Unless there's evidence he had it before she disappeared, so what? When I was going to court to fight a speeding ticket I went and got a bunch of books on traffic prosecutions. If I was a suspect in a murder, sure thing I'd read up on the topic.
Of course, being a reader is of itself grounds for suspicion in contemporary America.
Thorium where it is found is a good and efficient nuclear fuel source...It actually amazes me we don't use Thorium more.
Thorium isn't fissile, so it's not just a matter of swapping U for Th.
Current fission reactors are based on same chain reaction that makes nuclear weapons work. Some people want to breed Th into U to keep using these reactor designs, but the cool thing about Th is that you can use it in a subcritical accelerator-driven system. This is a truly safe form of nuclear reactor - pull the plug and the reaction stops, no way that it can melt down. It can actually "burn off" nuclear waste. And because no plutonium is created and the mix of uranium isotopes it produces is hard to weaponize, it's proliferation resistant and not a terrorist target the way a conventional plant is. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium, and easier to mine and process.
If fission has a future, it's accelerator-driven systems. We ought to be putting our reasources toward funding the R&D needed to deploy them instead of building dirty and dangerous uranium or plutonium fission plants.
The most distressing part of all this is that the citizens of the United States have come to love liberty so little that when a agent of the state wants to fuck them with a sample swab, wants to remove a part of their living body, they won't fight.
Can you imaging the response of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington to the government demanding tributes of flesh from citizens?
The sovereignty of the government ends at my skin. You want a DNA sample? Get a warrant and see what you dead skin you can find in my bed (the samples with the Y chromosome are mine, guys), or arrest me and give me a bucket toilet and pull a sample out of my shit. But I will not voluntarily give up even a microgram of living flesh to the government. Yes, they'll probably get able to get a lot of samples out of my blood on the floor after they beat me, but I'll mix as much of theirs with it as I can. I will not let the government inside my body, and this is a bright and clear line I will fight for.
I'm not a Christian, but I always liked Jesus's line about the separation of church and state: render onto Caesar what is Caesar's, and onto God what is God's. My body does not belong to Caesar, and I will render no part of it onto him.
So, yes, if it comes to that: you can have my DNA when you extract it from my cold dead hand.
I don't habitually defend Microsoft, but I completely disagree with you here. At work we're migrating away from Notes...
Well, that's damning with faint praise.
The whole Outlook/Notes notion of "collaboration" or "messaging" software is broken from the start. You want to know what the F/OSS replacement is? It's a collection of tools that follow the Unix philosophy: do one thing and do it well. Avoid these bloated monstrosities to start with.
Set up a mail server that only does mail. Give everyone a POP3 or IMAP client. Set up some local newsgroups for ongoing group discussions, and give everyone a news client. Set up an internal website with a wiki or CMS like Drupal for collaboration on documents, or use shared folders.
Not only is Ethanol shortsighted it is exactly the wrong direction for us to take. Ethanol is taken from food sources...
But ethanol doesn't have to be, and should not be, taken from food sources.
We should be working towards decentralized production of cellulosic ethanol from waste biomass. Decentralized production - you (or maybe your neighborhood) have your own still, feed it your lawn clippings and vegetable peels and autumn leaves, out comes alcohol. No piping.
Ethanol from food crops is indeed stupid, and has more to do with enriching agribusiness than solving energy supply issues.
YOU can't, because you're unable to conveive of a method of ruling out human perception as an affecting variable in an experiment.
No. You can't do an experiment to see what happens when no observation is being made, because doing an experiment involves making an observation. It has nothing to do anyone being "narrow minded and short sighted", it has to do with a logical impossibility.
We're not talking about using methods to reduce observational biases; we're talking about what is and is not ultimately observable. What happens in the absence of observation is by definition not observable.
You can't see what someone would see if there was no one around to see, because if you're there to see it, then it's not the case that no one was around to see. See?
We assume that what we see is the same as what's there when we're not there to see it. It's proved a useful working assumption - an assumption so deep that most of us are unaware of it. It's probably wired into our nervous system, a sort of intellectual equivalent of the persistence of vision.
