Creation science is fringe science. This doesn't mean it's *wrong*, it means it doesn't get mentioned in a discussion of mainstream science, except to be refuted. That's just the way it is. Postmillenialsm doesn't get taught in fundamentalist Christian Sunday school as a valid alternative to The Rapture; it's only brought up to be refuted. Socialism doesn't get taught in American civics classes as a valid alternative to free market capitalism either.
That's the way things are: fringe groups, right or wrong, face an uphill battle if they want to be treated as credible. Fortunately science (and even social science) is much less prejudicial towards fringe groups than religion or politics. There are climate scientists who believe that climate change won't happen because it would violate God's plan. They still publish in mainstream science journals too, and are doing legitimate science. Science is not concerned with the psychological reasons you believe something, but rather what evidence you can bring to the table.
So creationists *do* have equal time. So far as I know there is no scientific journal that has a policy of rejecting papers because the authors are creationists. They just can't publish papers that treat creationism as an established theory. That's jumping way ahead of what they have to first: impeach evolution by natural selection under conditions favorable to it as the null hypothesis.
Because good people are hard to find and great people are rare as hen's teeth.
"Aw, screw it we'll hire a bunch of new h1bs" is the thinking of someone who's accepted mediocrity as his standard. And it makes sense to encourage others to adopt that attitude too.
He's a science educator. Some science educators *are* bona fide scientists, like Carl Sagan; but science is not mysticism. String theory might be beyond most people, but there's a lot of basic stuff most people can explore and understand, and if you can do that you can explain it to others.
If you think about it, a background in comedy is a very good preparation for being an educator. First you have to get and hold their attention. Second, you have to make really, really sure they get your point. People don't laugh at jokes they don't understand -- at least not the kind of laughter they paid to come experience. So comedy is all about making sure people get the point and are entertained along the way.
The oil that 'spilled' into the gulf in 2010 was a naturally occurring substance, as evidenced by how easily the environment dealt with it.
OK, let's kill this "naturally occurring substances cannot be pollutants" meme.
Arguably *every* substance is a naturally occurring substance. But even substances that are normally found in a habitat can be a pollutant if they enter that habitat in amounts that disrupt it. The classic example of CO2, which is a normal and necessary part of the atmosphere, but is toxic to humans at a rate of as low as 1000 ppm. What's more, moderately elevated levels of CO2 that humans would not notice change the behavior of insects and benefit some plants over others. In a moderately elevated CO2 world, poison ivy wins big but soybeans lose. This is a *natural* response to an *unnatural* situation. The unnatural mix of species is the result of *natural* biological processes, *because that's the only kind of biological process there is*.
Likewise nitrogen and phosphorous are elements that are crucial to life and ubiquitous in the marine environment, but fertilizer runoff can cause dead zones where algae blooms deplete the water of oxygen. The algae and nutrients are a natural feature of the environment; were they not already ubiquitous in the environment then the environment couldn't respond in this unnatural way.
You do raise an interesting point in that crude oil is something that occurs naturally in the habitat of the DWH spill, albeit not in such quantity. Arguably the dispersants used to reduce the impact of the spill may have been as bad as the spill itself. One reasonable definition of a "disaster" is a situation in which every alternative action or inaction seems bad.
As for the environment "easily" dealing with the DWH spill and its aftermath, it's true that there is no longer an oil slick covering the Gulf that is visible from space. But there are many, many documented anomalies in marine mammals, crustaceans, corals and fish. The evidence connecting these anomalies to the DWH spill and cleanup efforts is circumstantial, but the parsimonious explanation is that the aftermath of DWH is causing many of these anomalies (e.g. unusual mutations). At the very least oil is still being found in wetlands around the gulf. The most recent article I could find about ongoing DWH oil problems was dated sixteen minutes ago.
Just because you aren't paying attention doesn't mean the effects aren't there.
The thing to remember is that for any but the tiniest individual business, $30K doesn't go very far in a business which has (according to Wikipedia) 143 employees.
That was a hard lesson for me to learn because I'm a cheapskate by inclination, but in a business sometimes it makes more sense to write off a loss than to spend the time it takes to make it good. Yes, if your staff isn't doing anything else $30K is nothing to sneeze at; but in a small to mid-sized business everyone ought to be balls-to-the-wall doing productive stuff. If it doesn't hurt to take someone off his normal duties to fix a mistake, then something's wrong.
If there's an official customs procedure for doing what you say, fine. But if there's no such procedure, you can *easily* spend $30K of opportunity costs trying to convince Homeland Security that it ought to create a procedure *just for this case*.
