It seems like you are cherry-picking some notable failures and extrapolating that to mean the entire classification is rotten to the core and incapable of doing hardly anything successfully. That's not wisdom, it's pessimism. You're not going to find private enterprise with lower rates of failure and obstruction, only lower rates of press reporting on it.
While I'm not in a position to use the services of the VA, they are the source for much of the systemic improvements in health IT we benefit from today. Here's a source for you on that, which also features how they were the first to call attention to the thousands of people that were being killed by Vioxx. https://books.google.com/books...
When you make assertions that are also blanket statements, shouldn't you be providing some sources that back up your claim on something similar to that level?
Is some inefficiency in government really any worse than private industry attaching profit to everything that is done and denying service if you can't pay? Defense, education, environmental protection, etc. - getting those things done only when there is profit to be made from them is a certain recipe for disaster. We've already seen that with for-profit prisons we wind up with those prisons bribing judges to send people to prison for long sentences that would otherwise have been dealt with through counseling. And that was with children.
The single largest problem with government is that private industry is getting their fingers into it and corrupting the process. i.e. bribes, lobbying, unlimited political contributions.
Are those "Netflix issues that plagued Verizon customers" the ones where traffic from Netflix was being throttled to force them to pay extra for Verizon's customers to receive the data from Netflix that the customers were already paying both of them for?
Investment in NASA has given our economy a boost of 7-14 times what we put into it so far, and the list of technologies and inventions that have resulted is prodigious, including things like kidney dialysis and fireproof clothing for firefighters. Here's a list of some more: http://www.21stcentech.com/mon...
> "Kids don't express themselves with chalk or in cursive. Kids text."
Kids also scribble and carve into desks and spray paint on the walls on occasion. In the past they passed notes to each other, as well. No one has suggested adopting those as main methods of performing and submitting work. Schools should be getting kids ready for college, where college should finish getting them ready for the workplace. And not many workplaces will do much of their work via texting.
I'm curious what the call rate is at centers like that - what gets portrayed in the media is either a room with 20-40 people constantly taking calls all day long, or a closet with 2 people in it, who get a couple calls a day. The closest one I've actually been in was a backup fire dispatch center that was about to be decommissioned (it was really old) in favor of its replacement, and it had room for 3-4 (uncomfortably). How many calls per hour would you estimate your center receives, and how big is the area it serves, population-wise?
Was that their "business" line or their "emergency" line? I've tried calling my local PD for non-life-threatening stuff I've witnessed before, and the non-emergency number appears to keep even less helpful hours than banks. Since police departments aren't normally geared for the customer-service mindset, they don't tend to set up their interfaces in a manner that makes sense to the callers in the same way it was intended by the receivers. And no one really expects to call and find the police department closed if there isn't a gun or knife threatening your life.
It's a weak god indeed that is needs to be protected by semi-illiterates armed with hatchets and cleavers from a guy asking questions and having discussions. Each act like this done in this "god's" name further convinces me there is no possible way it is worthy of worship, or that it exists at all.
every single scientific "law" might be overturned at any time by some new discovery that displays reality from a new and different point of view
You're confusing laws and theories. Laws describe what things do, with no concern for how that is accomplished. For example, Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation: F = G(m1*m2/r^2)
This accurately describes what the gravitational force is between two masses, but you're not going to see anything about gravity waves or gravitons or gravity elves in there - there's no "how". For this to be overturned, you'd have to contradict all of mankind's collected observational data on the subject, where everything we've ever observed has turned out to be affected by gravity according to that formula.
Theories are our attempts to explain the "how" - and are subject to correction, reinterpretation, and refinement constantly.
Out of ideas, or to protect themselves from ISPs that seem intent on using bandwidth as an excuse to throttle connections to their sites and extort money from them? If they become peers to the ISPs (becoming ISPs themselves), then the arguments that comcast/verizon/AT&T use against content providers like Netflix will fall apart and they'll have to go back to hatching new evil schemes.
Actually, closer to 100% of water is recycled. Possible exceptions being that underground lake they found in Antarctica (Lake Vostok) that has been sitting there for the past 15-25 million years, and a few places like it.
Still doesn't mean that it's not recycled dinosaur toilet water.
There's been a few nights I thought I recycled all the fresh water myself, or that's what my kidneys (and their damned stones) were telling me.
If you want to monitor my communications, get a warrant. Otherwise, they're violating the 4th amendment.
If they are going to argue that we should have nothing to hide if we are not doing anything wrong, I must ask why the government keeps secrets from its citizens - after all, we are also the "good guys". Any reason they have for not trusting citizens with access to their "secrets" would stand as a good reason why citizens would not trust these agencies with ours.
