The point is not that you keep someone with a gun from using it, it is that by adding an additional charge you deter use of guns.
Also, I'll point out that about 2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides. And the best way to keep people from shooting themselves is to keep guns away from them. That's why (for example) the Israeli Defense Force doesn't let soldiers take their guns home - they have to leave the guns on the bases unless they have a very specific need for a gun at home (which is quite rare). That one change dropped the suicide rate of Israeli soldiers by 80%.
True, they can't pick up fiber traffic that way, But then, the story was about monitoring stations in the US picking up radio traffic, and didn't talk about letting anyone tap into the fiber lines.
Of course, fiber is completely physically unguarded, so it can be tapped into as well. And unless we're going to patrol every mile of every fiber run undersea, we can't prevent that, either.
So I'm back to "big deal".
If we wanted our communications secure, we would encrypt them "end-to'end" so that nobody between the endpoints could intercept it. That's very easy to do in VOIP. Funny how none of the telco's actually do it.:-)
The US food supply is "safe" in terms of quantity, for example, and the FDA does a reasonably good job keeping deadly diseases out of the food supply (though it's far from perfect). The biggest problem is that the food industry, and in particular fast food, engineers and sells food that is quite unhealthy, making us literally sick. The human body is designed to crave things (e.g. sugar, salt, fat) that were needed but rare in the natural diet, but now modern food manufacturing provides in unlimited quantities. Add in that they flood food with chemicals and hormones and other processing that we don't understand the long term effects of, and the result is that modern man is in terrible health. And many countries (e.g. the EU. Japan) are much more conservative about what they allow in their food supply, and as a result have much better health.
To quote:
"The 3,000 annual deaths and 130,000 hospitalizations due to foodborne illness, though tragic, are miniscule compared with other deaths related to our diet. Every year at least 310,000 Americans go to an early grave and many more are sickened because of largely preventable diet-related conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, strokes, and some cancers. The big problem with our food supply isn’t pathogens, it is processed food. We’re being killed not by E. coli, salmonella, or campylobacter, but by the nutritionally hollow contents of the bags, boxes, and fast-food clamshells that have managed to pass as nourishment in our society."
"Over the last century, our diet has undergone unprecedented change. Some 70 percent of the calories Americans consume now come from highly processed foods—loaded up with salt, sugar, fat, strange additives, and refined grains and bereft of naturally occurring nutrients and antioxidants. We’ve outsourced so much of our cooking to highly efficient food companies that “cook” very differently than we do in our home kitchens."
"The fact is that much of our food supply is not safe, and the FDA, despite its new powers of oversight, doesn’t have anywhere near the authority or the political will it needs to help change this. The agency has done nothing to set controls on the massive quantities of sodium going into processed food, especially restaurant food, and still allows trans fat, an acknowledged poison, into products. And its oversight of the vast number of ingredients going into our food is much less reassuring than we might hope."
"Of the roughly 5,000 substances that can be directly added to food, the FDA has no knowledge whatsoever of an estimated 1,000 of them. And more disturbingly, fewer than half of those 4,000 substances known to the FDA have ever gone through the sort of testing you might hope something you’re feeding yourself and your kids would be subjected to, namely toxicology tests on mice or rats. On top of that, a scant few additives have been tested according to the way they’re actually consumed—that is, in combination with a multitude of other additives."
Not true. Not even close. "According to FBI data, 8,583 people were murdered with firearms in 2011. Only 496 people were killed by blunt objects, a category that includes not just hammers and baseball bats but crowbars, rocks, paving stones, statuettes, and electric guitars."
So unless you want to argue that 8,583 is less than 496, I think you'd best stop repeating obvious lies.
And, of course, the terrorists that flew the airplanes into the buildings on 9/11 didn't take control of the airplanes with any weapons. They did have a box cutter, and they killed one person on one plane for dramatic effect, but what gave them control of the plane wasn't a weapon, but telling people that they had explosives and that they'd blow up the plane unless everyone did what they said. And because in all previous hijackings the hijackers just flew away and negotiated some demands, people decided to wait it out. And what stopped the terrorists in the third plane wasn't anyone with a weapon, it was the knowledge (from someone with a cell phone) that the terrorists were flying planes into buildings, not negotiating demands, so waiting was no longer a good strategy, so the passengers overpowered the terrorists (who flew the plan into the ground instead of their target).