Well -- you *can't* just let one go. That's called abandoning your trademark. You don't have to catch every trademark violation, but you do have to defend your trademark when you know about a violation. If you don't defend a trademark, you lose it.
Now Fluke probably could do a number of clever things to help Sparkfun out here, the problem is that by the time Fluke finishes paying its lawyer and staff to do something about this, they might as well cut a check to Sparkfun for the $30K. It wold be perverse to require Fluke to pay for Sparkfun's error.
So this is one of those cases where a business (Sparkfun) made an innocent mistake, and someone has to pay for it.
Seems like overkill to me. I'd say building a simple resistive constant current source would be adequately safe. In fact a simpler circuit built entirely from passive components might even be safer given the unpredictability of homebuilt circuits. Say, two 9v batteries in series with an 20 K Ohm resistor (1 watt for safety), 1 mA panel meter and 2 mA fuse. You short out the leads out before applying them to the electrodes and you should get 0.9 mA.
It's hard to see how a circuit intended to be built by someone with questionable skills could be made safer -- at least with respect to limiting the possible current applied. The danger is in the *intended* operation of the device, not the failure.
The theory is that Europeans actually promoted forest growth as they drove out the native Americans and broke the cycle of man made forest fires.
Actually it was disease. The population of the Americas dropped by 80% or more due to diseases introduced by contact with the Europeans. That's why the Europeans were able to conquer the Americas relatively easily. Had there been 5x or 10x as many Indians the story might have been different.
The native cultures of the Americas was extremely diverse, so it's hard to make generalizations about the ecological sustainability of their societies. There's clear examples of human driven ecological collapse in the Mesoamerican empires. On the other hand it seems likely to me that societies living in arid or arctic regions were organized more sustainably, given the limitations of their environments.
I think it would be very hard to fry your brain with a 9v battery, even if you couple it to your head with saline soaked sponges. It'd sting, but it's doubtful you'd be able to endure enough to do serious damage. If you want to exercise an abundance of caution, you could put a 2ma or 5ma fast blow fuse in series with the electrode (yes, they make them that small).
More to the point is *subtle* changes in your brain because you hooked the electrodes up wrong, or overstimulated your brain with long sessions without medical supervision. You could commit a fatal error if you are treating yourself for depression and you connect the device in a way that makes the depression worse.
One thing that's worth noting is tha most if not all the claimed benefits of tDCS can be achieved through exercise. That's worth considering as an alternative brain hacking scheme.
Science fiction author "Gennady Stolyarov" isn't listed in Internet Speculative Fiction Database either, and the book's publisher, "Rational Argumentator Press" has a grand total of *one* publication, and its web presence is a section of Mr. Stolyarov's personal site. So what we're dealing with here is the self-published work by an unpublished crank sci-fi author -- not that there's any dishonor in being an unpublished crank sci-fi author. There's lots of us around.
I peeked inside the book, and what strikes me is that if you squint, this *looks* like a religious tract pitched toward children, right down to the colorful but stiff illustrations. Take a look at the cover, with it's child dressed in a blue oxford shirt, red tie and khaki chinos banishing death. This is peculiar, in a way that I applaud; an image pitched at children by someone so far out of the mainstream that she has no idea what a culturally "normal" child looks like. That's a good thing for the world, although it may not do much for the author's message. It's more important for people with an oddball streak to write books than people who think like everyone else.
This book appears to come out of the same impetus that underlies a lot of religious impulse: rage at the fact we're are going to die. It's a fact we *should* be uncomfortable with. Religion does the most damage when it makes us too comfortable with the prospect of death. The afterlife becomes a make-up session where we can do the things we put off line life like reconciling with estranged loved ones.
Anyone who regards speculation about technological singularity enabling indefinite human life extension as a "promise" is taking far too much comfort in what is, at best, an intriguing idea. But the universe itself has a finite lifespan; any being who could last to the heat death of the universe, or even a single 2 million century "galactic year" would be so far from human that calling it "transhuman" would be like calling ourselves "transprotozoans".
Whether we just disappear after a mere century or so, or survive as something unrecognizable as human, our opportunity to experience the universe as ourselves, as humans, is brief. We should make the most of it, no matter what we plan to leave behind when our human existence is done.
One of the reasons for the dysfunction we have in Washington is that all the rules that are supposed to protect the public interest have become so complicated that they actually promote crony capitalism. You need someone who knows how to hack the system to catch people hacking the system.
