Uh, what the fuck does your libertarian rant have to do with Obamacare?
A properly administered free-market system that allows insurers to cross state lines and removes a lot of the useless regulatory BS that makes practitioners hesitant to treat people will save tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people who will otherwise die thanks to the Obamacare act.
Bullshit. Pure, unmitigated bullshit. America has the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Here's a clue for the clueless: it's not because of government regulation, and it was the most expensive in the world (and one of the worst) even before Obama was elected. The "socialist" healthcare systems of Europe are both cheaper and also better. Yeah, libertarianism works great --when you've never been outside your basement.
Here's what laissez-faire capitalist healthcare really looks like: the health care conglomerates soak sick people for all they can take, because sick people don't have the resources to bargain. Then, when they run out of money, you let them die. For the conglomerates, it's like a money spigot.
For the sick people, of course, it's a death trap with the added feature that it bankrupts you, too.
Yes, I am so sorry for him, having to scrape by on a mere $5000 a month, and being forced to save for a whole five years before he can buy his million-dollar home.
Man, poverty in Silicon Valley is brutal. Maybe they have food stamps, though.
Five years! That's like, an eternity. He'll be, like, almost thirty before he can afford that house, all wrinkled up and probably almost senile by then. How can he stand waiting that long?
"..who earns a base salary of $160,000 a year, said his earnings are "pretty bad", adding that he pays $3000 rent for a two-bedroom house in San Francisco...."
I really feel for this poor downtrodden guy, having to shell out a whopping $36,000 out of his $160K salary just for a lousy two-bedroom house in a fabulous neighborhood, leaving him a bare $124,000 dollars a year to live on.
Maybe he could apply for foodstamps to keep him from starving to death in case he can't pay for his next meal on those starvation wages.
Whatever it is the U.S. is doing, we seem to be doing it wrong.
It's charmingly naive of you to think that our bad health has nothing to do with our health care system, probably the worst in the developed world, and definitely the most expensive in the developed world. (And I assume you've never been outside the U.S., since you seem to think nobody in the rest of the world smokes.)
But, whether in health care or in something else, we're at the bottom of the list in the developed world. Whatever it is we're doing-- we should do something else.
There are already a lot of people who are irrelevant, obsolete, and of whom nobody cares whether they starve to death or not now. Why don't these people walk into the houses of rich people and take their stuff? Well, because rich people are well defended.
In the future when robots take everybody's jobs because they are better than human at everything, who do you think is going to be defending the rich people? Robots.
See, now, your head is on straight. We are not going to find ourselves living in a world where billions of people have no job and no means of supporting themselves and surviving. It won't be allowed to happen because if it does then that means there will be a War to End All Wars...
Well, maybe the unemployed proles might try to start "a war to end all wars." But one of the jobs that gets obsolete first is soldier, and the rich guys who own the robots also control all the robot armies. So that "war to end all wars" will end all wars because the robots will win so quickly.
As for the United States, the life expectancy is "predicted to be among the lowest of these countries by 2030; 80 for men (similar to the Czech Republic) and 83 for women (similar to Mexico)."
I'm quite horrified that all the commentary on the article is almost entirely sarcasm and jokes. In fact, this is relatively horrifying. Not only is the life expectancy in the U.S. currently less than that in any of the developed countries in Europe, it's decreasing.
This is bad. It's easy enough to make fun of Europe's universal health care, but apparently they're doing something right.
"The culprits for our declining years, the report says, were increases in mortality from heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, unintentional injuries, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, kidney disease and suicide. Not surprisingly, that group plus cancer and the flu make up the top 10 causes of death in the U.S.... He (the report author) did highlight a 3% increase in "unintentional injuries." The heading includes, among other things, traffic accidents and drug overdoses — both of which often involve relatively young victims whose deaths can have a strong impact on the numbers."
source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
See also:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/08/... http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/12/08/504667607/life-expectancy-in-u-s-drops-for-first-time-in-decades-report-finds
Isn't it a bit strange that they won't approve a Dragon capsule for human use without a full unmanned test, yet now they are going to risk lives without a test on the SLS? At least the Dragon has a reasonable escape system.
You apparently have not have noticed it, but there is a new presidential administration out there. This was a request from the new administration's transition team for NASA to look into the possibility of putting crew on the flight.
That's only temporal: was it a bad idea, and should we hang someone for not stopping it?
Bad ideas don't become good ideas just because they've already done their damage.
No. But spent money doesn't become unspent money because you've changed your mind.
The new part here isn't the circum lunar test flight of the SLS rocket in itself. It's adding crew to the circum-lunar launch.
The Obama space malaise was Obama killing the Shuttle
Obama did not kill the shuttle. Bush killed the shuttle.
and Project Constellation and not providing an adequate replacement.
