The joint strike fighter was actually an attempt to save money. Did you know that?
As to the next nine countries: percentage GDP is what is relevant actually... and by those figures you can see the US isn't exceptional.
What is more, our military is effectively NATO, the military of Japan, the military of South Korea, the military of Australia, and also the military of Saudi Arabia and Israel which is kind of a fun combination.
Point is that you can't compare the US against non-hegemonic powers. And even if you do, as a percentage of our GDP it isn't remarkable.
That's what the British empire was spending around 1905 on their military: 68.1 million pounds. which is hilariously about 4,878 million pounds in today's money. It was about half the crown's budget.
Compared to GDP: Public Spending Chart Fiscal Years 1905 to 1910Year GDP-UK £ billion Population-UK million Defence -total percent GDP Total Spending -total percent GDP 1905 MW gdp 43.080 3.49 a 17.82 a 1906 MW gdp 43.459 3.16 a 15.18 a 1907 MW gdp 43.840 2.89 a 14.44 a 1908 MW gdp 44.225 3.00 a 14.78 a 1909 MW gdp 44.613 2.96 a 14.73 a 1910 MW gdp 45.005 3.03 a 15.95 a
Or around 1905 they had spending around 3.5 percent of GDP going to "defense".
Comparing the US to Sweden's military budget in 2015 is stupid. Compare the US to Sweden when they kinda sorta had an empire and then make sure you compare by GDP and total tax base. You'll find the US's numbers are probably low compared to what Sweden was spending when they were actually responsible for anything besides meatballs.
First, you had better sound pretty fucking clever by the time I'm done reading your post or I'm going to jam the aforementioned shotgun your ass. https://youtu.be/F1SfzV67Bqw?t...... sigh...
First, the hospitals do not bid rates generally. They only tell the insurance companies what their price lists are and that is the only place those prices are really negotiated. Lots of things are inelastic while also being subject to market forces. Food is a good example. Just because you need to eat doesn't mean you're going to buy food from just anyone. You know what the prices are of most retailers or have a reasonable estimation. And based on that and with general market competition you can control costs by shifting from different sellers.
If I needed a certain type of treatment... not right now... but in a week or two... I'd have time to shop around. And the medical system could offer rates just like anything else is offered with rates. The fact that they're not is one of the reasons the market has a hard time controlling costs. Lets say a hospital 400 miles away is willing to do an operation that would cost me 50k where I am for only 25k? Now assuming quality is comparable, I then do a cost benefit analysis where I calculate the cost to me of traveling over there and doing that, possibly staying in a hotel or renting a car, and then compare that against the cost of doing it where I am.
Lets say you need to get a lot work done and you live in New York where it might be expensive. But if you fly to Texas you can get the same thing done with the same quality for much less. Just as an example.
That drives down the price in New York because their high prices are causing customers to go somewhere else. And business being business they need to maintain competitiveness.
This notion you have that medical treatment can't be subjected to conventional market forces is in error.
The only case where you're going to be forced to use the local whatever is going to be if you have a medical emergency. OKAY... in that specific circumstance you've got me. But their business model probably isn't sustainable on nothing but the emergency room. So they have to bring their prices down regardless IF patients are informed of prices.
But they're not. Hospitals are one of a very few set of businesses where they don't even hint at what your costs are going to be until you leave. And even then you might not know for weeks after you left. I got medical bills from a visit two weeks after I actually went to the hospital. They said one number two days after I left... then a week later they give me another number and then two weeks after I had initially gone, I got a third number.
Where did any of that come from ? apparently three separate billing departments from a single hospital.
Think of any business where that would happen outside of an American hospital? There isn't one. No US business works that way except for hospitals and only in America so far as I know.
There are many problems with the cost structure of the US medical industry. But to brush all that off and suggest I'm a hillbilly? I assume this is because I don't goosestep to socialism? You call me a hippy, I'm going to call you a nazi. Suck it. But to say I'm ignorant because I don't share your slavish devotion to your absurd little ideology? You're more a bible thumper than I am sport. Its your dogma you're damning me with.
You're saying I don't worship your book... so I'm in league with the devil. And you call me the hillbilly?
The issue is very complicated. I think a more productive way of looking at it would be to break down the numbers into what is spent on various things and that would help us isolate where the costs are.
It is possible they're general. But I've never found an issue where that was the case. Typically what happens is that you have something in the stats that is HUGELY out of whack and when averaged into the total it distorts the statistics.
For example, lets look at what doctors make in the US:
Okay, wages for doctors range from 135 thousand a year to about 300 thousand a year for specialists.
Lets compare that to the UK... where they make about 50k to about 80k... in british pounds... so 77,000 US dollars to about 124,000 US dollars for specialists.
Point is the doctors in the UK make about HALF what they do in the US.
So that's one thing we can look at. Why are we paying TWICE as much for doctors as they do in the UK? Does that mean we're getting higher quality doctors, does that mean the UK is getting lower quality doctors? is there an issue with medical schools not training enough doctors in the US? Does the UK have a better program for teaching doctors?
Something I've noticed in the UK is they have a lot of imported doctors. People that grew up in India, went to medical school in india, and then immigrate to the UK to practice. I've been to a few UK hospitals and they're largely foreign born. Which implies the salaries being offered are below market rates for the UK.
That suggests that even if the US is over paying for doctors, the UK is likely underpaying.
If you'd like to talk about Canada...
They appear to be paid roughly what US doctors are paid.
You get the idea. You break it down. Simplifying everything to one number is not useful. You have no detail to form an opinion. To see that number and just say "well you should socialize your system" is simplistic. You don't know what is going on. The existing cost inflation is as likely to be caused by subsidies as anything.
We've seen that in the education system where every time university subsidies for student loans are increased the universities increase tuition.
The cost of university education has outpaced inflation. And the reason for it is that the government keeps giving kids zero interest loans and increasing the amount they'll give. The Universities just adjust the tuition so they take 100 percent of the loan + they take whatever the student or family might be able to afford on top of that.
We saw similar things in the housing crisis in that the government was giving cheap loans to buy houses. This caused market inflation because the cost of housing simply went up every time the government increased the subsidies. Why not increase the price of my house? If you've got more money to spend then I'll set my price at whatever you'll pay.
So you can't just abstract everything down to one number. You lose all the details.
As to what public service you'd like this new Health care system to resemble... you can't use another country as the model. Its like saying you want a US university system in Zimbabwe or an American news organization in China. These nations are all different and whatever you build in the US is going to be run by Americans and is going to be subject to American economics and is going to be subject to american local, state, and national politics.
So... find an analogue. What you'll find is that US services that are highly regulated tend to become heavily beurocratic, bloated, and inefficient... and often the quality drops. The reasons for this are mostly political. They tend to have employee unions which agree to deliver campaign donations and votes in exchange for lax auditing of their functions, over staffing their departments, and paying the union better than market rate.
There is a reason the most successful economy in the US is Washington DC. The government pays people very well and they don't fire people unless they're horrifically in
What did the world look like before the British Empire? Because that was what it was like before you had a great sea power patrolling the sea lanes and making it clear that anyone that fucked with shipping was going to get shelled.
As to why we have to fund it... basically because we agreed to and because no one else wants to do it.
A better question would be why don't we collect tribute.
Historically powers like the US do that. You provide protection or some other service and the powers that use it have to pay a tax and that tax subsidizes the actions by that power.
The British did that during their empire... so did the monguls... etc. We are unique in that we don't charge anything.
Our reasons for that are complicated and I won't get into it unless I I know you're asking in good faith. If you're just trying to be snarky then I won't waste my time.
As to US corporations profiting from US power... not disproportionately. Everyone profits from it to the extent that they have anything to sell that anyone else actually wants to buy. The US was a very profitable exporter prior to our expansion of responsibilities and suggesting that we're only profitable now because of them is not supportable.
You'd have to show instances of the US navy for example interdicting trade to profit US corporations.
We do interdict trade of course... though mostly in weapons and only against rogue states. Just because we would frustrate weapons shipments to Palestine or Iran doesn't mean we're doing anything to the trade of Mexico or Sweden or South Africa.
And if they US didn't those countries would have to spend more. So what is your point?
A country that is getting US strategic protection basically for free doesn't need to spend that money themselves.
Cite the percentage GDP spending of relevant non-first world powers.
First world is in the original context... aka US allies. Second world would be soviet allies and third world would be anyone else. That is what that term means.
So... cite non-US allies that have a relevant military force and cite the percentage of their GDP that they spend on the military. You'll find that they tend to spend more.
Your example is little more than pointing out that various first world countries save on their military budget because the US does it for them.
Yippy.
It was also deliberate. After WW2, the European powers were in ruins and it was agreed that the US would protect them while they rebuilt.
