the canadians pay ours. You pay half what we do. Half.
Now, if you are an english doctor, can just immigrate to the US and make DOUBLE. So no... you are underpaying your doctors or the US and canada are over paying ours.
Its one of the two. And that has to have some relevance to what we spend on healthcare. Unless you think labor costs being DOUBLE or HALF has no baring on anything.
You're not half as clever as you think you are... Just fyi. You keep coming off like you're sharp as a tack... but you're a dull one... or at least all your posts thus far have been indications of such.
The issue with not being able to get prompt scans is an issue we've heard from the Canadians. There are quite a few hospitals in the US that actually have a majority canadian patient list. And mostly as you say it is screening. MRIs etc.
That situation is one of the many reasons we look upon the calls for socialization with skepticism. If its so great we ask... why are the canadians coming over here to get this service and sometimes even treatement.
A big thing as I remember was the distinction between heart port and open heart surgery. I don't know if this is still the case, but the US adopted and trained people to do heart PORT surgery before anyone else. I think we developed and it naturally was adopted in the US first. It is apparently more expensive mostly because it requires different tools and retraining. Though the actual costs once that is taken care of are less than open heart.
The issue is that open heart involves cutting the rip cage open to get access to the heart. While heart port surgery sends fiddly little tools in through the gaps in the rib cage. Recovery times for open heart are at least a month or more. And heart port surgery has people out of the hospital in days.
Point is... there was a time when if you wanted heart port surgery you had to go to the US to get it. And that meant higher survival rates, quicker recovery times, fewer lingering problems because of the trauma of the open heart operation. Etc.
I believe there are a lot of things the US medical system does that are innovative. The robotic surgery projects are mostly in the US. We're working with gene therapy treatments. We are grafting electronic sensors to human nerves to allow direct brain interfaces with sensors and servos.
Is the socialized care better? I think it is contextual and depending on how you frame the question you'll get different answers.
As to the cost differences... I think a lot of that is the result of the way the medical industry is regulated in the US and less that we're not socialized.
as to insurance companies negociating with hospitals... first that is not a general release of pricing is it?
And second, the big problem with the insurance system is that it is no one's money.
The insurance companies don't really care what they pay the hospitals so long as all the other insurance companies have to pay a very similar amount. it isn't their money.
It's YOUR money. if the hospitals raise prices then the insurance companies raise premiums so they don't have to actually pay more because it isn't their money.
And the patients don't see it as their money often as not without high deductables because they think its the insurance company's money because the costs of the insurance are already set and won't change based on whatever they decide to do in the hospital on any given day.
So the costs are hidden and no one thinks of the money as theirs. This is a situation RIPE for problems.
Now here are some ways to fix this.
1. Have the hospitals disclose rates on their website in a comprehensible and comprehensive way. Here someone will say it is complicated... everything is complicated. And yet any businesses will average the costs so that they can form a simplified price list that they're happy to collect on average because over all their customers it works out to a decent profit.
2. Instead of having the insurance companies paying the hospital have them pay the patient. That is... you break an arm, and the insurance company has a certain amount of money that they just give you if you did that. If you spend less fixing your broken arm than the insurance company gave you than you personally are rewarded by keeping a bit more of your own money. And if you spend more than you have to pay more.
I can go on but just doing these two things would hugely control costs. Patients would be able to send market signals to the hospitals on a patient to patient basis. This would improve the efficiency of medicine hugely.
As to the flaw in my reasoning that all quality is basically equal... its less of a flaw then you think. When you have a problem most people just go to the nearest medical provider and get treatment there. You have to do quite a bit of research to figure out if one doctor is better than another and even then it is very subjective. The reality is that whether or not all medical care is actually equal, it is treated that way by the market in most cases. And thus from the market's perspective, it is generally considered to be equal.
As to manipulating statistics such as death rates etc... of course. Anyone that understands statistics understands that you can't understand the number unless you understand the methodology under which it was collected, calibrated, filtered, and executed.
This is why I have to take so many statistics so lightly. The methodology for so many of them is either unknown, intentionally hidden, misrepresented, or so complicated that I can't actually understand it. And if I can't understand the methodology than the number outputted by the system is likewise something I can't evaluate.
Two statistical studies could be talking about something and one outputs a number of X and another outputs a number of 2 * X... which one is right? Without understanding how they got to those numbers there is no way to know what any of it actually means.
Disclosure of that sort of information is frequently garbage.
You sloppy statistical methodology in journalism, government, and even academia. Mostly in the soft sciences but occasionally in the moderately hard science. You rarely see it in the actually hard sciences. Bullshit math is too easily detected in hard science.
As to Krugman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Krugman has no credibility on so many issues and he's mostly an ideologue at this point. He writes too many editorials to be anything else.
... no. Break down the budget. We can talk about what each thing we do costs and then you can tell me what you want me to cut.
Who gets fucked? Do we fuck Europe? Fuck Eastern Europe? Fuck Israel or Saudi Arabia? Fuck South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, or Australia? Who do we fuck?
You don't just take the full budget and sight unseen cut it.
You have to go into the projects and programs and tasks and tell me what you don't want us to do anymore.
I can give you one that I think we could probably scrap... the JSF could be scrapped.
We can't get the money back already spent on it but we can stop dropping more money down that pit.
Now. I'd also scale back or get rid of the DHS.
What do you want the US to not do?
A lot of people want the US to deal with ISIS for example... europeans are asking us to do that. They say go to war as often to us as they tell us not to... without irony or self awareness.
And if we go to war with ISIS that will cost money. Could Germany fight Isis or England or France? Nope. They can't even fight some shitty band of barbarians in the desert.
But we can... Tell me. What do you want the US to stop doing. Forget the money. You don't even begin to understand what that means.
As Cicero said "The Sinews of War are Infinite Money.". To retain an ability to go to war we need to spend more.
What is more, you mostly talking about our spending in absolute terms. In relative terms our spending isn't even that much by european standards.
The UK spends something like 2.2 percent of their GDP on their military and the US spends about 3.5 percent.
Are you really going to bitch endlessly about a 1.3 percent difference?
Fuck off.