So no weapons. Perhaps real life isn't like the movies...
There are lots of ways of detecting guns, not just metal detectors. For example, people can see you use it, or see you carrying it, or security guards can pat you down and find it. And if the penalty for possessing a gun with no metal is sufficiently high, criminals will avoid them because the penalty is higher than the value of having the "undetectable" gun.
For example, look at the UK. The penalty for committing a crime with a gun is much higher than without, so criminals don't generally use guns because if they're caught they'd rather spend 1/5th as long in jail.
Politicians of both parties use their power to promote what they like and pass laws against what they don't. Look for example at Republicans - they lead the charge to empower the government to spy on everyone ("to keep us safe from terrorists!"). And look at all of the social engineering coming from the right wing, passing laws to restrict people's marriages, make it hard for the "wrong" people to vote, etc.
The attempt to rewrite history and label all fascists as liberal is delusional.
Yep. Are you familiar with Australia? Rugged individualists, love their guns, etc. - a lot like the US as far as guns go. But when there was a school gun massacre, unlike the US they reacted with highly effective gun control laws, and there are no more gun massacres, and a clear drop in gun deaths.
Keep in mind that the gun "mania" in the US is relatively recent. Until a few decades ago, the NRA was pro gun-control, and focused on training and responsible ownership of guns (and I taught marksmanship, and gave students NRA certificates!). More recently the NRA was taken over by gun salesmen (which is where the NRA's money comes from), and responsible gun ownership went away, replaced by a highly paranoid marketing campaign that's doing a great job scaring NRA members into buying bigger and bigger guns, and stockpiling more and more ammunition. And, sadly, more and more lobbying undermining gun control laws, making it easy for violent criminals and crazy people to anonymously buy huge guns and piles of ammunition, leading to more and more gun massacres.
There's zero chance that 3D printers will be outlawed. So even if auto parts companies feel threatened by 3D printing (unlikely given the current state of the art) they're not going to get anywhere trying to get 3D printers outlawed. Heck, there was just a huge press event with the White House, Makerbot and Donors Choose to put a 3d printer in every classroom!
There were very few mass shootings when the US had a ban on assault weapons, and quite a few since then. Looks like a correlation to me.
For another example of bans being effective, look at Virginia. For decades Virginia's lax gun laws lead to guns from Virginia flooding the eastern seaboard, undermining the gun control laws in NY, DC, etc., so guns sold by Virginia dealers were routinely found in crimes all up and down the coast, meaning that Virginia was promoting gun crimes across a huge range of the US. Under pressure from many other states, Virginia cleaned up its act, and now Virginia no longer floods the rest of the country with guns. Unfortunately Arizona is apparently deeply committed to making sure that convicted violent criminals can buy guns in unlimited quantities, so they're flooding the streets (and increasing violent crime) in that region. Which is unfortunately, but again shows the correlation between uncontrolled guns and violent gun deaths.
Gun control laws don't work in small areas, because it's too easy for people to get around them (e.g. a short drive). So a "no guns allowed" sign in a bar is meaningless, of course. That's why gun salesmen are so deeply committed to preventing national gun control laws.
What's the big deal? The Russians have had a monitoring station in the US for decades. Specifically, there's a spot in the middle of the US that has line-of-sight to all satellites that carry phone calls in/out of the US. And there are three trailers there, one run by the NSA (remember, it was clearly illegal until quite recently, for the US to tapping all calls into and out of the US, which is what they've been doing for decades, though a shell corporation), one that operates for the Russians, and the third a private US corporation that captures and sells data as a business. I've been told (can't say by who) that they know about each other, and aren't even located far from each other.
No. Medical costs in different countries are vastly different because different countries are run differently.
For example, in the US doctors go wildly into debt, then charge a fortune to recover from that debt, then expect to make that kind of money their whole careers. In most other countries medical training is either free (e.g. France) or on the same scale as other professions, so doctors aren't stuck with a huge debt, and they get paid normal professional salaries.