Dealers try to mystify and generally complicate the process of buying a car by offering to arrange financing, making you a trade-in "deal" and obfuscating the true cost of the car. Fortunately you can get a detailed break down of the dealer's costs (including factory to dealer incentives) from Consumer Reports. Then you arrange financing elsewhere (or pay cash), sell your existing car yourself, decide on how much markup you'll pay, and resolve not to buy any additional services or warranties through the dealer. If you do those things you won't be walking into the dealership like a lamb to slaughter. They might as well try to fuck the Rock of Gibraltar. Some of them will try, but you just walk out the door and find a dealership that will sell you a car on your terms.
The last car I bought I walked into the dealer; the salesman saw I had the printouts and said, "I'm not stupid. How much are you going to pay?" I named a price 5% over the dealer's true cost. I could have opened with 3%, but I appreciated not having to go through the whole ridiculous ritual. It was a reasonable offer and the salesman immediately accepted. Half an hour later we finished up the paperwork; I dropped off a cashier's check the following day and drove my car off the day after that. It was all low-key and civilized, and by executing the deal quickly the dealership earned a fair paycheck for a couple hours of work.
This is the way buying a car should be: you tell the dealer which model you want, hand over a check and drive off. Letting the dealer do anything else "for you" is asking to be screwed over. Despite what the salesman claims, there is nothing the dealer can do to make your life simpler, except maybe fetching your plates from the motor vehicle registry. Do everything else yourself, including determining the price you'll pay for the car.
Sick citizens cost a state, not in on-the-book expenditures, but in lost productivity and higher hospitalization costs -- especially because of the large number of very sick people covered by hospitals' indigent care pools. This directly translates into higher dollar costs in health care and insurance.
The same insurance that would cost my family $8811/year in Massachusetts would cost an unbelievable $12576 in Mississippi, even though everything else is much more expensive here. Mississippi has the lowest cost of living in the country; Massachusetts is among the highest. Yet they pay 40% more for the same health insurance, when all things being equal you'd expect them to pay 30% less. Why? Is medical care cheaper here? Absolutely not. We're chock full of very expensive, high tech teaching hospitals where the cost of an aspirin would give you a stroke. We have the most expensive cost for medical procedures in the country of any state but Alaska.
So why is health insurance such a relative bargain here? Because we have by far the lowest rate of uninsured people in the country (4.0%) thanks to Mitt Romney's implementation of what later came to be called "Obamacare". Yes, our medical care is more expensive here but because we get preventive care and screening we use less of it.
Mississippi's uninsured rate is 15%, and consequently it's full of poor, unnecessarily sick people. the number of unnecessarily sick people. Here in Massachusetts when you hit 65 you can expect to enjoy 15 years of *healthy* life before your health fails. In Mississippi it's 10.8 years. Mississippi has a shocking infant mortality rate -- a total of 1% of live births. And all those unnecessarily sick babies who didn't get prenatal care cost people living in Mississippi a fortune.
So while Mississippi saves immediate cash outlay by not expanding Medicaid, that's penny wise and pound foolish. People carrying insurance end up spending so much more they could expand Medicaid for a fraction of the costs, and if you're a Mississippian you can expect to get more sick and die younger than any other state in the country. Some deal.
Mississippi has one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country -- a shocking 1% (10 per 1000 live births) of newborns in Mississippi don't make it. Sick, uninsured babies are very expensive.
You don't have a family with kids..who occasionally get sick and broken bones, do you?
I have a family with kids. Under ACA my cost for a silver level plan, after my tax credit, works out to $712/month. That's a lot: almost as much as we pay for food. But considering how much we use the doctor and even the hospital, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
For a family with two 40 year-old non-smokers and two children under 21, making the median household income of $50,054/year, the average annual silver plan premium, nation-wide would be $9700/year. That's a lot, but not unreasonable given what a silver plan covers. But here's the kicker: Uncle Sam cuts your taxes to the tune 65% of your premium, so effectively you only pay $3373/year. If you were getting anything close to silver plan coverage for much less than $281/month, I'd be very surprised. You can do this calculation for yourself at http://kff.org/interactive/sub... if you like. If you have a reasonably profitable consultancy, the prospect of paying $9/day to insure four people shouldn't be that daunting.
But some small businesses don't generate much income at first, and the tax breaks in Obamacare don't help you because you aren't paying much federal income tax yet. That's what the Obamacare Medcaid expansion is for. It covers *all* your health care expenses if you make 138% of the poverty line or less. Unfortunately about half of the states have opted not to expand Medicaid, even though the expansion woulds be entirely funded by the federal government. If you live and work in one of these states and make less than 138% of the poverty line, you need to get coverage at work or you're screwed. Even a bronze plan, at $249/month, is more than people who are supposed to be covered by Medicaid expansion can pay. Blocking Medicaid expansion at the state level is a key tactic in ensuring that working people experience Obamacare as ruinously expensive.