Tell that to the folks that used to work for Kay Bee toys. http://www.politifact.com/trut... While he had left by the time Bain did their damage there, they were using the system that he had set up: Run up a large debt to purchase a company, assign the debt to that company, sell off much of its assets, and watch it burn.
Considering he pointed out the distinction between communism and socialism, and provided examples the the continuing success and happiness of people that are using that system; then you get right back on the train of calling one by the other's name and giving it the blame for what that other did - that's some industrial-grade stupid there, son.
Can you really expect anyone to take you seriously when you use the word "anointed"? It gets trotted out every election cycle and it tells me to to ignore the person using it - because if the only serious critique you can come up with is that the candidate or office holder is popular among their supporters, you're likely into your third jug of kook-aid for the opposition. (yeah, I saw that typo and decided to keep it - it fits the concept well)
Is a high approval rating all that hard to accomplish in a state full of do-it-yourselfers that want not much more than to be left alone? People get paid to live there, so it's the biggest welfare state we have without it being called welfare, meaning she didn't have much to do in order to run things. She still managed to get embroiled in misuse-of-power scandals, and she abandoned her cushy post on top of all that.
Being a business-person is not an analog for being a politician, so I don't know why people keep pushing the idea that because someone is good at one, they'll be good at the other. After all, a good businessman is all about getting the most for themselves and being sure to do what is profitable, not what is right. Politics should be about serving the country, while business is about taking all they can. Would you trust a government run by AT&T or Comcast?
Here we have (yet more) obvious proof that allowing more competition increases the level of services available to, and decreases the prices for, the public - while granting limited monopolies causes stagnation and/or insufficient innovation and increased/unjustified pricing. There's no reason to continue allowing limited monopolies.
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It seems like you are cherry-picking some notable failures and extrapolating that to mean the entire classification is rotten to the core and incapable of doing hardly anything successfully. That's not wisdom, it's pessimism. You're not going to find private enterprise with lower rates of failure and obstruction, only lower rates of press reporting on it. While I'm not in a position to use the services of the VA, they are the source for much of the systemic improvements in health IT we benefit from today. Here's a source for you on that, which also features how they were the first to call attention to the thousands of people that were being killed by Vioxx. https://books.google.com/books...
When you make assertions that are also blanket statements, shouldn't you be providing some sources that back up your claim on something similar to that level?
Is some inefficiency in government really any worse than private industry attaching profit to everything that is done and denying service if you can't pay? Defense, education, environmental protection, etc. - getting those things done only when there is profit to be made from them is a certain recipe for disaster. We've already seen that with for-profit prisons we wind up with those prisons bribing judges to send people to prison for long sentences that would otherwise have been dealt with through counseling. And that was with children.
The single largest problem with government is that private industry is getting their fingers into it and corrupting the process. i.e. bribes, lobbying, unlimited political contributions.
If you look at Chattanooga, TN, then it seems to be working quite well. http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/2...
Are those "Netflix issues that plagued Verizon customers" the ones where traffic from Netflix was being throttled to force them to pay extra for Verizon's customers to receive the data from Netflix that the customers were already paying both of them for?
Investment in NASA has given our economy a boost of 7-14 times what we put into it so far, and the list of technologies and inventions that have resulted is prodigious, including things like kidney dialysis and fireproof clothing for firefighters. Here's a list of some more: http://www.21stcentech.com/mon...
> "Kids don't express themselves with chalk or in cursive. Kids text."
Kids also scribble and carve into desks and spray paint on the walls on occasion. In the past they passed notes to each other, as well. No one has suggested adopting those as main methods of performing and submitting work. Schools should be getting kids ready for college, where college should finish getting them ready for the workplace. And not many workplaces will do much of their work via texting.
I'm curious what the call rate is at centers like that - what gets portrayed in the media is either a room with 20-40 people constantly taking calls all day long, or a closet with 2 people in it, who get a couple calls a day. The closest one I've actually been in was a backup fire dispatch center that was about to be decommissioned (it was really old) in favor of its replacement, and it had room for 3-4 (uncomfortably). How many calls per hour would you estimate your center receives, and how big is the area it serves, population-wise?
Was that their "business" line or their "emergency" line? I've tried calling my local PD for non-life-threatening stuff I've witnessed before, and the non-emergency number appears to keep even less helpful hours than banks. Since police departments aren't normally geared for the customer-service mindset, they don't tend to set up their interfaces in a manner that makes sense to the callers in the same way it was intended by the receivers. And no one really expects to call and find the police department closed if there isn't a gun or knife threatening your life.