Also in the US, we waste 15-20% of healthcare spending on insurance companies that do nothing of medical value. And we force people who do provide healthcare to waste 15-20% overhead dealing with the insurance companies, trying to be allowed to do their jobs and then get paid for the work.
Then you have Pharmaceutical companies who jack up prices in the US, so people buying the same drug from the same supplier in other wealthy countries pay far less than we do. In part this is because the Congress (Republicans) passed a law preventing the US government from using its purchasing power to negotiate discounts (thanks, Bush), while every other country does so, and thus pays much less than we do for the same product from the same supplier.
And we force millions of Americans to receive medical care only in the Emergency Room. That's fantastically expensive compared to preventative care. And it's far less effective, because all the ER does is stabilize people and kick them out, because emergency rooms don't provide medical care, they provide EMERGENCY CARE. And as soon as you're stabilized, it's not an emergency, they throw you out, and you're supposed to go to your doctor for ongoing care, preventative care, rehabilitation, etc. None of which millions of Americans get. This is largely fixed by "Obamacare", other than the few million Americans who had the misfortune of being poor in a state with Republican leadership.
Uninsured also inflate the cost of medical care in the US, because (since Reagan passed the mandate) hospital ERs are required to treat people even if they can't pay, so hospitals inflate their prices quite a bit so that those of us with insurance (or cash) end up over-paying by 10-12% to cover everyone else.
Interestingly, if you take out the 30-40% waste created by the insurance companies, US medical spending is still higher than any other country, but at least it's close. And that's a start.
Now ask yourself why doctors in the US have to go vastly into debt, and then charge a fortune to recover from the debt. That's not how the rest of the planet runs. In France for example, which has much better medical service than the US, the training is free. This means that the best, most talented people get to become doctors regardless of wealth. And then they can work for a normal professional wage, without being forced to absolutely maximize revenue. So they can focus on providing medical care instead of dealing with financing.
As for the "there's no money for infrastructure", don't blame "boomers". Plenty of us were willing to pay the taxes to run the country, and we were paying down the debt and starting to save up for a rainy day. But one of the political parties became obsessed with dodging taxes while ramping up spending. But don't blame the rest of us for that!
A few points: - You're very right about the cost (cash, time and work) of getting devices certified. That swamps the actual development costs, by a wide margin. And that is the real reason that open source can't make any advances into the medical arena. - Yes, it's expensive getting into the medical devices business, but when you win, you win HUGE. Device manufacturers are, in total, making fantastic fortunes in the US, because they sell the same devices here for far more than in other countries. That's not just because we are a rich country - Germany, Japan, France, etc., all run healthcare much more efficiently and effectively than we do, and they do that in part by using their purchasing power to negotiate aggressively for good pricing, and by choosing equipment based on medical value based on outcomes. In the US, the sellers have all of the leverage, so prices are unrestrained. And hospitals buy things for marketing/revenue value, not purely for medical outcomes, which is why they buy the latest expensive gizmos and advertise them to attract rich patients, while in other countries purchasing is based on medical outcomes so they use much cheaper but just as medically effective models, and thus provide much better medical care for the same budget. - Other countries don't force doctors to go massively into debt to get trained. That's not true everywhere. For example, in France medical training is free (http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2009/11/10/the_french_and/), so people become doctors based on talent and ability, not on ability to pay for training, and when they graduate doctors can focus on providing medical care rather than debt management, and doctors can afford to work for reasonable professional salaries rather than being forced to absolutely maximize revenue in order to repay loans and to hire an army of administrators to fight the insurance companies in order to be allowed to treat patients. - Fast food's negative impact on health can't be pushed purely onto the buyers. The fast food companies spend $billions engineering food that targets our weak points, and $billions on marketing to pump it into the population, and they're quite willing to put things that are extremely bad for people into their food (salt and calories are the least of it) if it improves sales or reduces costs. Yes, McDonalds documents what they sell. That's due to government regulations requiring large chains to publish the nutritional data about their food - all chains do this now. What we need is more such regulation so that people can know what they're being fed, and to outlaw the most dangerous practices. The recent outlawing of hydrogenated oils is a good example of this - they're extremely bad for people but were at one point widely used in the industry because they're a bit cheaper than regular oils. - Computers have actually improved some aspects of medical care. The rate of medical errors is much, much lower now that hospitals and medical records are computerized - at one point, 40% of all patient hospital stays had at least one medical error (wrong drug, wrong quantity, etc.) due to doctors scribbling on paper that couldn't be accurately read. And I don't know how you'd run a modern medical trial without computerized record keeping and data analysis. And of course most radiology devices such as MRI can't exist without computers, or are much faster/cheaper (X rays don't use film that has to be processed, for example, but are instant). But I'd agree - computers don't help with the basics - a well trained, experienced doctor uses the same diagnostic tools doctors have used for decades (i.e. talking with patients, checking blood pressure, weight, etc.) most of the time.