Your utter lack of knowledge of the subject and history renders your presumption to an opinion laughable.
They still make space suits. Do you know who knows how to build a space suit? These people. And knowing how something was made in the first place is kind of a prerequisite for restoration in most cases. If you don't know how the oil painting was painted you're probably going to fuck up the restoration. Any restoration project that doesn't include the company that made them and likely has a lot of records and specifications on it is dubious from the get go. If the company didn't exist anymore and the technology were lost to the mists of time or something that would be one thing. But the company does exist and the technology is not lost.
They're just standing there. They're right there. So... use them.
I read more of the kickstarter page... They are using ILC Dover. So the original manufacturer is assisting in the restoration. So they know how to make the suit. The suit is made out of known materials that we can get our hands on right now. Explain to me why they can't just take some bits of that same material and f' with it to their hearts content until they figure out how to fix it?
Beyond that, the notion of restoring the thing without replacing materials is nonsense. The suit has undergone chemical changes. Most of these materials are not like clay tablets you can just store in a cave somewhere and take them out 2000 years later and they're as good as new. They change. You can expose them to air and that will change them or you can expose them to a vacuum and that will change them too.
They're not stable in the long term. They have shelf life. And you can't restore them without replacing them. Its like trying to restore cheese or a banana or something. I don't care what you do... that cheese or that banana is going to undergo some changes if you put it somewhere for decades.
Here is what is POSSIBLE: You can make it LOOK restored which will involve cleaning and painting and squirting liquids on it to give it a new car smell.
OR
You can can basically build a brand new suit reusing a few components that are chemically stable.
Those are the two things you can do.
For obvious reasons they're going with option 1. And option 1 is cheaper than option 2 and option 2 is cheaper than the amount of money they're asking for by quite a bit.
I doubt that thing is more than a mock up... aka, I'm just about positive it doesn't work. But so long as you didn't need to actually use it... it works for a museum etc. 2. My figure was a gross inflation assuming the work was as hard per inch as oil painting restorations. The restoration of a space suit for photography and display would be vastly cheaper. Again, the company that made the suit in the first place would probably sell you a functional replica for less and restoring is generally a lot cheaper than actually building from scratch especially when you only need it to LOOK restored and not actually hold pressure or something.
3. I don't understand why they need to do that and I don't understand why that is expensive. You're talking about a box that controls temperature and humidity. That is not expensive.
4. Why do they need a custom built one? And even if they do... which is dubious... why is this assumed to be expensive? You're talking about some foam rubber in a rough human shape around a metal skeleton.
Myth busters builds dummies all the time out of crap and it is demonstrably not difficult.
5. That fee is 5%.
As to what I read... I reacted to a kickstarter project.
NASA is not the only one to issue one of them. I judged NASA by the same standards I judge any kickstarter project.
I look at what they're doing, I look at the cost, I look at who they are, I look at what the ultimate payout will be... and from that I decide if I'm going to fund a project.
I don't like the price they're citing. It seems high.
Just like we cut education spending and improved quality with the public education system right?
Sorry... nationalizing stuff is not a panacea.
The thing lost in your statistics is that the US if you compare equal demographics to equal demographics compares very very well to other countries even the hyper socialized ones.
Where things fall apart is if you compare people and cultures that exist in the US but not somewhere else.
Compare white women between the ages of 22-35 with any country you like... the US does just fine. Compare it against sweden if you like... same thing... the numbers are about the same. Where things get bad... and very bad at that is when you start to compare inner city minority populations or simply average them into the total.
Those stats are HORRIBLE. They're a fucking nightmare. Crime stats, drug addiction, literacy, high school graduation, college graduation, average income, life expectancy, infant mortality, teenaged pregnancy... the stats there are BAD.
But if you exclude that segment of the US population and recalculate... the US stats are quite good actually.
Now here you're going to say "you can't exclude a portion of the system"... okay, but now we have to admit that the problem is CONCENTRATED in a specific segment. And rather than applying your solution to EVERYONE when the problem is not suffered by EVERYONE maybe you should instead focus on what the fuck is going on in those communities that makes ALL the stats so bad. I mean, can you blame the lack of socialized healthcare on the literacy and high school graduation rates? Kinda hard to do that isn't it?
So once you're doing that, you're going to have to focus on what went wrong in these communities because they actually used to be better than that. They've gotten WORSE over time... not better. And what you'll find is that they started to get bad when a lot of welfare programs were released that disincentivized work, disincentivized a stable household, undermined the quality of inner city public education, and a tediously long list of things that really hurt those people. And it was all government action. And it was all with good intentions.
And fucked everything up.
What public service in the US do you think your new healthcare system is going to resemble. Because I can tell you now, that it would very rapidly look just like the public education system unless you instituted systemic reform in government unions just as a start.
And absent that... your idea would endanger the health of my entire country for very little if any objective return.
Well... depends on how you define "enemy force"...
Regardless, if you want to talk about stupidly pointless wars the US has fought since WW2, nearly all of them were part of the Cold War which was neither stupid nor pointless.
Typically what you'll see there is a list of proxy wars between the US and the Soviets that basically kept happening until the Soviets folded.
As to why defense isn't on the chopping block... so many reasons its hard to do the topic justice.
the long and the short of it is that the only thing giving international law, the UN, or stablizing the majority of the first world is the presence of the US military.
The Navy keeps the sea lanes open for trade and makes pointless any rival powers investment into naval power because whatever it is will be meaningless against the US Navy.
The Army and Marines are based around the world. We secure the border between north and south korea. We have bases throughout Europe that actually serve as the continent's actual military. And there is really a very complex and not very well understood logistics network the army maintains that is critical for rapid mobilization of US forces and the subsequent projection of force that permits.
The Air Force has bases all around the world capable of very rapid force projection anywhere in the world. They do the majority of the reconnaissance of the western powers. How do you know X country is doing Y? The US Air Force has pictures. Added to that, investment, development, and production of fighters and bombers the world over is suppressed by the existence of the air force if only because the USSR tried and got their faces shot off more often than not.
I mean... that's US pilots in WW2 era slow as shit propeller ground support craft... dogfighting a mig from Vietnam... and basically winning some crazy how.
That means countries don't develop air power because there really isn't a point with US air superiority.
We suppress all of that. Every day.
Again, if you want to cut the US military budget. Which thing that the US military does would you like to cut?
No patrolling sea lanes? No maintaining an international military logistics network? No investing in air superiority? No protecting Japan? No protecting South Korea? No protecting Israel? No protecting Europe? No protecting Eastern Europe? No defense agreements in South America to defend country X if attacked by country Y?
Tell me what you'd like to cut? Who should we hang out to dry. *takes out ball point pen, clicks pen head out, and pulls out a lined ledger*
Tell me who we're fucking over. I'll make a list.:-D
We have statistics on malaria rates before DDT, during DDT, and after it was no longer used.
You are right that the WHO did not ban it. You are wrong that the lobby did not cause it to be banned in any country making heavy use of it. And the results have been consistent.
Malaria rates in Mexico for example have gone up more than ten times their previous rate simply by switching from DDT to other less effective and more expensive pesticides.
You can justifiably knock me for the mistake on the WHO. You got me there. However, you go too far by saying the anti DDT lobby basically doesn't exist or is not responsible for getting DDT widely banned around the world. THAT is bullshit.
I'm responding to this because it wasn't a troll question... I also felt answering it would get people to think about an issue for more than the.5 seconds they normally do which invariably leads to no actual thinking ever happening in the first place:
To be fair, he's saying that the DoD "Over Spends" so much on paperclips that you could raid the DoD budget indiscriminately and pay for the suit restoration.
here you might say "well, why do you say over spend"... because otherwise you're saying that the government is spending X on paperclips and doesn't need to because apparently they either buy too many or they aren't using them for anything.
Here is what you use paper clips for... to hold bits of paper together. So if you're using them... then what are you going to do when you don't have them?
Staples? Folding the sheets just so? Maybe putting them in a folder?
And that causes your staple budget to go up... and that ignores that there are feature differences between staples and paperclips. Paper clips don't damage the paper when you use them which means you can separate out individual sheets or add sheets. Or folding... doesn't work as well as paper clips which means close efficiency from whatever that does. Or folders means you're now spending more on folders which are more expensive than paper clips per unit and are basically a superior version of the same thing at a higher cost.
I know I sound autistic going through this but details matter. The context of the statement was that there was so much fat in the military budget they could just bill it to the DoD. Now I'm sure the DoD does waste at LEAST half a million a year on all sorts of stupid shit. But every branch of government does that as well.
Obama and his wife took two separate government secret service protected planes to go to Los Angeles on the same day. Now, if they had shared the same plane that would have saved money. But they didn't. They chose to take two planes because "reasons". And I'm not beating up on Obama for that. you see it in every government department. They do stuff like that all the time.