Finally, it's important to remember that Obamacare doesn't set insurance premiums. What you pay *for* is regulated, but the *amount* you pay for it is determined by the market. Increases in premiums, or too-good-to-be-true plans that are dropped, result from outlawing practices like dropping you from your insurance when you get sick, or raising the premiums so much when you get sick that you're forced to drop your coverage. So the increased premiums under ACA are simply the market price for insurance that actually works the way people expect it to (i.e., when you get sick, it pays for care until you are no longer sick).
If you are one of those people who pre-ACA had awesome health insurance for your entire family below $100/month, your old insurance was almost certainly too good to be true. Insurance companies dropped those policies when the ACA outlawed the deceptive practices that made them profitable.
What does it matter, on a plane like the 777 that costs $260 to $377 *million* dollars to acquire? That's less than 4 hundreths of a percent of the acquisition cost. 100K$ is peanuts on the scale of costs it takes to acquire and operate a large airliner.
And since it is not, strictly speaking, a piece of *safety* equipment, there's no need to take planes out of service to install it. Just require it on new planes, and maybe retrofit existing large airliners when they're down for major maintenance.
It seems likely to me that the probably reason this device isn't required is engineering conservatism. Before something like this is required, you have to convince people that (a) it's a good idea, and (b) this is a good implementation of that good idea.
The document in question was an internal CIA investigation that concluded that the CIA's post 9/11 extraordinary rendition and torture program had not produced any useful intelligence. That contradicts the CIAs reporting to congress on the program.
There are over six million people in US prisons, only a small minority of which are in there for violent crimes. You're 8.5x more likely to go to prison for a non-violent drug offense such as possessing a trivial amount of drugs or even living in the same home as a drug dealer and being charged as an accessory. Your are 6x more likely to be in prison for a public order or "victimless" crime such as prostitution than a violent crime. You are 2.5x more likely to be in prison for a "weapons violation" in which nobody was hurt than you are for a violent crime.
So why is it OK to be happy about the prospect of people in prison being killed in a fire?
One solution to many of the technical, administrative and financial problems of running prisons would be to imprison fewer people. Canada imprisons less than 1/6 the fraction of its population than the US, and it's not a crime-ridden hell hole; Germany 1/9th and Denmark 1/10th the US incarceration rate. We could half our prison spending and spend the money on education (or give people a tax break if you prefer), and still have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.
Why do we have so many people in prisons? Well, putting people behind bars is good for a prosecutor's career, especially if he has political ambitions. Also in states with privatized prisons the taxpayers are financially penalized for having occupancy rates less than 95 or even 100%. Think about that. Your prisons are overcrowded, so you hire a politically contractor and build a virtual guarantee into the contract that prisons will remain overcrowded.
Anyhow, a coarse net wouldn't rain fire down on prisoners. Stretch a piece nylon (very flammable) rope and try to ignite it by throwing burning stuff onto it. Even if it does catch it will only smolder. So net would be cheap and practical, which is precisely why it would never be used in the US: not enough profits to prison operators.
It's not that it can't do useful things for everyone; it's that you have to balance that against things like time wasted. For the head of a major agency with private secretaries and aids at her call, checking and sending emails might not be the best use of her time.
Robin Hood. Dick Turpin. Butch Cassidy. Bonnie and Clyde. Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.
People who break the law have always been the subject of fascination, and for a certain subset of the fascinated, glorification. We still enjoy caper movies about criminals pulling off complicated heists, movies which gloss over the innocent victims of crime or even depict the criminal as an instrument of poetic justice. For the vast majority of people fascination with criminals is harmless. Living in a civilized society requires restraint that makes fantasies of anarchic behavior attractive. In moderation, some measure of admiration of rule breakers probably helps keep the people who run things in check (e.g. the Edward Snowden case).
The problem is that some people have difficulty separating fantasy from reality, keeping to moderation, or understanding how complex or ambiguous people can be. Julian Assange is neither an angel nor a devil, but a flawed, complicated person who did something that needed doing. George Washington wasn't the childhood paragon of the cherry tree legend, but an ambitious, rash, somewhat dishonest social climber who achieved greatness under the pressure of circumstance.
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They are by definition on the margins already.