In the US "maximize the revenue of medical providers and vendors" is how we roll.
That's why in the US there's almost no money spent educating people on basic health and nutrition, minimal regulation to protect our food supplies, and $billions spent marketing fast food that's causing massive health problems and early deaths for millions of Americans. But businesses in the healthcare business are making record profits. Yay!
Surely conflict of interest is an argument for keeping utilities under public rather than private control, because then the utility's interests are aligned with the public rather than the private ownership.
So your argument is that because the Tesla was well designed enough to suffer major damage and still pull over to the side of the road that there's a design flaw in the Tesla? I'm not following that logic.
The Tesla doesn't have a design flaw unless it ended up in worse shape than a gas car in the same situation would have.
As far as I can tell, a gas car would have suffered much more damage, because the bottom isn't protected but is just a thin floorboard, so the "debris" that punched up with a few tons of force that went through the quarter inch of bottom armor and destroyed the Tesla's batteries would have ended up inside the car, or destroyed the drive train, or punctured the gas tank, which would have been a lot worse that safely pulling over.
It's a large chunk of metal that punched up through a quarter inch steel sheet at highway speeds. In a gas car, which has just a thin skin on the bottom, the hitch would have gone up into the passenger compartment or smashed the drive train. If that's not a major accident, what is?
When a car randomly ignores the driver's controls and accelerates and kills people, that's a design flaw.
When a car is in a major accident, suffers severe damage, and the driver can pull over and get out safely, that's not an obvious design flaw. Any car will fail given sufficient damage, so the question is how the car handled the damage, and how the passengers came out. So far, the Tesla looks pretty good.
No, the 187,500 highway car fires last year don't include cars in storage, cars abandoned and destroyed, etc., they include only highway incidents reported to the police. So the answer to "how many regular cars light on fire on the highway" is 187,500 last year.
Likely the details of how the accident played out could have been different. A chunk of metal coming up through the floorboard of a gas car would likely have killed passengers, but might not have hit the gas tank. In contrast, in the Tesla the chunk of metal made it through the quarter inch of plating but was stopped by the batteries, so the passengers made it out safely.
Or there are a lot of car accidents all the time, but only the Tesla accident is being discussed in the press because they're a fancy new car that's interesting to talk about, while the other 187,000 highway car fires last year are boring.
The survival and injury statistics for modern cars are MUCH better than for older designs. Apparently seat belts and airbags, lower speed limits, and crumple zones that protect passengers, all lead to much lower fatality rates. Fatalities per vehicle mile travelled is now (2011) 1.1 fatality per 100 million miles travelled, down from a peak of 5.5 in 1966.
Now think about the fact that the US car companies opposed every single one of those improvements that reduced fatalities by 80%.:-) Luckily we regulate cars, saving a lot of lives.
And comparing the stats for fatalities for Tesla and other cars, so far the Tesla catches fire 1/4th as often (NB: small numbers, don't extrapolate too literally), but in the accidents the fire was contained and the passengers were uninjured. In comparison, with gas cars, "On average, 17 automobile fires were reported per hour. These fires killed an average of four people every week." So with 2,856 gas car fires a week and only 4 deaths a week. I guess car fires aren't as dangerous as you'd think. By the numbers, Tesla looks safer than other cars, and even if there are other factors, it'd be hard to use the data to argue that Tesla has a safety problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is not that you keep someone with a gun from using it, it is that by adding an additional charge you deter use of guns.