The US Federal government got in trouble recently for running the sprinklers too long in California. They have a very bad drought there and for that reason they're being asked to not run the sprinkers for more than 6 minutes a week. Instead they're running them for about 6 hours a week.
Typical stuff. The city hall of San Francisco dumps about half a million gallons of drinking water down the drain every day to run water boiler heating system for the building. Again... in a drought. Never mind that they could recirculate the same water every day for at least a year at a time without any problems.
Its typical.
So if you want to raid a budget... I'd like people to stop picking on the military as if they're the only ones that do retarded shit on a regular basis. They ALL do it. Raid the general fund if you're going to take money out.
This would properly be filed under the "discretionary non military" fund. ANd that make up about 420 billion dollars of our annual budget every year. So add it to that.
Bureaucrats are pissed that they're being bypassed by military departments that have neither the time nor the inclination to waste the lives of soldiers on these pencil kings.
Here is the salient point: The military departments find the process too slow to be useful and so bypass it.
That's the story. Full stop. Not that the military over pays for stuff. But that this budget approval office is SLOW.
Fix that and the military will route their orders through them instead.
Here they'll say "we need more money to do that"
Okay... now we're doing a cost benefit analysis. Is it cheaper to over pay for some stuff or cheaper to pay the bureaucrats to make sure we don't over pay?
Ehm? I think we'll find it is probably a wash. Just my bias here. You'd think some bureaucrats were fairly cheap. Guys sitting there with some spreadsheets pushing numbers around. How expensive could it be? Well... horrifically expensive in many cases. Which... again based just on my bias here suggests this office complaining that because they're not used we over pay for stuff... well, maybe they're actually a net cost and the best way to save money is to just terminate them entirely and tell teh military departments and commanders and generals to use their budgets as best as they see fit. Who after all understands what the military needs better than the military? You could have some corrupt general or something but generally they're not. And generally they'll make a serious effort to make every penny go as far as they can. If you give the Marines a giant pile of money and say "this is your money for the year, spend it how you choose". I frankly think they'll make better use of it than if you hand it to the pentagon and say "okay here is everyone's money, spread that around through everything somehow."
A big problem with all governments i've ever really looked at is that there is a belief that you make things cheaper/more efficient/better by combining and centralizing. This is sometimes true but it is often not true. The primary thing centralization does is make it easier for people at the top to understand and manage the whole system. But that's why we invented delegation. Just delegate it. Then you don't need to centralize, combine, or simplify. The recent F35 project was a giant example of how combining a lot of projects together into one project actually made it more expensive and less useful.
We also see that with the DHS. The concept there was not costs but rather free flow of information... but we don't actually have the free flow of information the DHS was supposed to give us and by all indications it is frustrating the effective execution of orders simply because we have some of this going on: https://youtu.be/_iiOEQOtBlQ?t...
Every time some organization under the DHS wants to do something they have to run upstairs and ask the DHS for permission. That can't help but slow things down massively as well as limit the scope of the organization to whatever the DHS can understand which is going to be less than what all the various departments could individually understand collectively.
That they don't have the money to pay for this out of petty cash. I also question why it is costing half a million dollars.
It sounds like they're mostly taking pictures of it and then putting a website up with historical information they can pull out of records and the pictures.
Why does that cost half a million dollars? I'd feel better about this if they put that out to an open bid. I'm quite certain that you could get a very reputable outfit to do it for a fraction of this amount of money.
Okay, that's what it costs for the restoration of an oil painting. And that is finer fiddlier work than the space suit.
Lets take their high number of 2500 USD and say that is what it would cost to restore 80 square inches of space suit. This is a huge inflation of the art restoration costs because they're saying this would cost 500 dollars for 80 square inches. But we'll go with the high number just to make a point.
Okay human body has about 2790 square inches of surface area... we'll double that for inside and outside and just treat the suit for this example like its skin. Then we'll divide that by 80 square inches and then multiply that by 2500 USD... and we get:
174,375 dollars. And that still sounds really high to me. But its a tiny fraction of the money they're asking.
But they also promised to take high res photos. So lets look at what that costs.
I did some digging as to what it would cost to do a full 3d high res photo shoot for the entire space suit... whole thing... inside, outside, helmet, gloves, etc. And I'm having a hard time getting numbers even in 5 figures. This is looking like maybe 8 grand. But lets say its 80 grand because its the government and you can reliabily get them to pay 10 times what something is worth without them batting an eye.
That's still 173 + 80 grand. So... What's left here? Making a website? Who here thinks that explains the gap in costs?
So yeah... I don't understand the 500 grand bill on this. It seems wildly inflated.
We spend about 834 billion a year on government healthcare subsidies.
We spend about 538 billion a year on non-defense discretionary spending.
We spend about 420 billion a year on "mandatory" spending.
We spend about 230 billion a year on interest payments to national debt.
Wee spend about 600 billion on the military.
Yet whenever anyone wants to raid a fund to pay for something... its the military budget.
Why is that?
And I should point out that the military is one of the few things the government does that it is supposed to do and it is one of the few things the world... especially our allies need us to be competent in.
So why are you raiding the military budget? Do you want the US to pull out of NATO? Maybe sunset its guarantee to protect Japan? We could let Israel get genocided. Maybe let the Russians run wild in Eastern Europe. Possibly allow the North Koreans to invade and enslave the south koreans?
Where would you like to cut the US military budget?
Maybe cut their medical care? That's a popular one. Or maybe you'd like them to not have the latest high tech stuff so when we go to war more of our people die... or we have to kill innocent people because the military will have to compensate for having bad weapons by using them less discriminately. That precision bomb that blows up one building but leaves the rest standing is expensive. Much cheaper to drop a lot of dumb bombs and flatten the whole neighborhood.
What would you like to cut? Obama is talking about cutting the ability of the US to fight two wars at once. This was something we built into the US budget during and after WW2 because we had to fight the Japanese and the Germans at once. A two front war. So... maybe that's what you want to cut.
Its all well and good to say "lets cut the military budget" but what does that mean? What are you cutting specifically?
Wrong. I explained and justified the reference. Claiming otherwise is intellectually dishonest.
Marxism relies on the theory of social constructivism.
Social constructivism conflicts with evolutionary psychology via nature vs nurture.
For marxism to make any sense, human nature has to be arbitrary. If any human behavior is not arbitrary it will almost certainly conflict with some aspect of marxism because marxism argues in terms of absolutes and touches on every human behavior.
The progressive movements that are pushing for hard AND soft racial and sexual quotas in business, government, the military, and academia are all reliant and related to the same thing political gestalt.
What you want me to do when I get kicked is to only look at the foot. The foot is relevant but I'm going to look at what is attached to the foot as well because maybe it is more effective to throw an upper cut to the nut sack rather than waste my time attacking the foot.
This is a larger political movement and if it becomes an issue then I'm going to address it as a whole rather than fixate on whatever toe it stepped across the line today.
Its easier, its more honest, and its actually more interesting because it bypasses a lot of the sophistry where various people misrepresent their motives, views, and sources of information. By cutting right to the heart of the beast I am dealing with the actual issue at hand here.
In regards to the 30 years war, can you be specific? I'm not sure what you're talking about. Its a massive subject and I can't figure out specifically what you're referring to... I see the ottomans allied with some eastern european protestants. That's about it.
However, getting international funding for DDT programs is almost impossible and several countries have been compelled diplomatically to ban the use with predictable results.
Mexico and South Africa were both pressured by the United States to ban DDT. Mexico did it to get the US to pass the Free Trade agreement and I forget what South Africa was getting out of it.
The point is that the only way you can use DDT is if you give a finger to the whole first world and that's hard to do.
What is sick is that you need to do that. Obviously the first world shouldn't care or make DDT bans a requirement for good relations.
There's no reason to ban it besides a book backed largely by fiction published in the 60s.
Unlikely? The point is that they CANNOT be compared.
Tell you what, sparky. Exclude all infants from US records that include underweight infants or that had resuscitation. Then you can start to compare.
So long as US records include underweight infants and infants given resuscitation and other records do not... they cannot be directly compared.
This is obvious to anyone with any knowledge of how statistics work. In fact, I am certain you know you're full of shit here and you're just such a degenerate that you think lying is going to save yourself.
You lost. Again. Horribly.
You won't accept it because you're the black knight... but your fucking legs got cut off and you're little more than an object of pity and dark humor for me at this point.
As to what humans need to survive... I am aware... I don't see what babies needing to be cared for has to do with competition between males and females however.
As to multiple partners... yes, however a man having sex with a woman does not mean he is promising to protect her or provide for her.