> automated plane systems which could save thousands of lives per year because it might crash once or twice.
I haven't heard of a plane that has crashed twice, usually once will do the job.
It's a weak god indeed that is needs to be protected by semi-illiterates armed with hatchets and cleavers from a guy asking questions and having discussions. Each act like this done in this "god's" name further convinces me there is no possible way it is worthy of worship, or that it exists at all.
every single scientific "law" might be overturned at any time by some new discovery that displays reality from a new and different point of view
You're confusing laws and theories. Laws describe what things do, with no concern for how that is accomplished. For example, Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation: F = G(m1*m2/r^2)
This accurately describes what the gravitational force is between two masses, but you're not going to see anything about gravity waves or gravitons or gravity elves in there - there's no "how". For this to be overturned, you'd have to contradict all of mankind's collected observational data on the subject, where everything we've ever observed has turned out to be affected by gravity according to that formula.
Theories are our attempts to explain the "how" - and are subject to correction, reinterpretation, and refinement constantly.
Out of ideas, or to protect themselves from ISPs that seem intent on using bandwidth as an excuse to throttle connections to their sites and extort money from them? If they become peers to the ISPs (becoming ISPs themselves), then the arguments that comcast/verizon/AT&T use against content providers like Netflix will fall apart and they'll have to go back to hatching new evil schemes.
Actually, closer to 100% of water is recycled. Possible exceptions being that underground lake they found in Antarctica (Lake Vostok) that has been sitting there for the past 15-25 million years, and a few places like it.
Still doesn't mean that it's not recycled dinosaur toilet water. There's been a few nights I thought I recycled all the fresh water myself, or that's what my kidneys (and their damned stones) were telling me.
That's a mistranslation - the original text says "burn in Burbank", and was more of a figurative thing because it was summer at the time.
It'd be somewhere (lower) on the scale of what it took to obtain all that info in the first place. And we're the ones paying for that to begin with.
If you want to monitor my communications, get a warrant. Otherwise, they're violating the 4th amendment. If they are going to argue that we should have nothing to hide if we are not doing anything wrong, I must ask why the government keeps secrets from its citizens - after all, we are also the "good guys". Any reason they have for not trusting citizens with access to their "secrets" would stand as a good reason why citizens would not trust these agencies with ours.
So, an early version of Mudd's Women, where there's only 72 instead of 500?
his job at Bain was to save companies, not jobs
Tell that to the folks that used to work for Kay Bee toys. http://www.politifact.com/trut... While he had left by the time Bain did their damage there, they were using the system that he had set up: Run up a large debt to purchase a company, assign the debt to that company, sell off much of its assets, and watch it burn.
By firing air traffic controllers and public mental health workers.
Considering he pointed out the distinction between communism and socialism, and provided examples the the continuing success and happiness of people that are using that system; then you get right back on the train of calling one by the other's name and giving it the blame for what that other did - that's some industrial-grade stupid there, son.
Can you really expect anyone to take you seriously when you use the word "anointed"? It gets trotted out every election cycle and it tells me to to ignore the person using it - because if the only serious critique you can come up with is that the candidate or office holder is popular among their supporters, you're likely into your third jug of kook-aid for the opposition. (yeah, I saw that typo and decided to keep it - it fits the concept well)
Is a high approval rating all that hard to accomplish in a state full of do-it-yourselfers that want not much more than to be left alone? People get paid to live there, so it's the biggest welfare state we have without it being called welfare, meaning she didn't have much to do in order to run things. She still managed to get embroiled in misuse-of-power scandals, and she abandoned her cushy post on top of all that.
Being a business-person is not an analog for being a politician, so I don't know why people keep pushing the idea that because someone is good at one, they'll be good at the other. After all, a good businessman is all about getting the most for themselves and being sure to do what is profitable, not what is right. Politics should be about serving the country, while business is about taking all they can. Would you trust a government run by AT&T or Comcast?
For most people who claim to understand it, the whole problem seems to be "not enough of it funnels into MY wallet!"
Wow, that alternate reality you live in is scary. I'll stick to the real world where none of that stuff actually happened.
Here we have (yet more) obvious proof that allowing more competition increases the level of services available to, and decreases the prices for, the public - while granting limited monopolies causes stagnation and/or insufficient innovation and increased/unjustified pricing. There's no reason to continue allowing limited monopolies.
With frickin' lasers on its head?
> Musicians being screwed by labels and publishers is coming to an end
Oh, that's hilarious. I'll believe it when I see it.