Also, I'll point out that about 2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides. And the best way to keep people from shooting themselves is to keep guns away from them. That's why (for example) the Israeli Defense Force doesn't let soldiers take their guns home - they have to leave the guns on the bases unless they have a very specific need for a gun at home (which is quite rare). That one change dropped the suicide rate of Israeli soldiers by 80%.
That's roughly how laws are already written.
True, they can't pick up fiber traffic that way, But then, the story was about monitoring stations in the US picking up radio traffic, and didn't talk about letting anyone tap into the fiber lines.
Of course, fiber is completely physically unguarded, so it can be tapped into as well. And unless we're going to patrol every mile of every fiber run undersea, we can't prevent that, either.
So I'm back to "big deal".
If we wanted our communications secure, we would encrypt them "end-to'end" so that nobody between the endpoints could intercept it. That's very easy to do in VOIP. Funny how none of the telco's actually do it. :-)
The US food supply is "safe" in terms of quantity, for example, and the FDA does a reasonably good job keeping deadly diseases out of the food supply (though it's far from perfect). The biggest problem is that the food industry, and in particular fast food, engineers and sells food that is quite unhealthy, making us literally sick. The human body is designed to crave things (e.g. sugar, salt, fat) that were needed but rare in the natural diet, but now modern food manufacturing provides in unlimited quantities. Add in that they flood food with chemicals and hormones and other processing that we don't understand the long term effects of, and the result is that modern man is in terrible health. And many countries (e.g. the EU. Japan) are much more conservative about what they allow in their food supply, and as a result have much better health.
To quote:
"The 3,000 annual deaths and 130,000 hospitalizations due to foodborne illness, though tragic, are miniscule compared with other deaths related to our diet. Every year at least 310,000 Americans go to an early grave and many more are sickened because of largely preventable diet-related conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, strokes, and some cancers. The big problem with our food supply isn’t pathogens, it is processed food. We’re being killed not by E. coli, salmonella, or campylobacter, but by the nutritionally hollow contents of the bags, boxes, and fast-food clamshells that have managed to pass as nourishment in our society."
"Over the last century, our diet has undergone unprecedented change. Some 70 percent of the calories Americans consume now come from highly processed foods—loaded up with salt, sugar, fat, strange additives, and refined grains and bereft of naturally occurring nutrients and antioxidants. We’ve outsourced so much of our cooking to highly efficient food companies that “cook” very differently than we do in our home kitchens."
"The fact is that much of our food supply is not safe, and the FDA, despite its new powers of oversight, doesn’t have anywhere near the authority or the political will it needs to help change this. The agency has done nothing to set controls on the massive quantities of sodium going into processed food, especially restaurant food, and still allows trans fat, an acknowledged poison, into products. And its oversight of the vast number of ingredients going into our food is much less reassuring than we might hope."
"Of the roughly 5,000 substances that can be directly added to food, the FDA has no knowledge whatsoever of an estimated 1,000 of them. And more disturbingly, fewer than half of those 4,000 substances known to the FDA have ever gone through the sort of testing you might hope something you’re feeding yourself and your kids would be subjected to, namely toxicology tests on mice or rats. On top of that, a scant few additives have been tested according to the way they’re actually consumed—that is, in combination with a multitude of other additives."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/01/our-unsafe-food-supply-is-killing-us.html
Not true. Not even close. "According to FBI data, 8,583 people were murdered with firearms in 2011. Only 496 people were killed by blunt objects, a category that includes not just hammers and baseball bats but crowbars, rocks, paving stones, statuettes, and electric guitars."
So unless you want to argue that 8,583 is less than 496, I think you'd best stop repeating obvious lies.
Good point.
And, of course, the terrorists that flew the airplanes into the buildings on 9/11 didn't take control of the airplanes with any weapons. They did have a box cutter, and they killed one person on one plane for dramatic effect, but what gave them control of the plane wasn't a weapon, but telling people that they had explosives and that they'd blow up the plane unless everyone did what they said. And because in all previous hijackings the hijackers just flew away and negotiated some demands, people decided to wait it out. And what stopped the terrorists in the third plane wasn't anyone with a weapon, it was the knowledge (from someone with a cell phone) that the terrorists were flying planes into buildings, not negotiating demands, so waiting was no longer a good strategy, so the passengers overpowered the terrorists (who flew the plan into the ground instead of their target).