And a woman sleeping with a man does mean she is interested in carrying his child to term. Genetically.
As you point out, women need help during pregnancy and for years afterwards. The only thing more vulnerable than a pregnant woman is a baby. She can't feed herself. She cannot protect herself. And all things being equal, the people assigned to that role will be men. And if you want a man to sacrifice his time, resources, and risk his life... then giving him some stake in the project is in your self interest.
At the very least you want to give him a strong impression that the child is his. Whether it actually is or not is not important. He needs to believe it. if he does, then he'll sacrifice more deeply... if food gets short and he only has enough food for one of you. You want him to give you his food so he starves while you live. Men are less likely to do this if they either know or believe the child is not theirs.
How does a woman give a man this impression? Having sex with him about nine months before is a good start. This course means the child COULD actually be his. The probability of it being roughly a question of how many other men she slept with at that time. If not so many, then his chances are decent. If everyone in the tribe then the chances are poor and he probably knows it and she is going to have to rely on a milder but more general sacrifice from the male population at large rather than asking for a deep sacrifice from one specific male.
I'm unsure of which of these works better. I only know that a more monogamous arrangement is more common. That suggests that it is either better for the woman or there is some other reason it tends to work out that way.
Obviously, once you get to property rights etc the notion of interference and land rights becomes a problem and that is one of the big reasons societies tend to encourage monogamy... it is just easier to figure out who owns what.
As to british history... I again did no such thing. I think you're having a very hard time actually making up a rational argument on your own. So first you say I was talking about chimps when I clearly wasn't and then you claim I am talking about british history when I am not.
You're doing a very poor job of forming a coherent argument. I don't say this as an insult. You can tell because when I get offensive I include lots of dirty dirty words.
What you are very very very obviously doing is sitting there with a series of prefabricated arguments in front of you that you've memorized and you're trying to match them to what I'm saying. I think I've told you already that I go out of my way to frustrate tactics like that.
If you presume to have an opinion then you're going to have to think for yourself here. If you don't... then it isn't your opinion is it? You're just parroting something someone else programmed into you like a computer.
listening to you argue sounds like this guy that robot from "what are little girls made of?"... you think you're making things up or thinking but you're just responding to programming.
And this is NOT an insult. It is super obvious. You keep trying to force me into an argument you have stored.
The Chimp Bonobo thing was obvious and now this english thing.
Dude. "CAN" you actually... REALLY think for yourself? If you can, then come up with your own thinking. Your own argument. I don't debate programming.
If you could bring me the person that input this programming than I might be willing to debate them. But you can't debate an inanimate object which is all programming really is here. You either have your own mind or you don't actually have an opinion in the first place.
As to being prizes... yes... but women also want to be won. They want to be competed over. The notion that women are victims of that system is not accurate. They can be but generally it serves their needs by organizing the competition that their own biology finds desirable.
Women don't just want ANY guy. They want a good/great/the best guy.
it is important for women and men to understand where they personally stand on the sexual market. How desirable they are and why. And that helps them pick a mate they can actually get.
Something that is unfortunate about the modern hookup culture is that we have this odd mix of two very different and incompatible ways of looking at sex.
The hookup culture puts no value on what happens after the sex. So a low status female for example could have sex with a high status man. Just a fuck as they say. But what we've seen is that many women will misunderstand what happened there and think "I can get a high status male"... and so they hold out for the guy that is as good as the guy that flipped her around backwards so he didn't have to look at her face and has his way whilst probably drunk.
This is a common problem in market economics as well. A misunderstanding as to what something is worth causes buyers, sellers, and producers to under produce, over produce, over value, or under value assets. A lot of economic problems are ultimately due to this.
The biggest culprit here tends to be big national banks that are state sponsored under valuing credit or over valuing some asset that they've determined politically they want people to have.
So credit tends to be issued at well below market interest rates and that causes problems. And we had an issue in the housing market where the value of land or homes was overvalued. Things can be under valued as well. Savings tend to be undervalued by most national banks which is why they like to encourage people to not save. The problem with that is that people without savings tend to operate economically very different from people with savings. So its very short term thinking that tends to backfire badly. A person without savings is going to be much more frugal and conservative in their spending that someone with a big nest egg. People with nest eggs will also invest and start businesses and do a lot of things that you really need to keep an economy healthy. Wiping them out or encouraging them to not build the nest eggs keeps them from doing those things and that ultimately is very damaging to the economy.
Anyway, you see this is mating strategy as well. People need to know what they're worth in the sexual market. You're asking a man or a woman to give you the rest of their lives or at least commit to a child with you. This is a big portion of their life they're giving to the project. And they need to know what they're worth on the market to feel comfortable in the relationship. A woman or man that thinks they're worth more or could do better are going to be more inclined to break the relationship and try to form a new one. That's rational.
And someone that feels they are worth less will feel especially committed to the relationship because they'll feel very lucky and will not want to screw things up because they'll be unlikely to do better.
As to being a mammalian, it is also true that sexual intercourse is almost always initiated by the female. A female cow that doesn't want to have sex with a male bull can avoid it quite easily. She just moves her head so that she faces him or lays down. He's not going to be able to mate with her unless she stands up and points her vagina at him.
Amongst zebra they even wink the vulva as a come on.
As to being for feminism, I think we're all for equal rights and equality before the law. But feminism won all those arguments a long time ago and no one is fighting over that anymore.
What feminism is fighting for now is "more".
We're all equality feminists. But modern feminism isn't about equality. its about female privileges and the expans
Every culture has a means of assigning breeding privileges to males.
Some of them rely upon the woman deciding who she wants to be with. Others have her family decide this thus giving the power to give away her breeding rights to her parents. And others even have the government dispense breeding rights. And then you have combinations of this... some cultures have the church or the local wise man/woman decide.
And the basis of the decision is typically based on the success of the male, his contribution to the economy, his service to the community... that sort of thing. What do you think wealth and fame are?
For a very clear example of this, look at ISIS... yes, they're exceptional, but mostly in the simplicity and overtness of the system. You make the organization happy and they give you women. Hand them right to you.
All societies do that though in their own way.
And if you do not make the society happy... you either have a much harder time finding a mate or in some cases you're legally forbidden to even have one. More commonly, women tend to be discouraged from associating with you.
Its part of the means of social control you have in any society. Men that don't play by the rules don't get to breed.
As to social constructs from marx, wrong.
First, he argues that class is a social construct. The whole notion of some people being better than others being arbitary. Obviously in some cases it is... but in others it isn't and communist theory doesn't account for people that are naturally in positions of authority, power, or have high status because they are in fact superior to their peers.
And then the whole notion of doing away with the market and changing human self interest is very social constructivist.
No one invented capitalism. It evolved. The argument from marx is that capitalism is just as arbitrary as any system before it and for that to be true... markets, market theory, game theory, etc all have to be social constructs.
As to what this has to do with marxism... marxist theory is heavily involved in current gender and race theory and the primary opponents to the science of evolutionary psychology are the people that say everything is a construct... and the primary push behind that idea is it is required for marxist theory to be credible. If you can't argue that market theory is a social construct then marxist theory because incoherent.
That is why you're taking the stand you are against me here. Think about it. When do you take a hard stand against me without it being in the name of some leftist politics? That's all you do.
The simple fact that you're engaging with me like this suggests it.
Now that IS ad hominem on my part. So I'm not going to stand behind it. I'm just pointing something out to you. Why do you think this issue is so controversial? Why do you get energy poured into this and not something else?
This is an intellectual battlefield that is within spitting distance of invading marxist territory and overrunning the entire body of thought. Marxists must hold me here or lose everything. In truth, they lost generations ago. its little more than ignorance and sophistry that have kept them going since. Old battles have to be refought. The marxists are big believers in retroactive history... or gaslighting. So they tend to erase past defeats from the records unless you hold them to it.
You can see that at work in the cultural marxism thread on Wikipedia. A great thing about wikipedia is that it keeps a record of all changes. So whatever it says... you can see what it used to say. And there is something of that going around all over.
Thus here I am... winning battles that past generations won... all over again.
As to your assertion that I'm talking about chimps, nope. That's your attempt to make a stored argument you have relevant. I said nothing about chimps.
And frankly even if I did, which I did not, chimps are a much closer analogue to
Slashdot Mirror
The joint strike fighter was actually an attempt to save money. Did you know that?
As to the next nine countries:
percentage GDP is what is relevant actually... and by those figures you can see the US isn't exceptional.
What is more, our military is effectively NATO, the military of Japan, the military of South Korea, the military of Australia, and also the military of Saudi Arabia and Israel which is kind of a fun combination.
Point is that you can't compare the US against non-hegemonic powers. And even if you do, as a percentage of our GDP it isn't remarkable.
Compare to this:
http://www.ukpublicspending.co...