Bush designated Constellation to replace the shuttle, but did not appropriate funds to build it. Bush also started the Commercial Access to Space Station program, which funded the development of the SpaceX Falcon-9 and the Orbital Cygnus.
Obama commissioned a study of the Constellation program, the Augustine Commission, which concluded that Constellation should either be fully funded or else cancelled (and pointed out that there was no little of Congress fully funding it.) Obama then killed Constellation, in favor of the commercial programs which were looking very successful so far (and which, to be fair, had been started by Bush.)
The rocket is being built already, you know. The question here is whether the first launch, which is already scheduled, should carry humans around the moon, or carry an empty capsule around the moon.
Presumably the air pollution is coming from some activities that raise living standards to afford clean water, public hospitals, health insurance, and reduced crime.
Nope.
In India, the worst of the air pollution is generated from burning fields after harvest. There are other technologies to clear the fields, such as a tractor-mounted seeder, which is actually better for the fields, as well as for the air-- but they cost over a thousand dollars each, far too much for the small farmers.
It's actually quite responsible for them to stop selling the unit, rather than continuing to sell product that they know has a problem, which is what many companies in the past have done.
Seems pretty unlikely as cops generally don't hang around bathrooms
Sure they do.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2016/05/long_beach_police_rebuked_for_illegal_anti_gay_stings.html
http://www.sunherald.com/news/local/crime/article81336687.html
http://fox2now.com/2016/04/28/sex-busts-in-st-louis-park-bathrooms-lead-to-surprising-plea-deal/
https://www.queerty.com/long-beach-police-accused-of-illegally-targeting-gay-man-in-bathroom-sex-sting-20160304
http://www.newnownext.com/aggressive-cop-forces-gay-woman-out-of-womens-bathroom-for-not-having-id/04/2016/
and with cameras, too:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/02/09/colb.restroom/index.html?_s=PM:LAW
https://www.glapn.org/sodomylaws/usa/ohio/ohnews21.htm
https://www.datalounge.com/thread/7715912-the-police-film-of-the-1962-mansfield-ohio-undercover-men-s-bathroom-sting
The social expression of ones sex (gender) is disproved by... genetics? Genes govern whether we wear trousers or skirts? If we like pink or blue? If we are tops or bottoms? Or did you mean sex? The physical expression of ones genes.
And this, in a nutshell, is a large part of the problem. The words sex and gender are used by different people to mean different things.
Yes, your particular subculture has decided to define gender to mean "whether we wear trousers or skirts. If we like pink or blue." This particular definition has not been adopted universally within the English language.
From Merriam Webster, you apparently think definition 2b is the only definition
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender
Definition of gender
1
a : a subclass within a grammatical class (as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms
b : membership of a word or a grammatical form in such a subclass
c : an inflectional form (see inflection 3a) showing membership in such a subclass
2
a : sex ("the feminine gender")
b : the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex
with regards to the actual R&D, German companies can take credit for industry standard wind turbine, PV, and inverter technology.
I'll challenge that. German companies may have done the industrialiation of wind turbines, but when you're talking about the "actual R&D", they built on the R&D that was done at NASA, who built the first multi-megawatt scale wind turbine back in the mid 1970s, when the biggest production units were 20 kW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And the same is true of PV technology-- today's low cost panels are all outgrowth of the technologies developed in the Low Cost Solar Array (LSA) project (later renamed Flat-Plate Solar Array project) run by JPL and DOE in the 70s to early 1980s: http://authors.library.caltech...
We should give some credit to the Australians as well, particularly the group at University of New South Wales under Martin Green that did a lot of work pushing solar panel efficiency up. But the Germans? Yes, they did some good work too, but the US and Australian research really drove the field.
Because all renewable power generation goes offline at the same time,
Different forms of renewable power generation go offline at different times, and geographically separated sources don't go offline in synch. One thing you can count on is that solar power generation stops at night, but this is a known time dependence, and hence can be accounted for in scheduling; not an intermittancy, which is the hardest interruption to handle.
and there's no way to store electricity.
It's also not true that there's no way to store electricity. You should know better than that, you've never heard of batteries? What you probably mean to say is that electrical storage is too expensive to be economically viable. That statement, however, is disputable. Definitely in places where hydropower is stored in reservoirs this is untrue, and new battery, fuel cell, compressed-air, and even flywheel technologies are coming online with decreases in price.
Slashdot Mirror
A properly administered free-market system that allows insurers to cross state lines and removes a lot of the useless regulatory BS that makes practitioners hesitant to treat people will save tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people who will otherwise die thanks to the Obamacare act.
Bullshit. Pure, unmitigated bullshit. America has the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Here's a clue for the clueless: it's not because of government regulation, and it was the most expensive in the world (and one of the worst) even before Obama was elected. The "socialist" healthcare systems of Europe are both cheaper and also better. Yeah, libertarianism works great --when you've never been outside your basement.