So no weapons. Perhaps real life isn't like the movies...
There are lots of ways of detecting guns, not just metal detectors. For example, people can see you use it, or see you carrying it, or security guards can pat you down and find it. And if the penalty for possessing a gun with no metal is sufficiently high, criminals will avoid them because the penalty is higher than the value of having the "undetectable" gun.
For example, look at the UK. The penalty for committing a crime with a gun is much higher than without, so criminals don't generally use guns because if they're caught they'd rather spend 1/5th as long in jail.
Politicians of both parties use their power to promote what they like and pass laws against what they don't. Look for example at Republicans - they lead the charge to empower the government to spy on everyone ("to keep us safe from terrorists!"). And look at all of the social engineering coming from the right wing, passing laws to restrict people's marriages, make it hard for the "wrong" people to vote, etc.
The attempt to rewrite history and label all fascists as liberal is delusional.
Yep. Are you familiar with Australia? Rugged individualists, love their guns, etc. - a lot like the US as far as guns go. But when there was a school gun massacre, unlike the US they reacted with highly effective gun control laws, and there are no more gun massacres, and a clear drop in gun deaths.
Keep in mind that the gun "mania" in the US is relatively recent. Until a few decades ago, the NRA was pro gun-control, and focused on training and responsible ownership of guns (and I taught marksmanship, and gave students NRA certificates!). More recently the NRA was taken over by gun salesmen (which is where the NRA's money comes from), and responsible gun ownership went away, replaced by a highly paranoid marketing campaign that's doing a great job scaring NRA members into buying bigger and bigger guns, and stockpiling more and more ammunition. And, sadly, more and more lobbying undermining gun control laws, making it easy for violent criminals and crazy people to anonymously buy huge guns and piles of ammunition, leading to more and more gun massacres.
There's zero chance that 3D printers will be outlawed. So even if auto parts companies feel threatened by 3D printing (unlikely given the current state of the art) they're not going to get anywhere trying to get 3D printers outlawed. Heck, there was just a huge press event with the White House, Makerbot and Donors Choose to put a 3d printer in every classroom!
There were very few mass shootings when the US had a ban on assault weapons, and quite a few since then. Looks like a correlation to me.
For another example of bans being effective, look at Virginia. For decades Virginia's lax gun laws lead to guns from Virginia flooding the eastern seaboard, undermining the gun control laws in NY, DC, etc., so guns sold by Virginia dealers were routinely found in crimes all up and down the coast, meaning that Virginia was promoting gun crimes across a huge range of the US. Under pressure from many other states, Virginia cleaned up its act, and now Virginia no longer floods the rest of the country with guns. Unfortunately Arizona is apparently deeply committed to making sure that convicted violent criminals can buy guns in unlimited quantities, so they're flooding the streets (and increasing violent crime) in that region. Which is unfortunately, but again shows the correlation between uncontrolled guns and violent gun deaths.
Gun control laws don't work in small areas, because it's too easy for people to get around them (e.g. a short drive). So a "no guns allowed" sign in a bar is meaningless, of course. That's why gun salesmen are so deeply committed to preventing national gun control laws.
What's the big deal? The Russians have had a monitoring station in the US for decades. Specifically, there's a spot in the middle of the US that has line-of-sight to all satellites that carry phone calls in/out of the US. And there are three trailers there, one run by the NSA (remember, it was clearly illegal until quite recently, for the US to tapping all calls into and out of the US, which is what they've been doing for decades, though a shell corporation), one that operates for the Russians, and the third a private US corporation that captures and sells data as a business. I've been told (can't say by who) that they know about each other, and aren't even located far from each other.
No. Medical costs in different countries are vastly different because different countries are run differently.
For example, in the US doctors go wildly into debt, then charge a fortune to recover from that debt, then expect to make that kind of money their whole careers. In most other countries medical training is either free (e.g. France) or on the same scale as other professions, so doctors aren't stuck with a huge debt, and they get paid normal professional salaries.
Also in the US, we waste 15-20% of healthcare spending on insurance companies that do nothing of medical value. And we force people who do provide healthcare to waste 15-20% overhead dealing with the insurance companies, trying to be allowed to do their jobs and then get paid for the work.