That's what the British empire was spending around 1905 on their military:
68.1 million pounds.
which is hilariously about
4,878 million pounds in today's money. It was about half the crown's budget.
Compared to GDP:
Public Spending Chart
Fiscal Years 1905 to 1910Year GDP-UK
£ billion Population-UK
million Defence -total
percent GDP Total Spending -total
percent GDP
1905 MW gdp 43.080 3.49 a 17.82 a
1906 MW gdp 43.459 3.16 a 15.18 a
1907 MW gdp 43.840 2.89 a 14.44 a
1908 MW gdp 44.225 3.00 a 14.78 a
1909 MW gdp 44.613 2.96 a 14.73 a
1910 MW gdp 45.005 3.03 a 15.95 a
Or around 1905 they had spending around 3.5 percent of GDP going to "defense".
Comparing the US to Sweden's military budget in 2015 is stupid. Compare the US to Sweden when they kinda sorta had an empire and then make sure you compare by GDP and total tax base. You'll find the US's numbers are probably low compared to what Sweden was spending when they were actually responsible for anything besides meatballs.
Nationalizing the insurance system is still nationalizing.
First, you had better sound pretty fucking clever by the time I'm done reading your post or I'm going to jam the aforementioned shotgun your ass. ... sigh...
https://youtu.be/F1SfzV67Bqw?t...
First, the hospitals do not bid rates generally. They only tell the insurance companies what their price lists are and that is the only place those prices are really negotiated. Lots of things are inelastic while also being subject to market forces. Food is a good example. Just because you need to eat doesn't mean you're going to buy food from just anyone. You know what the prices are of most retailers or have a reasonable estimation. And based on that and with general market competition you can control costs by shifting from different sellers.
If I needed a certain type of treatment... not right now... but in a week or two... I'd have time to shop around. And the medical system could offer rates just like anything else is offered with rates. The fact that they're not is one of the reasons the market has a hard time controlling costs. Lets say a hospital 400 miles away is willing to do an operation that would cost me 50k where I am for only 25k? Now assuming quality is comparable, I then do a cost benefit analysis where I calculate the cost to me of traveling over there and doing that, possibly staying in a hotel or renting a car, and then compare that against the cost of doing it where I am.
Lets say you need to get a lot work done and you live in New York where it might be expensive. But if you fly to Texas you can get the same thing done with the same quality for much less. Just as an example.
That drives down the price in New York because their high prices are causing customers to go somewhere else. And business being business they need to maintain competitiveness.
This notion you have that medical treatment can't be subjected to conventional market forces is in error.
The only case where you're going to be forced to use the local whatever is going to be if you have a medical emergency. OKAY... in that specific circumstance you've got me. But their business model probably isn't sustainable on nothing but the emergency room. So they have to bring their prices down regardless IF patients are informed of prices.
But they're not. Hospitals are one of a very few set of businesses where they don't even hint at what your costs are going to be until you leave. And even then you might not know for weeks after you left. I got medical bills from a visit two weeks after I actually went to the hospital. They said one number two days after I left... then a week later they give me another number and then two weeks after I had initially gone, I got a third number.
Where did any of that come from ? apparently three separate billing departments from a single hospital.
Think of any business where that would happen outside of an American hospital? There isn't one. No US business works that way except for hospitals and only in America so far as I know.
There are many problems with the cost structure of the US medical industry. But to brush all that off and suggest I'm a hillbilly? I assume this is because I don't goosestep to socialism? You call me a hippy, I'm going to call you a nazi. Suck it. But to say I'm ignorant because I don't share your slavish devotion to your absurd little ideology? You're more a bible thumper than I am sport. Its your dogma you're damning me with.
You're saying I don't worship your book... so I'm in league with the devil. And you call me the hillbilly?
You're a retard.
*jams it up his ass until it goes click*
*rolls eyes*
The issue is very complicated. I think a more productive way of looking at it would be to break down the numbers into what is spent on various things and that would help us isolate where the costs are.
It is possible they're general. But I've never found an issue where that was the case. Typically what happens is that you have something in the stats that is HUGELY out of whack and when averaged into the total it distorts the statistics.
For example, lets look at what doctors make in the US:
Okay, wages for doctors range from 135 thousand a year to about 300 thousand a year for specialists.
Lets compare that to the UK... where they make about 50k to about 80k... in british pounds... so
77,000 US dollars to about 124,000 US dollars for specialists.
Point is the doctors in the UK make about HALF what they do in the US.
So that's one thing we can look at. Why are we paying TWICE as much for doctors as they do in the UK? Does that mean we're getting higher quality doctors, does that mean the UK is getting lower quality doctors? is there an issue with medical schools not training enough doctors in the US? Does the UK have a better program for teaching doctors?
Something I've noticed in the UK is they have a lot of imported doctors. People that grew up in India, went to medical school in india, and then immigrate to the UK to practice. I've been to a few UK hospitals and they're largely foreign born. Which implies the salaries being offered are below market rates for the UK.
That suggests that even if the US is over paying for doctors, the UK is likely underpaying.
If you'd like to talk about Canada...
They appear to be paid roughly what US doctors are paid.
You get the idea. You break it down. Simplifying everything to one number is not useful. You have no detail to form an opinion. To see that number and just say "well you should socialize your system" is simplistic. You don't know what is going on. The existing cost inflation is as likely to be caused by subsidies as anything.
We've seen that in the education system where every time university subsidies for student loans are increased the universities increase tuition.
The cost of university education has outpaced inflation. And the reason for it is that the government keeps giving kids zero interest loans and increasing the amount they'll give. The Universities just adjust the tuition so they take 100 percent of the loan + they take whatever the student or family might be able to afford on top of that.
We saw similar things in the housing crisis in that the government was giving cheap loans to buy houses. This caused market inflation because the cost of housing simply went up every time the government increased the subsidies. Why not increase the price of my house? If you've got more money to spend then I'll set my price at whatever you'll pay.
So you can't just abstract everything down to one number. You lose all the details.
As to what public service you'd like this new Health care system to resemble... you can't use another country as the model. Its like saying you want a US university system in Zimbabwe or an American news organization in China. These nations are all different and whatever you build in the US is going to be run by Americans and is going to be subject to American economics and is going to be subject to american local, state, and national politics.
So... find an analogue. What you'll find is that US services that are highly regulated tend to become heavily beurocratic, bloated, and inefficient... and often the quality drops. The reasons for this are mostly political. They tend to have employee unions which agree to deliver campaign donations and votes in exchange for lax auditing of their functions, over staffing their departments, and paying the union better than market rate.
There is a reason the most successful economy in the US is Washington DC. The government pays people very well and they don't fire people unless they're horrifically in
What did the world look like before the British Empire? Because that was what it was like before you had a great sea power patrolling the sea lanes and making it clear that anyone that fucked with shipping was going to get shelled.
As to why we have to fund it... basically because we agreed to and because no one else wants to do it.
A better question would be why don't we collect tribute.
Historically powers like the US do that. You provide protection or some other service and the powers that use it have to pay a tax and that tax subsidizes the actions by that power.
The British did that during their empire... so did the monguls... etc. We are unique in that we don't charge anything.
Our reasons for that are complicated and I won't get into it unless I I know you're asking in good faith. If you're just trying to be snarky then I won't waste my time.
As to US corporations profiting from US power... not disproportionately. Everyone profits from it to the extent that they have anything to sell that anyone else actually wants to buy. The US was a very profitable exporter prior to our expansion of responsibilities and suggesting that we're only profitable now because of them is not supportable.
You'd have to show instances of the US navy for example interdicting trade to profit US corporations.
We do interdict trade of course... though mostly in weapons and only against rogue states. Just because we would frustrate weapons shipments to Palestine or Iran doesn't mean we're doing anything to the trade of Mexico or Sweden or South Africa.
And if they US didn't those countries would have to spend more. So what is your point?
A country that is getting US strategic protection basically for free doesn't need to spend that money themselves.
Cite the percentage GDP spending of relevant non-first world powers.
First world is in the original context... aka US allies. Second world would be soviet allies and third world would be anyone else. That is what that term means.
So... cite non-US allies that have a relevant military force and cite the percentage of their GDP that they spend on the military. You'll find that they tend to spend more.
Your example is little more than pointing out that various first world countries save on their military budget because the US does it for them.
Yippy.
It was also deliberate. After WW2, the European powers were in ruins and it was agreed that the US would protect them while they rebuilt.
Your utter lack of knowledge of the subject and history renders your presumption to an opinion laughable.