Here's what laissez-faire capitalist healthcare really looks like: the health care conglomerates soak sick people for all they can take, because sick people don't have the resources to bargain. Then, when they run out of money, you let them die. For the conglomerates, it's like a money spigot.
For the sick people, of course, it's a death trap with the added feature that it bankrupts you, too.
Man, poverty in Silicon Valley is brutal. Maybe they have food stamps, though.
Five years! That's like, an eternity. He'll be, like, almost thirty before he can afford that house, all wrinkled up and probably almost senile by then. How can he stand waiting that long?
"..who earns a base salary of $160,000 a year, said his earnings are "pretty bad", adding that he pays $3000 rent for a two-bedroom house in San Francisco...."
I really feel for this poor downtrodden guy, having to shell out a whopping $36,000 out of his $160K salary just for a lousy two-bedroom house in a fabulous neighborhood, leaving him a bare $124,000 dollars a year to live on.
Maybe he could apply for foodstamps to keep him from starving to death in case he can't pay for his next meal on those starvation wages.
It's charmingly naive of you to think that our bad health has nothing to do with our health care system, probably the worst in the developed world, and definitely the most expensive in the developed world. (And I assume you've never been outside the U.S., since you seem to think nobody in the rest of the world smokes.)
But, whether in health care or in something else, we're at the bottom of the list in the developed world. Whatever it is we're doing-- we should do something else.
In the future when robots take everybody's jobs because they are better than human at everything, who do you think is going to be defending the rich people? Robots.
See, now, your head is on straight. We are not going to find ourselves living in a world where billions of people have no job and no means of supporting themselves and surviving. It won't be allowed to happen because if it does then that means there will be a War to End All Wars...
Well, maybe the unemployed proles might try to start "a war to end all wars." But one of the jobs that gets obsolete first is soldier, and the rich guys who own the robots also control all the robot armies. So that "war to end all wars" will end all wars because the robots will win so quickly.
You'd think scientist would be pushing for LOWERING the lifespan of humans...
I'm not sure why you would think this. In general, scientists are not assholes, despite what the blogosphere would have you believe.
I can't assert that about Slashdot commenters, on the other hand.
As for the United States, the life expectancy is "predicted to be among the lowest of these countries by 2030; 80 for men (similar to the Czech Republic) and 83 for women (similar to Mexico)."
I'm quite horrified that all the commentary on the article is almost entirely sarcasm and jokes. In fact, this is relatively horrifying. Not only is the life expectancy in the U.S. currently less than that in any of the developed countries in Europe, it's decreasing.
This is bad. It's easy enough to make fun of Europe's universal health care, but apparently they're doing something right.
"The culprits for our declining years, the report says, were increases in mortality from heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, unintentional injuries, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, kidney disease and suicide. Not surprisingly, that group plus cancer and the flu make up the top 10 causes of death in the U.S....
He (the report author) did highlight a 3% increase in "unintentional injuries." The heading includes, among other things, traffic accidents and drug overdoses — both of which often involve relatively young victims whose deaths can have a strong impact on the numbers."
source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
See also:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/08/...
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/12/08/504667607/life-expectancy-in-u-s-drops-for-first-time-in-decades-report-finds
Isn't it a bit strange that they won't approve a Dragon capsule for human use without a full unmanned test, yet now they are going to risk lives without a test on the SLS? At least the Dragon has a reasonable escape system.
You apparently have not have noticed it, but there is a new presidential administration out there. This was a request from the new administration's transition team for NASA to look into the possibility of putting crew on the flight.
That's only temporal: was it a bad idea, and should we hang someone for not stopping it? Bad ideas don't become good ideas just because they've already done their damage.
No. But spent money doesn't become unspent money because you've changed your mind.
The new part here isn't the circum lunar test flight of the SLS rocket in itself. It's adding crew to the circum-lunar launch.
The Obama space malaise was Obama killing the Shuttle
Obama did not kill the shuttle. Bush killed the shuttle.
and Project Constellation and not providing an adequate replacement.
Bush designated Constellation to replace the shuttle, but did not appropriate funds to build it. Bush also started the Commercial Access to Space Station program, which funded the development of the SpaceX Falcon-9 and the Orbital Cygnus.
Obama commissioned a study of the Constellation program, the Augustine Commission, which concluded that Constellation should either be fully funded or else cancelled (and pointed out that there was no little of Congress fully funding it.) Obama then killed Constellation, in favor of the commercial programs which were looking very successful so far (and which, to be fair, had been started by Bush.)
The rocket is being built already, you know. The question here is whether the first launch, which is already scheduled, should carry humans around the moon, or carry an empty capsule around the moon.
So the deep pockets win again.
Uh, the University of California system has a 28.5 billion dollar annual budget. I'd call their pockets pretty deep.
Well just so you know the problem here isn't coal, ...