Creation science is fringe science. This doesn't mean it's *wrong*, it means it doesn't get mentioned in a discussion of mainstream science, except to be refuted. That's just the way it is. Postmillenialsm doesn't get taught in fundamentalist Christian Sunday school as a valid alternative to The Rapture; it's only brought up to be refuted. Socialism doesn't get taught in American civics classes as a valid alternative to free market capitalism either.
That's the way things are: fringe groups, right or wrong, face an uphill battle if they want to be treated as credible. Fortunately science (and even social science) is much less prejudicial towards fringe groups than religion or politics. There are climate scientists who believe that climate change won't happen because it would violate God's plan. They still publish in mainstream science journals too, and are doing legitimate science. Science is not concerned with the psychological reasons you believe something, but rather what evidence you can bring to the table.
So creationists *do* have equal time. So far as I know there is no scientific journal that has a policy of rejecting papers because the authors are creationists. They just can't publish papers that treat creationism as an established theory. That's jumping way ahead of what they have to first: impeach evolution by natural selection under conditions favorable to it as the null hypothesis.
What about creationism in a non-inertial frame?
Because good people are hard to find and great people are rare as hen's teeth.
"Aw, screw it we'll hire a bunch of new h1bs" is the thinking of someone who's accepted mediocrity as his standard. And it makes sense to encourage others to adopt that attitude too.
He's a science educator. Some science educators *are* bona fide scientists, like Carl Sagan; but science is not mysticism. String theory might be beyond most people, but there's a lot of basic stuff most people can explore and understand, and if you can do that you can explain it to others.
If you think about it, a background in comedy is a very good preparation for being an educator. First you have to get and hold their attention. Second, you have to make really, really sure they get your point. People don't laugh at jokes they don't understand -- at least not the kind of laughter they paid to come experience. So comedy is all about making sure people get the point and are entertained along the way.
The oil that 'spilled' into the gulf in 2010 was a naturally occurring substance, as evidenced by how easily the environment dealt with it.
OK, let's kill this "naturally occurring substances cannot be pollutants" meme.
Arguably *every* substance is a naturally occurring substance. But even substances that are normally found in a habitat can be a pollutant if they enter that habitat in amounts that disrupt it. The classic example of CO2, which is a normal and necessary part of the atmosphere, but is toxic to humans at a rate of as low as 1000 ppm. What's more, moderately elevated levels of CO2 that humans would not notice change the behavior of insects and benefit some plants over others. In a moderately elevated CO2 world, poison ivy wins big but soybeans lose. This is a *natural* response to an *unnatural* situation. The unnatural mix of species is the result of *natural* biological processes, *because that's the only kind of biological process there is*.
Likewise nitrogen and phosphorous are elements that are crucial to life and ubiquitous in the marine environment, but fertilizer runoff can cause dead zones where algae blooms deplete the water of oxygen. The algae and nutrients are a natural feature of the environment; were they not already ubiquitous in the environment then the environment couldn't respond in this unnatural way.
You do raise an interesting point in that crude oil is something that occurs naturally in the habitat of the DWH spill, albeit not in such quantity. Arguably the dispersants used to reduce the impact of the spill may have been as bad as the spill itself. One reasonable definition of a "disaster" is a situation in which every alternative action or inaction seems bad.
As for the environment "easily" dealing with the DWH spill and its aftermath, it's true that there is no longer an oil slick covering the Gulf that is visible from space. But there are many, many documented anomalies in marine mammals, crustaceans, corals and fish. The evidence connecting these anomalies to the DWH spill and cleanup efforts is circumstantial, but the parsimonious explanation is that the aftermath of DWH is causing many of these anomalies (e.g. unusual mutations). At the very least oil is still being found in wetlands around the gulf. The most recent article I could find about ongoing DWH oil problems was dated sixteen minutes ago.
Just because you aren't paying attention doesn't mean the effects aren't there.
Yay! Texas wins again!
The thing to remember is that for any but the tiniest individual business, $30K doesn't go very far in a business which has (according to Wikipedia) 143 employees.
That was a hard lesson for me to learn because I'm a cheapskate by inclination, but in a business sometimes it makes more sense to write off a loss than to spend the time it takes to make it good. Yes, if your staff isn't doing anything else $30K is nothing to sneeze at; but in a small to mid-sized business everyone ought to be balls-to-the-wall doing productive stuff. If it doesn't hurt to take someone off his normal duties to fix a mistake, then something's wrong.
If there's an official customs procedure for doing what you say, fine. But if there's no such procedure, you can *easily* spend $30K of opportunity costs trying to convince Homeland Security that it ought to create a procedure *just for this case*.