But if we're going to have a philosophical discussion about the nature of knowledge, we need to list all of our axioms. "The universe continues to exist and behave in the same way whether observed or not" is an axiom, not a demonstrable fact.
because any theory that axiomatizes the universe (which is to say, any set of sentences which is true of the universe and exhausts all sentences about it) must include all sentences about the natural numbers.
How's that follow? Not all natural numbers, nor all relationships between them, will be observed within the physical universe, which is finite in both area and time. A complete description of the universe need only describe all the observed data.
Indeed, all the observations that will ever be made will be a finite set. Bam, there's a trivial way to get a theory that axiomatizes the universe: after it runs down, go back and collect every observation ever made, and there's a finite set of axioms that completely describe the universe. (Or, collect all observations up to time T, then destroy the universe. Whichever.)
All statements about reality are statements about human observation; all physical laws are just patterns seen in observations. What is "real" outside of human observation is not answerable.
The idea that reality continues when no one is looking is a convenient simplifying assumption, but is ultimately, by definition, not determinable - you can't do the experiment to check.
A better way to handle that is to turn the loop body into a function or group of functions.
Only if the function, or group of functions, represent natural borders on encapsulation. People who create arbitrary subroutines out of some misguided notion that a a function/procedure/method should not be longer than N lines, don't understand the basic concept of encapsulation.
This applies mostly to programmers who write functions. Developers who create objects with methods usually don't require blocks of code "pages" long.
Oh, please. Don't put on object-oriented airs. A "method" ain't a nothing more than a function associated with a class..
A function (method, procedure, subroutine) should be just as long as it has to be to encapsulate the work it's doing. Sometimes that's one line. Sometimes it's pages.
Breaking those pages of code into a bunch of other subroutines solely on some misguided notion that a function shouldn't be longer than N lines, makes for code that is harder to understand an maintain.
By this logic if I want the government to keep people from looting my collection of paintings I need to ensure that nobody has an undecorated house.
Not at all. People are quite capable of decorating their own houses; if you own all the paintings in the world, I can still make a new one. But if you own all the land in the world - as homes or as farms - I can't make new land to live on or to farm.
A painting is a product of human labor. Land is not. If you want to claim land - which you did not create - as your own and exclude the rest of the human race, you owe something in return.
The danger is that when you make something "free" you reduce the incentive to produce it in the first place.
Food literally grows on trees; the fact that we need to "produce" it gets at the fact that we've been building society on a crooked foundation since the Neolithic revolution. And no one "produces" real estate. (The buildings on them, yes; but just about anyone can put up a shanty from salvage if they have some land. You ought to see some of the huts that homeless Japanese have built in the public parks in Osaka.)
the new drugs that are patented would likely not exist at all if it weren't for the huge incentives to develop them (regardless of whether the basic research came out of a government lab).
Of course they could exist, if the government lab continued on to do full development. Or private development could continue with a different sort of incentive: model it after the X Prize. $100,000,000 for whoever develops an AIDS vaccine, but the vaccine is free for anyone to make.
And even if government did all the work the cost would end up probably about the same (or likely higher) - the only thing that would change would be the distribution of the costs.
Nonsense. A private company needs to make back the cost of research plus a profit. A publicly financed lab needs only to take in the cost of research, without having to feed parasitic investors.
The problem is that it has a really crazy pricing system that tends to defeat the controls that govern most markets.
That's the nature of health care. It doesn't fit the preconditions necessary for a market to function effectively.
I know, I know: to some ideologues out there, to whom the "free market" is a manifestation of the divine, it's blasphemy to say that there are conditions where markets don't work. But they only work where buyer and sellers meet with full knowledge, equal power, and no externalized costs.
Buyers and sellers of health care do not meet with full knowledge: not only does your doctor know a lot more than you, but diagnosis and treatment are intricately intertwined. It's not like, "We won't know what the problem is until we do the exploratory surgery. We'll bring you out of the anesthesia and give you and estimate then, and you can decide if you want to have the work done here or shop around for a better price..."