Right. The problems in India are
1. Construction dust
2. Vehicular emissions,
3. burning fields after harvest.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi/delhi-chokes-on-smoke-from-neighbouring-states/story-zAkXkflle5MoUXLNYfZa0H.html
Presumably the air pollution is coming from some activities that raise living standards to afford clean water, public hospitals, health insurance, and reduced crime.
Nope.
In India, the worst of the air pollution is generated from burning fields after harvest. There are other technologies to clear the fields, such as a tractor-mounted seeder, which is actually better for the fields, as well as for the air-- but they cost over a thousand dollars each, far too much for the small farmers.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi/delhi-chokes-on-smoke-from-neighbouring-states/story-zAkXkflle5MoUXLNYfZa0H.html
http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/delhi-air-poolution-in-haryana-farmers-say-burning-fields-their-only-option-3739415/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/world/asia/farmers-unchecked-crop-burning-fuels-indias-air-pollution.html?_r=0
It's actually quite responsible for them to stop selling the unit, rather than continuing to sell product that they know has a problem, which is what many companies in the past have done.
huh what? No computers communicate at a terabit per second.
Gen-X and boomers moved a lot when young because they got job offers and moved to take the job.
If the only jobs around are fast food and retail, there's no reason to move-- there are McDongles and Arpies all over.
Hmm. I get all my news from news.google.com. I wonder if that's just as bad?
Seems pretty unlikely as cops generally don't hang around bathrooms
Sure they do.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2016/05/long_beach_police_rebuked_for_illegal_anti_gay_stings.html
http://www.sunherald.com/news/local/crime/article81336687.html
http://fox2now.com/2016/04/28/sex-busts-in-st-louis-park-bathrooms-lead-to-surprising-plea-deal/
https://www.queerty.com/long-beach-police-accused-of-illegally-targeting-gay-man-in-bathroom-sex-sting-20160304
http://www.newnownext.com/aggressive-cop-forces-gay-woman-out-of-womens-bathroom-for-not-having-id/04/2016/
and with cameras, too:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/02/09/colb.restroom/index.html?_s=PM:LAW
https://www.glapn.org/sodomylaws/usa/ohio/ohnews21.htm
https://www.datalounge.com/thread/7715912-the-police-film-of-the-1962-mansfield-ohio-undercover-men-s-bathroom-sting
The social expression of ones sex (gender) is disproved by... genetics? Genes govern whether we wear trousers or skirts? If we like pink or blue? If we are tops or bottoms? Or did you mean sex? The physical expression of ones genes.
And this, in a nutshell, is a large part of the problem. The words sex and gender are used by different people to mean different things.
Yes, your particular subculture has decided to define gender to mean "whether we wear trousers or skirts. If we like pink or blue." This particular definition has not been adopted universally within the English language.
From Merriam Webster, you apparently think definition 2b is the only definition
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender
Definition of gender
1
a : a subclass within a grammatical class (as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms
b : membership of a word or a grammatical form in such a subclass
c : an inflectional form (see inflection 3a) showing membership in such a subclass
2
a : sex ("the feminine gender")
b : the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex
Dorsey can do whatever the frick he wants to do.
Whatever the frick??
Is frick the new frak, now that fracking means fracking instead of frigging?
I think I'm two swear words behind the gimes
Or at least have a new rule that the first post has to be an xkcd.
with regards to the actual R&D, German companies can take credit for industry standard wind turbine, PV, and inverter technology.
I'll challenge that. German companies may have done the industrialiation of wind turbines, but when you're talking about the "actual R&D", they built on the R&D that was done at NASA, who built the first multi-megawatt scale wind turbine back in the mid 1970s, when the biggest production units were 20 kW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And the same is true of PV technology-- today's low cost panels are all outgrowth of the technologies developed in the Low Cost Solar Array (LSA) project (later renamed Flat-Plate Solar Array project) run by JPL and DOE in the 70s to early 1980s: http://authors.library.caltech...
We should give some credit to the Australians as well, particularly the group at University of New South Wales under Martin Green that did a lot of work pushing solar panel efficiency up. But the Germans? Yes, they did some good work too, but the US and Australian research really drove the field.
Because all renewable power generation goes offline at the same time,
Different forms of renewable power generation go offline at different times, and geographically separated sources don't go offline in synch. One thing you can count on is that solar power generation stops at night, but this is a known time dependence, and hence can be accounted for in scheduling; not an intermittancy, which is the hardest interruption to handle.
and there's no way to store electricity.
It's also not true that there's no way to store electricity. You should know better than that, you've never heard of batteries? What you probably mean to say is that electrical storage is too expensive to be economically viable. That statement, however, is disputable. Definitely in places where hydropower is stored in reservoirs this is untrue, and new battery, fuel cell, compressed-air, and even flywheel technologies are coming online with decreases in price.