Well -- you *can't* just let one go. That's called abandoning your trademark. You don't have to catch every trademark violation, but you do have to defend your trademark when you know about a violation. If you don't defend a trademark, you lose it.
Now Fluke probably could do a number of clever things to help Sparkfun out here, the problem is that by the time Fluke finishes paying its lawyer and staff to do something about this, they might as well cut a check to Sparkfun for the $30K. It wold be perverse to require Fluke to pay for Sparkfun's error.
So this is one of those cases where a business (Sparkfun) made an innocent mistake, and someone has to pay for it.
Seems like overkill to me. I'd say building a simple resistive constant current source would be adequately safe. In fact a simpler circuit built entirely from passive components might even be safer given the unpredictability of homebuilt circuits. Say, two 9v batteries in series with an 20 K Ohm resistor (1 watt for safety), 1 mA panel meter and 2 mA fuse. You short out the leads out before applying them to the electrodes and you should get 0.9 mA.
It's hard to see how a circuit intended to be built by someone with questionable skills could be made safer -- at least with respect to limiting the possible current applied. The danger is in the *intended* operation of the device, not the failure.
The theory is that Europeans actually promoted forest growth as they drove out the native Americans and broke the cycle of man made forest fires.
Actually it was disease. The population of the Americas dropped by 80% or more due to diseases introduced by contact with the Europeans. That's why the Europeans were able to conquer the Americas relatively easily. Had there been 5x or 10x as many Indians the story might have been different.
The native cultures of the Americas was extremely diverse, so it's hard to make generalizations about the ecological sustainability of their societies. There's clear examples of human driven ecological collapse in the Mesoamerican empires. On the other hand it seems likely to me that societies living in arid or arctic regions were organized more sustainably, given the limitations of their environments.
I think it would be very hard to fry your brain with a 9v battery, even if you couple it to your head with saline soaked sponges. It'd sting, but it's doubtful you'd be able to endure enough to do serious damage. If you want to exercise an abundance of caution, you could put a 2ma or 5ma fast blow fuse in series with the electrode (yes, they make them that small).
More to the point is *subtle* changes in your brain because you hooked the electrodes up wrong, or overstimulated your brain with long sessions without medical supervision. You could commit a fatal error if you are treating yourself for depression and you connect the device in a way that makes the depression worse.
One thing that's worth noting is tha most if not all the claimed benefits of tDCS can be achieved through exercise. That's worth considering as an alternative brain hacking scheme.
5) British cuisine.
Science fiction author "Gennady Stolyarov" isn't listed in Internet Speculative Fiction Database either, and the book's publisher, "Rational Argumentator Press" has a grand total of *one* publication, and its web presence is a section of Mr. Stolyarov's personal site. So what we're dealing with here is the self-published work by an unpublished crank sci-fi author -- not that there's any dishonor in being an unpublished crank sci-fi author. There's lots of us around.
I peeked inside the book, and what strikes me is that if you squint, this *looks* like a religious tract pitched toward children, right down to the colorful but stiff illustrations. Take a look at the cover, with it's child dressed in a blue oxford shirt, red tie and khaki chinos banishing death. This is peculiar, in a way that I applaud; an image pitched at children by someone so far out of the mainstream that she has no idea what a culturally "normal" child looks like. That's a good thing for the world, although it may not do much for the author's message. It's more important for people with an oddball streak to write books than people who think like everyone else.
This book appears to come out of the same impetus that underlies a lot of religious impulse: rage at the fact we're are going to die. It's a fact we *should* be uncomfortable with. Religion does the most damage when it makes us too comfortable with the prospect of death. The afterlife becomes a make-up session where we can do the things we put off line life like reconciling with estranged loved ones.
Anyone who regards speculation about technological singularity enabling indefinite human life extension as a "promise" is taking far too much comfort in what is, at best, an intriguing idea. But the universe itself has a finite lifespan; any being who could last to the heat death of the universe, or even a single 2 million century "galactic year" would be so far from human that calling it "transhuman" would be like calling ourselves "transprotozoans".
Whether we just disappear after a mere century or so, or survive as something unrecognizable as human, our opportunity to experience the universe as ourselves, as humans, is brief. We should make the most of it, no matter what we plan to leave behind when our human existence is done.
Well, "set a thief to catch a thief."
One of the reasons for the dysfunction we have in Washington is that all the rules that are supposed to protect the public interest have become so complicated that they actually promote crony capitalism. You need someone who knows how to hack the system to catch people hacking the system.
Damn straight. They're out to fuck you blind.