They don't meet with equal power. If I have the treatment you need to survive - especially if I have a monopoly on it through the patent process, or if you need it immediately and have no time to shop around - I have a hell of a lot more power than you do.
And not all costs are accounted for: there are tremendous external costs when people don't have health care or choose not to get their conditions treated, because many diseases are contagious.
If your neighbor doesn't get his TB treated, if your future girlfriend's current boyfriend doesn't get that the little problem checked out, if the postal worker who feels sick after handling that funny looking package from (insert bioterrorist haven here) doesn't get checked out before he coughs on you, you're at risk.
Basic health care is part of the government's mandate to provide for the common defense, especially as bioterrorist threats grow.
So I guess the only solution is to nationalize the means of production, distribution etc of foodstuffs?
Completely nationalize it? No. But the means of food production, distribution, et cetera, are very heavily regulated, from farm policy to food stamps. (And if a food emergency hit, yes, nationalizing the food supply might be the best option.)
Freedom that doesn't include the possibility of failure isn't Freedom.
But the poster wasn't asking about a situation with no possibility of failure. Just softening the landing of one does fail.
I see no reason for you (using the power of government) to seize the product of my labor to help the asshole out.
But yet, if said asshole sets up camp on your front lawn, you want to use the power of government to move him. (To where?) And you want to use the power of government to seize the product of my labor to make me pay for the police force to do it.
Paying for a social safety net is the ante you owe if you want to play the game of private property. If you want to border off some land for your home and keep others off, use government force to turn land into real estate, the price you owe is providing everyone minimal shelter. If you want to border off some land to make a farm and keep the harvest to yourself, turn the bounty of the earth into agricultural commodities - again, using government force - the price is making sure nobody starves. If you want the government to issue patents on drugs, use government force to keep people from making copies in order to secure profits to big pharma, you have to make sure no one dies from lack of access to them.
In America when we walk in and say "Check for X" it takes them... that day to get whatever fluids and scans, and then in 2-3 days the test results come back from the lab.
For some people. For others, it takes them forever, because the tests don't get done, because the patient can't afford them.
In America people do not wait months for basic services.
Of course people wait. They wait to get that little problem looked at until they get a job with health insurance and the pre-existing condition exclusion period is over. Or they wait - wait forever - because they can't afford the services.
Nah, you aren't going to give up on socialism.
"Socialized medicine" really has nothing to do with whether you have an economic system based on the exchange of labor (socialism) or on the private ownership of economic resources (capitalism). It's entirely possible to have a health care system in a libertarian socialist system that would not be government run, and it's possible to have a capitalist government run healthcare system. (Such as Clinton's latest offering, which would make us all buy from private insurers. The worst of both worlds!)
A better term - and one less likely to trigger the conditioned reflexes of Americans who don't know what socialism is other than that it's the devil's work - would be "public medicine." Like public libraries, public roads, public parks, public fire service, public police...
if this bill passes, millions will start getting tested so that we'll know what wonderful surprises await us in our waning years
And? Genetic testing doesn't give you a guarantee your won't get cancer or whatever. It's just an enhanced version of the family history information we've always known.
I've always known that my paternal grandfather had adult-onset diabetes, that both my grandfathers required multiple bypass surgery, that my mom has high blood pressure, than a distant umpity-great aunt was institutionalized after running down the street naked chasing someone with a knife. My insurer knows none of this. (My insurer also doesn't know that I eat a vegan diet, exercise regularly, and get acupuncture and massage and do meditation to relieve stress.)
Healthy people will self-select *out* of the private insurance system. The only people who will buy insurance will be the ones who already know they'll get sick. But again, that's already the case.
Stupid healthy people, perhaps.