1. They were made by this company:
http://www.ilcdover.com/
They still make space suits. Do you know who knows how to build a space suit? These people. And knowing how something was made in the first place is kind of a prerequisite for restoration in most cases. If you don't know how the oil painting was painted you're probably going to fuck up the restoration. Any restoration project that doesn't include the company that made them and likely has a lot of records and specifications on it is dubious from the get go. If the company didn't exist anymore and the technology were lost to the mists of time or something that would be one thing. But the company does exist and the technology is not lost.
They're just standing there. They're right there. So... use them.
I read more of the kickstarter page... They are using ILC Dover. So the original manufacturer is assisting in the restoration. So they know how to make the suit. The suit is made out of known materials that we can get our hands on right now. Explain to me why they can't just take some bits of that same material and f' with it to their hearts content until they figure out how to fix it?
Beyond that, the notion of restoring the thing without replacing materials is nonsense. The suit has undergone chemical changes. Most of these materials are not like clay tablets you can just store in a cave somewhere and take them out 2000 years later and they're as good as new. They change. You can expose them to air and that will change them or you can expose them to a vacuum and that will change them too.
They're not stable in the long term. They have shelf life. And you can't restore them without replacing them. Its like trying to restore cheese or a banana or something. I don't care what you do... that cheese or that banana is going to undergo some changes if you put it somewhere for decades.
Here is what is POSSIBLE:
You can make it LOOK restored which will involve cleaning and painting and squirting liquids on it to give it a new car smell.
OR
You can can basically build a brand new suit reusing a few components that are chemically stable.
Those are the two things you can do.
For obvious reasons they're going with option 1. And option 1 is cheaper than option 2 and option 2 is cheaper than the amount of money they're asking for by quite a bit.
And just in case you're curious what a replica suit costs:
http://www.spacetoys.com/produ...
I doubt that thing is more than a mock up... aka, I'm just about positive it doesn't work. But so long as you didn't need to actually use it... it works for a museum etc.
2. My figure was a gross inflation assuming the work was as hard per inch as oil painting restorations. The restoration of a space suit for photography and display would be vastly cheaper. Again, the company that made the suit in the first place would probably sell you a functional replica for less and restoring is generally a lot cheaper than actually building from scratch especially when you only need it to LOOK restored and not actually hold pressure or something.
3. I don't understand why they need to do that and I don't understand why that is expensive. You're talking about a box that controls temperature and humidity. That is not expensive.
4. Why do they need a custom built one? And even if they do... which is dubious... why is this assumed to be expensive? You're talking about some foam rubber in a rough human shape around a metal skeleton.
Myth busters builds dummies all the time out of crap and it is demonstrably not difficult.
5. That fee is 5%.
As to what I read... I reacted to a kickstarter project.
NASA is not the only one to issue one of them. I judged NASA by the same standards I judge any kickstarter project.
I look at what they're doing, I look at the cost, I look at who they are, I look at what the ultimate payout will be... and from that I decide if I'm going to fund a project.
I don't like the price they're citing. It seems high.
Just like we cut education spending and improved quality with the public education system right?
Sorry... nationalizing stuff is not a panacea.
The thing lost in your statistics is that the US if you compare equal demographics to equal demographics compares very very well to other countries even the hyper socialized ones.
Where things fall apart is if you compare people and cultures that exist in the US but not somewhere else.
Compare white women between the ages of 22-35 with any country you like... the US does just fine. Compare it against sweden if you like... same thing... the numbers are about the same. Where things get bad... and very bad at that is when you start to compare inner city minority populations or simply average them into the total.
Those stats are HORRIBLE. They're a fucking nightmare. Crime stats, drug addiction, literacy, high school graduation, college graduation, average income, life expectancy, infant mortality, teenaged pregnancy... the stats there are BAD.
But if you exclude that segment of the US population and recalculate... the US stats are quite good actually.
Now here you're going to say "you can't exclude a portion of the system"... okay, but now we have to admit that the problem is CONCENTRATED in a specific segment. And rather than applying your solution to EVERYONE when the problem is not suffered by EVERYONE maybe you should instead focus on what the fuck is going on in those communities that makes ALL the stats so bad. I mean, can you blame the lack of socialized healthcare on the literacy and high school graduation rates? Kinda hard to do that isn't it?
So once you're doing that, you're going to have to focus on what went wrong in these communities because they actually used to be better than that. They've gotten WORSE over time... not better. And what you'll find is that they started to get bad when a lot of welfare programs were released that disincentivized work, disincentivized a stable household, undermined the quality of inner city public education, and a tediously long list of things that really hurt those people. And it was all government action. And it was all with good intentions.
And fucked everything up.
What public service in the US do you think your new healthcare system is going to resemble. Because I can tell you now, that it would very rapidly look just like the public education system unless you instituted systemic reform in government unions just as a start.
And absent that... your idea would endanger the health of my entire country for very little if any objective return.
Well... depends on how you define "enemy force"...
Regardless, if you want to talk about stupidly pointless wars the US has fought since WW2, nearly all of them were part of the Cold War which was neither stupid nor pointless.
Typically what you'll see there is a list of proxy wars between the US and the Soviets that basically kept happening until the Soviets folded.
As to why defense isn't on the chopping block... so many reasons its hard to do the topic justice.
the long and the short of it is that the only thing giving international law, the UN, or stablizing the majority of the first world is the presence of the US military.
The Navy keeps the sea lanes open for trade and makes pointless any rival powers investment into naval power because whatever it is will be meaningless against the US Navy.
The Army and Marines are based around the world. We secure the border between north and south korea. We have bases throughout Europe that actually serve as the continent's actual military. And there is really a very complex and not very well understood logistics network the army maintains that is critical for rapid mobilization of US forces and the subsequent projection of force that permits.
The Air Force has bases all around the world capable of very rapid force projection anywhere in the world. They do the majority of the reconnaissance of the western powers. How do you know X country is doing Y? The US Air Force has pictures. Added to that, investment, development, and production of fighters and bombers the world over is suppressed by the existence of the air force if only because the USSR tried and got their faces shot off more often than not.
I find this video to be especially hilarious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I mean... that's US pilots in WW2 era slow as shit propeller ground support craft... dogfighting a mig from Vietnam... and basically winning some crazy how.
That means countries don't develop air power because there really isn't a point with US air superiority.
We suppress all of that. Every day.
Again, if you want to cut the US military budget. Which thing that the US military does would you like to cut?
No patrolling sea lanes? No maintaining an international military logistics network? No investing in air superiority? No protecting Japan? No protecting South Korea? No protecting Israel? No protecting Europe? No protecting Eastern Europe? No defense agreements in South America to defend country X if attacked by country Y?
Tell me what you'd like to cut? Who should we hang out to dry. *takes out ball point pen, clicks pen head out, and pulls out a lined ledger*
Tell me who we're fucking over. I'll make a list. :-D
We have statistics on malaria rates before DDT, during DDT, and after it was no longer used.
You are right that the WHO did not ban it. You are wrong that the lobby did not cause it to be banned in any country making heavy use of it. And the results have been consistent.
Malaria rates in Mexico for example have gone up more than ten times their previous rate simply by switching from DDT to other less effective and more expensive pesticides.
You can justifiably knock me for the mistake on the WHO. You got me there. However, you go too far by saying the anti DDT lobby basically doesn't exist or is not responsible for getting DDT widely banned around the world. THAT is bullshit.
I'm responding to this because it wasn't a troll question... I also felt answering it would get people to think about an issue for more than the .5 seconds they normally do which invariably leads to no actual thinking ever happening in the first place:
To be fair, he's saying that the DoD "Over Spends" so much on paperclips that you could raid the DoD budget indiscriminately and pay for the suit restoration.
here you might say "well, why do you say over spend"... because otherwise you're saying that the government is spending X on paperclips and doesn't need to because apparently they either buy too many or they aren't using them for anything.
Here is what you use paper clips for... to hold bits of paper together. So if you're using them... then what are you going to do when you don't have them?
Staples? Folding the sheets just so? Maybe putting them in a folder?
And that causes your staple budget to go up... and that ignores that there are feature differences between staples and paperclips. Paper clips don't damage the paper when you use them which means you can separate out individual sheets or add sheets. Or folding... doesn't work as well as paper clips which means close efficiency from whatever that does. Or folders means you're now spending more on folders which are more expensive than paper clips per unit and are basically a superior version of the same thing at a higher cost.
I know I sound autistic going through this but details matter. The context of the statement was that there was so much fat in the military budget they could just bill it to the DoD. Now I'm sure the DoD does waste at LEAST half a million a year on all sorts of stupid shit. But every branch of government does that as well.
Obama and his wife took two separate government secret service protected planes to go to Los Angeles on the same day. Now, if they had shared the same plane that would have saved money. But they didn't. They chose to take two planes because "reasons". And I'm not beating up on Obama for that. you see it in every government department. They do stuff like that all the time.