Dealers try to mystify and generally complicate the process of buying a car by offering to arrange financing, making you a trade-in "deal" and obfuscating the true cost of the car. Fortunately you can get a detailed break down of the dealer's costs (including factory to dealer incentives) from Consumer Reports. Then you arrange financing elsewhere (or pay cash), sell your existing car yourself, decide on how much markup you'll pay, and resolve not to buy any additional services or warranties through the dealer. If you do those things you won't be walking into the dealership like a lamb to slaughter. They might as well try to fuck the Rock of Gibraltar. Some of them will try, but you just walk out the door and find a dealership that will sell you a car on your terms.
The last car I bought I walked into the dealer; the salesman saw I had the printouts and said, "I'm not stupid. How much are you going to pay?" I named a price 5% over the dealer's true cost. I could have opened with 3%, but I appreciated not having to go through the whole ridiculous ritual. It was a reasonable offer and the salesman immediately accepted. Half an hour later we finished up the paperwork; I dropped off a cashier's check the following day and drove my car off the day after that. It was all low-key and civilized, and by executing the deal quickly the dealership earned a fair paycheck for a couple hours of work.
This is the way buying a car should be: you tell the dealer which model you want, hand over a check and drive off. Letting the dealer do anything else "for you" is asking to be screwed over. Despite what the salesman claims, there is nothing the dealer can do to make your life simpler, except maybe fetching your plates from the motor vehicle registry. Do everything else yourself, including determining the price you'll pay for the car.
Sick citizens cost a state, not in on-the-book expenditures, but in lost productivity and higher hospitalization costs -- especially because of the large number of very sick people covered by hospitals' indigent care pools. This directly translates into higher dollar costs in health care and insurance.
The same insurance that would cost my family $8811/year in Massachusetts would cost an unbelievable $12576 in Mississippi, even though everything else is much more expensive here. Mississippi has the lowest cost of living in the country; Massachusetts is among the highest. Yet they pay 40% more for the same health insurance, when all things being equal you'd expect them to pay 30% less. Why? Is medical care cheaper here? Absolutely not. We're chock full of very expensive, high tech teaching hospitals where the cost of an aspirin would give you a stroke. We have the most expensive cost for medical procedures in the country of any state but Alaska.
So why is health insurance such a relative bargain here? Because we have by far the lowest rate of uninsured people in the country (4.0%) thanks to Mitt Romney's implementation of what later came to be called "Obamacare". Yes, our medical care is more expensive here but because we get preventive care and screening we use less of it.
Mississippi's uninsured rate is 15%, and consequently it's full of poor, unnecessarily sick people. the number of unnecessarily sick people. Here in Massachusetts when you hit 65 you can expect to enjoy 15 years of *healthy* life before your health fails. In Mississippi it's 10.8 years. Mississippi has a shocking infant mortality rate -- a total of 1% of live births. And all those unnecessarily sick babies who didn't get prenatal care cost people living in Mississippi a fortune.
So while Mississippi saves immediate cash outlay by not expanding Medicaid, that's penny wise and pound foolish. People carrying insurance end up spending so much more they could expand Medicaid for a fraction of the costs, and if you're a Mississippian you can expect to get more sick and die younger than any other state in the country. Some deal.
Mississippi has one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country -- a shocking 1% (10 per 1000 live births) of newborns in Mississippi don't make it. Sick, uninsured babies are very expensive.
>> few hundred bucks a month for health care
You don't have a family with kids..who occasionally get sick and broken bones, do you?
I have a family with kids. Under ACA my cost for a silver level plan, after my tax credit, works out to $712/month. That's a lot: almost as much as we pay for food. But considering how much we use the doctor and even the hospital, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
How high is "insanely high"?
For a family with two 40 year-old non-smokers and two children under 21, making the median household income of $50,054/year, the average annual silver plan premium, nation-wide would be $9700/year. That's a lot, but not unreasonable given what a silver plan covers. But here's the kicker: Uncle Sam cuts your taxes to the tune 65% of your premium, so effectively you only pay $3373/year. If you were getting anything close to silver plan coverage for much less than $281/month, I'd be very surprised. You can do this calculation for yourself at http://kff.org/interactive/sub... if you like. If you have a reasonably profitable consultancy, the prospect of paying $9/day to insure four people shouldn't be that daunting.
But some small businesses don't generate much income at first, and the tax breaks in Obamacare don't help you because you aren't paying much federal income tax yet. That's what the Obamacare Medcaid expansion is for. It covers *all* your health care expenses if you make 138% of the poverty line or less. Unfortunately about half of the states have opted not to expand Medicaid, even though the expansion woulds be entirely funded by the federal government. If you live and work in one of these states and make less than 138% of the poverty line, you need to get coverage at work or you're screwed. Even a bronze plan, at $249/month, is more than people who are supposed to be covered by Medicaid expansion can pay. Blocking Medicaid expansion at the state level is a key tactic in ensuring that working people experience Obamacare as ruinously expensive.