Then you have Pharmaceutical companies who jack up prices in the US, so people buying the same drug from the same supplier in other wealthy countries pay far less than we do. In part this is because the Congress (Republicans) passed a law preventing the US government from using its purchasing power to negotiate discounts (thanks, Bush), while every other country does so, and thus pays much less than we do for the same product from the same supplier.
And we force millions of Americans to receive medical care only in the Emergency Room. That's fantastically expensive compared to preventative care. And it's far less effective, because all the ER does is stabilize people and kick them out, because emergency rooms don't provide medical care, they provide EMERGENCY CARE. And as soon as you're stabilized, it's not an emergency, they throw you out, and you're supposed to go to your doctor for ongoing care, preventative care, rehabilitation, etc. None of which millions of Americans get. This is largely fixed by "Obamacare", other than the few million Americans who had the misfortune of being poor in a state with Republican leadership.
Uninsured also inflate the cost of medical care in the US, because (since Reagan passed the mandate) hospital ERs are required to treat people even if they can't pay, so hospitals inflate their prices quite a bit so that those of us with insurance (or cash) end up over-paying by 10-12% to cover everyone else.
Interestingly, if you take out the 30-40% waste created by the insurance companies, US medical spending is still higher than any other country, but at least it's close. And that's a start.
Now ask yourself why doctors in the US have to go vastly into debt, and then charge a fortune to recover from the debt. That's not how the rest of the planet runs. In France for example, which has much better medical service than the US, the training is free. This means that the best, most talented people get to become doctors regardless of wealth. And then they can work for a normal professional wage, without being forced to absolutely maximize revenue. So they can focus on providing medical care instead of dealing with financing.
As for the "there's no money for infrastructure", don't blame "boomers". Plenty of us were willing to pay the taxes to run the country, and we were paying down the debt and starting to save up for a rainy day. But one of the political parties became obsessed with dodging taxes while ramping up spending. But don't blame the rest of us for that!
A few points:
- You're very right about the cost (cash, time and work) of getting devices certified. That swamps the actual development costs, by a wide margin. And that is the real reason that open source can't make any advances into the medical arena.
- Yes, it's expensive getting into the medical devices business, but when you win, you win HUGE. Device manufacturers are, in total, making fantastic fortunes in the US, because they sell the same devices here for far more than in other countries. That's not just because we are a rich country - Germany, Japan, France, etc., all run healthcare much more efficiently and effectively than we do, and they do that in part by using their purchasing power to negotiate aggressively for good pricing, and by choosing equipment based on medical value based on outcomes. In the US, the sellers have all of the leverage, so prices are unrestrained. And hospitals buy things for marketing/revenue value, not purely for medical outcomes, which is why they buy the latest expensive gizmos and advertise them to attract rich patients, while in other countries purchasing is based on medical outcomes so they use much cheaper but just as medically effective models, and thus provide much better medical care for the same budget.
- Other countries don't force doctors to go massively into debt to get trained. That's not true everywhere. For example, in France medical training is free (http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2009/11/10/the_french_and/), so people become doctors based on talent and ability, not on ability to pay for training, and when they graduate doctors can focus on providing medical care rather than debt management, and doctors can afford to work for reasonable professional salaries rather than being forced to absolutely maximize revenue in order to repay loans and to hire an army of administrators to fight the insurance companies in order to be allowed to treat patients.
- Fast food's negative impact on health can't be pushed purely onto the buyers. The fast food companies spend $billions engineering food that targets our weak points, and $billions on marketing to pump it into the population, and they're quite willing to put things that are extremely bad for people into their food (salt and calories are the least of it) if it improves sales or reduces costs. Yes, McDonalds documents what they sell. That's due to government regulations requiring large chains to publish the nutritional data about their food - all chains do this now. What we need is more such regulation so that people can know what they're being fed, and to outlaw the most dangerous practices. The recent outlawing of hydrogenated oils is a good example of this - they're extremely bad for people but were at one point widely used in the industry because they're a bit cheaper than regular oils.