The US Federal government got in trouble recently for running the sprinklers too long in California. They have a very bad drought there and for that reason they're being asked to not run the sprinkers for more than 6 minutes a week. Instead they're running them for about 6 hours a week.
Typical stuff. The city hall of San Francisco dumps about half a million gallons of drinking water down the drain every day to run water boiler heating system for the building. Again... in a drought. Never mind that they could recirculate the same water every day for at least a year at a time without any problems.
Its typical.
So if you want to raid a budget... I'd like people to stop picking on the military as if they're the only ones that do retarded shit on a regular basis. They ALL do it. Raid the general fund if you're going to take money out.
This would properly be filed under the "discretionary non military" fund. ANd that make up about 420 billion dollars of our annual budget every year. So add it to that.
Bureaucrats are pissed that they're being bypassed by military departments that have neither the time nor the inclination to waste the lives of soldiers on these pencil kings.
Here is the salient point: The military departments find the process too slow to be useful and so bypass it.
That's the story. Full stop. Not that the military over pays for stuff. But that this budget approval office is SLOW.
Fix that and the military will route their orders through them instead.
Here they'll say "we need more money to do that"
Okay... now we're doing a cost benefit analysis. Is it cheaper to over pay for some stuff or cheaper to pay the bureaucrats to make sure we don't over pay?
Ehm? I think we'll find it is probably a wash. Just my bias here. You'd think some bureaucrats were fairly cheap. Guys sitting there with some spreadsheets pushing numbers around. How expensive could it be? Well... horrifically expensive in many cases. Which... again based just on my bias here suggests this office complaining that because they're not used we over pay for stuff... well, maybe they're actually a net cost and the best way to save money is to just terminate them entirely and tell teh military departments and commanders and generals to use their budgets as best as they see fit. Who after all understands what the military needs better than the military? You could have some corrupt general or something but generally they're not. And generally they'll make a serious effort to make every penny go as far as they can. If you give the Marines a giant pile of money and say "this is your money for the year, spend it how you choose". I frankly think they'll make better use of it than if you hand it to the pentagon and say "okay here is everyone's money, spread that around through everything somehow."
A big problem with all governments i've ever really looked at is that there is a belief that you make things cheaper/more efficient/better by combining and centralizing. This is sometimes true but it is often not true. The primary thing centralization does is make it easier for people at the top to understand and manage the whole system. But that's why we invented delegation. Just delegate it. Then you don't need to centralize, combine, or simplify. The recent F35 project was a giant example of how combining a lot of projects together into one project actually made it more expensive and less useful.
We also see that with the DHS. The concept there was not costs but rather free flow of information... but we don't actually have the free flow of information the DHS was supposed to give us and by all indications it is frustrating the effective execution of orders simply because we have some of this going on:
https://youtu.be/_iiOEQOtBlQ?t...
Every time some organization under the DHS wants to do something they have to run upstairs and ask the DHS for permission. That can't help but slow things down massively as well as limit the scope of the organization to whatever the DHS can understand which is going to be less than what all the various departments could individually understand collectively.
That they don't have the money to pay for this out of petty cash. I also question why it is costing half a million dollars.
It sounds like they're mostly taking pictures of it and then putting a website up with historical information they can pull out of records and the pictures.
Why does that cost half a million dollars? I'd feel better about this if they put that out to an open bid. I'm quite certain that you could get a very reputable outfit to do it for a fraction of this amount of money.
This is probably a bad example but I think this gets to something I'm talking about here:
http://www.cleanoilpainting.co...
Okay, that's what it costs for the restoration of an oil painting. And that is finer fiddlier work than the space suit.
Lets take their high number of 2500 USD and say that is what it would cost to restore 80 square inches of space suit. This is a huge inflation of the art restoration costs because they're saying this would cost 500 dollars for 80 square inches. But we'll go with the high number just to make a point.
Okay human body has about 2790 square inches of surface area... we'll double that for inside and outside and just treat the suit for this example like its skin. Then we'll divide that by 80 square inches and then multiply that by 2500 USD... and we get:
174,375 dollars. And that still sounds really high to me. But its a tiny fraction of the money they're asking.
But they also promised to take high res photos. So lets look at what that costs.
I did some digging as to what it would cost to do a full 3d high res photo shoot for the entire space suit... whole thing... inside, outside, helmet, gloves, etc. And I'm having a hard time getting numbers even in 5 figures. This is looking like maybe 8 grand. But lets say its 80 grand because its the government and you can reliabily get them to pay 10 times what something is worth without them batting an eye.
That's still 173 + 80 grand. So... What's left here? Making a website? Who here thinks that explains the gap in costs?
So yeah... I don't understand the 500 grand bill on this. It seems wildly inflated.
We spend about 834 billion a year on government healthcare subsidies.
We spend about 538 billion a year on non-defense discretionary spending.
We spend about 420 billion a year on "mandatory" spending.
We spend about 230 billion a year on interest payments to national debt.
Wee spend about 600 billion on the military.
Yet whenever anyone wants to raid a fund to pay for something... its the military budget.
Why is that?
And I should point out that the military is one of the few things the government does that it is supposed to do and it is one of the few things the world... especially our allies need us to be competent in.
So why are you raiding the military budget? Do you want the US to pull out of NATO? Maybe sunset its guarantee to protect Japan? We could let Israel get genocided. Maybe let the Russians run wild in Eastern Europe. Possibly allow the North Koreans to invade and enslave the south koreans?
Where would you like to cut the US military budget?
Maybe cut their medical care? That's a popular one. Or maybe you'd like them to not have the latest high tech stuff so when we go to war more of our people die... or we have to kill innocent people because the military will have to compensate for having bad weapons by using them less discriminately. That precision bomb that blows up one building but leaves the rest standing is expensive. Much cheaper to drop a lot of dumb bombs and flatten the whole neighborhood.
What would you like to cut? Obama is talking about cutting the ability of the US to fight two wars at once. This was something we built into the US budget during and after WW2 because we had to fight the Japanese and the Germans at once. A two front war. So... maybe that's what you want to cut.
Its all well and good to say "lets cut the military budget" but what does that mean? What are you cutting specifically?
The entire social construct subject is an outgrowth of marxism. It is very very central to marxist philosophy.
Don't cite an argument that isn't a third rail for marxists and I won't point out that it is a third rail for marxists.
Wrong. I explained and justified the reference. Claiming otherwise is intellectually dishonest.
Marxism relies on the theory of social constructivism.
Social constructivism conflicts with evolutionary psychology via nature vs nurture.
For marxism to make any sense, human nature has to be arbitrary. If any human behavior is not arbitrary it will almost certainly conflict with some aspect of marxism because marxism argues in terms of absolutes and touches on every human behavior.
The progressive movements that are pushing for hard AND soft racial and sexual quotas in business, government, the military, and academia are all reliant and related to the same thing political gestalt.
What you want me to do when I get kicked is to only look at the foot. The foot is relevant but I'm going to look at what is attached to the foot as well because maybe it is more effective to throw an upper cut to the nut sack rather than waste my time attacking the foot.
This is a larger political movement and if it becomes an issue then I'm going to address it as a whole rather than fixate on whatever toe it stepped across the line today.
Its easier, its more honest, and its actually more interesting because it bypasses a lot of the sophistry where various people misrepresent their motives, views, and sources of information. By cutting right to the heart of the beast I am dealing with the actual issue at hand here.
In regards to the 30 years war, can you be specific? I'm not sure what you're talking about. Its a massive subject and I can't figure out specifically what you're referring to... I see the ottomans allied with some eastern european protestants. That's about it.
You're right.
However, getting international funding for DDT programs is almost impossible and several countries have been compelled diplomatically to ban the use with predictable results.
Mexico and South Africa were both pressured by the United States to ban DDT. Mexico did it to get the US to pass the Free Trade agreement and I forget what South Africa was getting out of it.
The point is that the only way you can use DDT is if you give a finger to the whole first world and that's hard to do.
What is sick is that you need to do that. Obviously the first world shouldn't care or make DDT bans a requirement for good relations.
There's no reason to ban it besides a book backed largely by fiction published in the 60s.
Unlikely? The point is that they CANNOT be compared.
Tell you what, sparky. Exclude all infants from US records that include underweight infants or that had resuscitation. Then you can start to compare.
So long as US records include underweight infants and infants given resuscitation and other records do not... they cannot be directly compared.
This is obvious to anyone with any knowledge of how statistics work. In fact, I am certain you know you're full of shit here and you're just such a degenerate that you think lying is going to save yourself.
You lost. Again. Horribly.
You won't accept it because you're the black knight... but your fucking legs got cut off and you're little more than an object of pity and dark humor for me at this point.