Finally, it's important to remember that Obamacare doesn't set insurance premiums. What you pay *for* is regulated, but the *amount* you pay for it is determined by the market. Increases in premiums, or too-good-to-be-true plans that are dropped, result from outlawing practices like dropping you from your insurance when you get sick, or raising the premiums so much when you get sick that you're forced to drop your coverage. So the increased premiums under ACA are simply the market price for insurance that actually works the way people expect it to (i.e., when you get sick, it pays for care until you are no longer sick).
If you are one of those people who pre-ACA had awesome health insurance for your entire family below $100/month, your old insurance was almost certainly too good to be true. Insurance companies dropped those policies when the ACA outlawed the deceptive practices that made them profitable.
What does it matter, on a plane like the 777 that costs $260 to $377 *million* dollars to acquire? That's less than 4 hundreths of a percent of the acquisition cost. 100K$ is peanuts on the scale of costs it takes to acquire and operate a large airliner.
And since it is not, strictly speaking, a piece of *safety* equipment, there's no need to take planes out of service to install it. Just require it on new planes, and maybe retrofit existing large airliners when they're down for major maintenance.
It seems likely to me that the probably reason this device isn't required is engineering conservatism. Before something like this is required, you have to convince people that (a) it's a good idea, and (b) this is a good implementation of that good idea.
The document in question was an internal CIA investigation that concluded that the CIA's post 9/11 extraordinary rendition and torture program had not produced any useful intelligence. That contradicts the CIAs reporting to congress on the program.
There are over six million people in US prisons, only a small minority of which are in there for violent crimes. You're 8.5x more likely to go to prison for a non-violent drug offense such as possessing a trivial amount of drugs or even living in the same home as a drug dealer and being charged as an accessory. Your are 6x more likely to be in prison for a public order or "victimless" crime such as prostitution than a violent crime. You are 2.5x more likely to be in prison for a "weapons violation" in which nobody was hurt than you are for a violent crime.
So why is it OK to be happy about the prospect of people in prison being killed in a fire?
One solution to many of the technical, administrative and financial problems of running prisons would be to imprison fewer people. Canada imprisons less than 1/6 the fraction of its population than the US, and it's not a crime-ridden hell hole; Germany 1/9th and Denmark 1/10th the US incarceration rate. We could half our prison spending and spend the money on education (or give people a tax break if you prefer), and still have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.
Why do we have so many people in prisons? Well, putting people behind bars is good for a prosecutor's career, especially if he has political ambitions. Also in states with privatized prisons the taxpayers are financially penalized for having occupancy rates less than 95 or even 100%. Think about that. Your prisons are overcrowded, so you hire a politically contractor and build a virtual guarantee into the contract that prisons will remain overcrowded.
Anyhow, a coarse net wouldn't rain fire down on prisoners. Stretch a piece nylon (very flammable) rope and try to ignite it by throwing burning stuff onto it. Even if it does catch it will only smolder. So net would be cheap and practical, which is precisely why it would never be used in the US: not enough profits to prison operators.
Unfortunately, that means they have to be several kilometers in width...
It's not that it can't do useful things for everyone; it's that you have to balance that against things like time wasted. For the head of a major agency with private secretaries and aids at her call, checking and sending emails might not be the best use of her time.
Robin Hood. Dick Turpin. Butch Cassidy. Bonnie and Clyde. Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.
People who break the law have always been the subject of fascination, and for a certain subset of the fascinated, glorification. We still enjoy caper movies about criminals pulling off complicated heists, movies which gloss over the innocent victims of crime or even depict the criminal as an instrument of poetic justice. For the vast majority of people fascination with criminals is harmless. Living in a civilized society requires restraint that makes fantasies of anarchic behavior attractive. In moderation, some measure of admiration of rule breakers probably helps keep the people who run things in check (e.g. the Edward Snowden case).
The problem is that some people have difficulty separating fantasy from reality, keeping to moderation, or understanding how complex or ambiguous people can be. Julian Assange is neither an angel nor a devil, but a flawed, complicated person who did something that needed doing. George Washington wasn't the childhood paragon of the cherry tree legend, but an ambitious, rash, somewhat dishonest social climber who achieved greatness under the pressure of circumstance.
On which planet has the anti-tax movement won?
That would be this one.