- Computers have actually improved some aspects of medical care. The rate of medical errors is much, much lower now that hospitals and medical records are computerized - at one point, 40% of all patient hospital stays had at least one medical error (wrong drug, wrong quantity, etc.) due to doctors scribbling on paper that couldn't be accurately read. And I don't know how you'd run a modern medical trial without computerized record keeping and data analysis. And of course most radiology devices such as MRI can't exist without computers, or are much faster/cheaper (X rays don't use film that has to be processed, for example, but are instant). But I'd agree - computers don't help with the basics - a well trained, experienced doctor uses the same diagnostic tools doctors have used for decades (i.e. talking with patients, checking blood pressure, weight, etc.) most of the time.
In the US "maximize the revenue of medical providers and vendors" is how we roll.
That's why in the US there's almost no money spent educating people on basic health and nutrition, minimal regulation to protect our food supplies, and $billions spent marketing fast food that's causing massive health problems and early deaths for millions of Americans. But businesses in the healthcare business are making record profits. Yay!
Surely conflict of interest is an argument for keeping utilities under public rather than private control, because then the utility's interests are aligned with the public rather than the private ownership.
So your argument is that because the Tesla was well designed enough to suffer major damage and still pull over to the side of the road that there's a design flaw in the Tesla? I'm not following that logic.
The Tesla doesn't have a design flaw unless it ended up in worse shape than a gas car in the same situation would have.
As far as I can tell, a gas car would have suffered much more damage, because the bottom isn't protected but is just a thin floorboard, so the "debris" that punched up with a few tons of force that went through the quarter inch of bottom armor and destroyed the Tesla's batteries would have ended up inside the car, or destroyed the drive train, or punctured the gas tank, which would have been a lot worse that safely pulling over.
So what's the Tesla's supposed design flaw?
It's a large chunk of metal that punched up through a quarter inch steel sheet at highway speeds. In a gas car, which has just a thin skin on the bottom, the hitch would have gone up into the passenger compartment or smashed the drive train. If that's not a major accident, what is?
When a car randomly ignores the driver's controls and accelerates and kills people, that's a design flaw.
When a car is in a major accident, suffers severe damage, and the driver can pull over and get out safely, that's not an obvious design flaw. Any car will fail given sufficient damage, so the question is how the car handled the damage, and how the passengers came out. So far, the Tesla looks pretty good.
No, the 187,500 highway car fires last year don't include cars in storage, cars abandoned and destroyed, etc., they include only highway incidents reported to the police. So the answer to "how many regular cars light on fire on the highway" is 187,500 last year.
Likely the details of how the accident played out could have been different. A chunk of metal coming up through the floorboard of a gas car would likely have killed passengers, but might not have hit the gas tank. In contrast, in the Tesla the chunk of metal made it through the quarter inch of plating but was stopped by the batteries, so the passengers made it out safely.
Or there are a lot of car accidents all the time, but only the Tesla accident is being discussed in the press because they're a fancy new car that's interesting to talk about, while the other 187,000 highway car fires last year are boring.
The survival and injury statistics for modern cars are MUCH better than for older designs. Apparently seat belts and airbags, lower speed limits, and crumple zones that protect passengers, all lead to much lower fatality rates. Fatalities per vehicle mile travelled is now (2011) 1.1 fatality per 100 million miles travelled, down from a peak of 5.5 in 1966.
Now think about the fact that the US car companies opposed every single one of those improvements that reduced fatalities by 80%. :-) Luckily we regulate cars, saving a lot of lives.
And comparing the stats for fatalities for Tesla and other cars, so far the Tesla catches fire 1/4th as often (NB: small numbers, don't extrapolate too literally), but in the accidents the fire was contained and the passengers were uninjured. In comparison, with gas cars, "On average, 17 automobile fires were reported per hour. These fires killed an average of four people every week." So with 2,856 gas car fires a week and only 4 deaths a week. I guess car fires aren't as dangerous as you'd think. By the numbers, Tesla looks safer than other cars, and even if there are other factors, it'd be hard to use the data to argue that Tesla has a safety problem.
So in that case, compare injuries and deaths. So far, Tesla has zero.
While we're at it, let's compare the number of gas fires that occur in Tesla and non-Tesla cars. :-)