As to what humans need to survive... I am aware... I don't see what babies needing to be cared for has to do with competition between males and females however.
As to multiple partners... yes, however a man having sex with a woman does not mean he is promising to protect her or provide for her.
And a woman sleeping with a man does mean she is interested in carrying his child to term. Genetically.
As you point out, women need help during pregnancy and for years afterwards. The only thing more vulnerable than a pregnant woman is a baby. She can't feed herself. She cannot protect herself. And all things being equal, the people assigned to that role will be men. And if you want a man to sacrifice his time, resources, and risk his life... then giving him some stake in the project is in your self interest.
At the very least you want to give him a strong impression that the child is his. Whether it actually is or not is not important. He needs to believe it. if he does, then he'll sacrifice more deeply... if food gets short and he only has enough food for one of you. You want him to give you his food so he starves while you live. Men are less likely to do this if they either know or believe the child is not theirs.
How does a woman give a man this impression? Having sex with him about nine months before is a good start. This course means the child COULD actually be his. The probability of it being roughly a question of how many other men she slept with at that time. If not so many, then his chances are decent. If everyone in the tribe then the chances are poor and he probably knows it and she is going to have to rely on a milder but more general sacrifice from the male population at large rather than asking for a deep sacrifice from one specific male.
I'm unsure of which of these works better. I only know that a more monogamous arrangement is more common. That suggests that it is either better for the woman or there is some other reason it tends to work out that way.
Obviously, once you get to property rights etc the notion of interference and land rights becomes a problem and that is one of the big reasons societies tend to encourage monogamy... it is just easier to figure out who owns what.
As to british history... I again did no such thing. I think you're having a very hard time actually making up a rational argument on your own. So first you say I was talking about chimps when I clearly wasn't and then you claim I am talking about british history when I am not.
You're doing a very poor job of forming a coherent argument. I don't say this as an insult. You can tell because when I get offensive I include lots of dirty dirty words.
What you are very very very obviously doing is sitting there with a series of prefabricated arguments in front of you that you've memorized and you're trying to match them to what I'm saying. I think I've told you already that I go out of my way to frustrate tactics like that.
If you presume to have an opinion then you're going to have to think for yourself here. If you don't... then it isn't your opinion is it? You're just parroting something someone else programmed into you like a computer.
listening to you argue sounds like this guy that robot from "what are little girls made of?"... you think you're making things up or thinking but you're just responding to programming.
And this is NOT an insult. It is super obvious. You keep trying to force me into an argument you have stored.
The Chimp Bonobo thing was obvious and now this english thing.
Dude. "CAN" you actually... REALLY think for yourself? If you can, then come up with your own thinking. Your own argument. I don't debate programming.
If you could bring me the person that input this programming than I might be willing to debate them. But you can't debate an inanimate object which is all programming really is here. You either have your own mind or you don't actually have an opinion in the first place.
As to being prizes... yes... but women also want to be won. They want to be competed over. The notion that women are victims of that system is not accurate. They can be but generally it serves their needs by organizing the competition that their own biology finds desirable.
Women don't just want ANY guy. They want a good/great/the best guy.
it is important for women and men to understand where they personally stand on the sexual market. How desirable they are and why. And that helps them pick a mate they can actually get.
Something that is unfortunate about the modern hookup culture is that we have this odd mix of two very different and incompatible ways of looking at sex.
The hookup culture puts no value on what happens after the sex. So a low status female for example could have sex with a high status man. Just a fuck as they say. But what we've seen is that many women will misunderstand what happened there and think "I can get a high status male"... and so they hold out for the guy that is as good as the guy that flipped her around backwards so he didn't have to look at her face and has his way whilst probably drunk.
This is a common problem in market economics as well. A misunderstanding as to what something is worth causes buyers, sellers, and producers to under produce, over produce, over value, or under value assets. A lot of economic problems are ultimately due to this.
The biggest culprit here tends to be big national banks that are state sponsored under valuing credit or over valuing some asset that they've determined politically they want people to have.
So credit tends to be issued at well below market interest rates and that causes problems. And we had an issue in the housing market where the value of land or homes was overvalued. Things can be under valued as well. Savings tend to be undervalued by most national banks which is why they like to encourage people to not save. The problem with that is that people without savings tend to operate economically very different from people with savings. So its very short term thinking that tends to backfire badly. A person without savings is going to be much more frugal and conservative in their spending that someone with a big nest egg. People with nest eggs will also invest and start businesses and do a lot of things that you really need to keep an economy healthy. Wiping them out or encouraging them to not build the nest eggs keeps them from doing those things and that ultimately is very damaging to the economy.
Anyway, you see this is mating strategy as well. People need to know what they're worth in the sexual market. You're asking a man or a woman to give you the rest of their lives or at least commit to a child with you. This is a big portion of their life they're giving to the project. And they need to know what they're worth on the market to feel comfortable in the relationship. A woman or man that thinks they're worth more or could do better are going to be more inclined to break the relationship and try to form a new one. That's rational.
And someone that feels they are worth less will feel especially committed to the relationship because they'll feel very lucky and will not want to screw things up because they'll be unlikely to do better.
As to being a mammalian, it is also true that sexual intercourse is almost always initiated by the female. A female cow that doesn't want to have sex with a male bull can avoid it quite easily. She just moves her head so that she faces him or lays down. He's not going to be able to mate with her unless she stands up and points her vagina at him.
Amongst zebra they even wink the vulva as a come on.
As to being for feminism, I think we're all for equal rights and equality before the law. But feminism won all those arguments a long time ago and no one is fighting over that anymore.
What feminism is fighting for now is "more".
We're all equality feminists. But modern feminism isn't about equality. its about female privileges and the expans
So terrible at math that we dominate the high end of most mathematically intensive industries.
Also, I think you mean the Republic of Panama. Correct me if I'm wrong and it does come from chile.
Of course we have breeding rights amongst humans.
Every culture has a means of assigning breeding privileges to males.
Some of them rely upon the woman deciding who she wants to be with. Others have her family decide this thus giving the power to give away her breeding rights to her parents. And others even have the government dispense breeding rights. And then you have combinations of this... some cultures have the church or the local wise man/woman decide.
And the basis of the decision is typically based on the success of the male, his contribution to the economy, his service to the community... that sort of thing. What do you think wealth and fame are?
For a very clear example of this, look at ISIS... yes, they're exceptional, but mostly in the simplicity and overtness of the system. You make the organization happy and they give you women. Hand them right to you.
All societies do that though in their own way.
And if you do not make the society happy... you either have a much harder time finding a mate or in some cases you're legally forbidden to even have one. More commonly, women tend to be discouraged from associating with you.
Its part of the means of social control you have in any society. Men that don't play by the rules don't get to breed.
As to social constructs from marx, wrong.
First, he argues that class is a social construct. The whole notion of some people being better than others being arbitary. Obviously in some cases it is... but in others it isn't and communist theory doesn't account for people that are naturally in positions of authority, power, or have high status because they are in fact superior to their peers.
And then the whole notion of doing away with the market and changing human self interest is very social constructivist.
No one invented capitalism. It evolved. The argument from marx is that capitalism is just as arbitrary as any system before it and for that to be true... markets, market theory, game theory, etc all have to be social constructs.
As to what this has to do with marxism... marxist theory is heavily involved in current gender and race theory and the primary opponents to the science of evolutionary psychology are the people that say everything is a construct... and the primary push behind that idea is it is required for marxist theory to be credible. If you can't argue that market theory is a social construct then marxist theory because incoherent.
That is why you're taking the stand you are against me here. Think about it. When do you take a hard stand against me without it being in the name of some leftist politics? That's all you do.
The simple fact that you're engaging with me like this suggests it.
Now that IS ad hominem on my part. So I'm not going to stand behind it. I'm just pointing something out to you. Why do you think this issue is so controversial? Why do you get energy poured into this and not something else?
This is an intellectual battlefield that is within spitting distance of invading marxist territory and overrunning the entire body of thought. Marxists must hold me here or lose everything. In truth, they lost generations ago. its little more than ignorance and sophistry that have kept them going since. Old battles have to be refought. The marxists are big believers in retroactive history... or gaslighting. So they tend to erase past defeats from the records unless you hold them to it.
You can see that at work in the cultural marxism thread on Wikipedia. A great thing about wikipedia is that it keeps a record of all changes. So whatever it says... you can see what it used to say. And there is something of that going around all over.
Thus here I am... winning battles that past generations won... all over again.
As to your assertion that I'm talking about chimps, nope. That's your attempt to make a stored argument you have relevant. I said nothing about chimps.
And frankly even if I did, which I did not, chimps are a much closer analogue to
Login and ask the same question and I'll answer you.
Out of curiosity are you using a US processor and operating system right now? :)
Come now.