The best way to stay healthy is to seek care at the first sign of trouble. If you don't have insurance, or have a high deductible plan, you have an incentive to wait - hey, maybe it'll go away on its own, and treatment would be expensive anyway, so I'll assume the best. So you wait. And by the time you get seen, the tumor has grown or the infection has spread or whatever, and your prognosis is worse, and your treatment more expensive.
If you have a plan with a low co-pay, you call your doctor as soon as you feel that lump where there shouldn't be one - hey, it's only a $20 office visit, and treatment would be covered. So you get treated while it's still simple. And cheap.
And of course being genetically healthy doesn't protect you against accidental injury.
If you can afford it (and of course that's the rub), failing to buy health insurance is dumb.
There are good reasons to move to single payer, sure. But banning genetic discrimination adds nothing to the issue.
Because insurance companies manage their rates based on trackable probabilities and their claims history.
Yes, of course. But what does that have to do with the submitter's claim that banning genetic discrimination means the end of private insurance?
We've had private insurance for a long time without genetic discrimination, because genetic discrimination wasn't possible. This legislation bans genetic discrimination, thus keeping the status quo on this issue. How does that mean the end of private insurance?
You're taking something for free that you were supposed to pay for. That obviously is wrong.
Supposed to pay for? Says who?
I say you're supposed to pay me a dollar for every breath you take. At a textbook value of twelve breaths a minute, let's see, that'll be $17,280 a day. $6,307,200 for every year of your age. (I'm giving you leap days for free.)
All claims of "property rights" that originate from government fiat - in other words, most of them, and certainly all copyrights - are just as arbitrary as the breathing charge I'm leveling on you. Governments just have more guns at their disposal to extract payment.
If you want to actually follow the law, you won't get out the door in the morning. It's almost inevitable that you will break some law today - fail to fix a minor building code violation in your house, use a pesticide or disinfectant in a manner contrary to its labeling, break a minor traffic law...there are so many laws that no one can hope to be compliant with them all.
I think this is where I first saw a calculation of Hg emissions: if mercury emissions are about 0.079 mg/kWh, and a CFL saves 296 kWh of electricity over its lifetime, then 23 mg of mercury emissions are prevented. Even if you take one quarter of the mercury emissions (the author of the linked page notes that his value is high), you still save 5.9 mg of mercury, more than the 5 mg in the bulb.
And of course if you recycle them, no mercury is emitted. (Well, maybe some trace.) If you live near a large city, there's probably an IkeaMOM's stores collect CFLs for recycling.
You don't have a 4th Amendment right to cross the US border.
Amendment IX: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
As a U.S. Citizen, I have the right to re-enter the country. If citizenship doesn't include that, it's meaningless.
The feds can pick and choose which of dem dang furriners they let in, make 'em jump through flaming hoops or whatever. Fine, our policies may be rude and stupid but you're right, they don't have a right to enter the U.S. But I do, and they don't get to make me waive my rights to do so.
If there is nothing directly in it for the participating individual then any effort is too much.
There's nothing directly in it you you to use a toilet rather than taking a dump in the middle of the road, yet through legal and social means we've managed to get most people to use toilets.
Throwing away recyclables is an indication you're not housebroken yet.
It takes more energy to recycle glass or bimetal than to just make new stuff.
Citation needed. Wikipedia says glass recycling saves 5-30% of the energy, and 20% of the air pollution. Bimetal, I don't know about, but recycling aluminum can saves 95% of the energy, and steel 60%; recycling bimetal cans would only waste energy if it took a tremendous amount of energy to separate the parts, and if that's the case we ought to redesign or eliminate them.
I cannot put the majority of my trash because, even if it is technically recyclable, it is not marked for recycling.
Where do you live that paper, aluminum cans, and glass bottles, are supposed to be specially marked for recycling? Here in the U.S. the only things marked are plastic, so you can tell what type it is. It was the same way when I was in Japan (where they do a tremendous job of recycling).
the usa's hesitance to use breeder reactors (because they make bomb grade materials). but if you use breeder reactors, you have a tenth of the nuclear fuel waste which loses its radioactivity in a few centuries, rather in 10,000s of years, AND you get way more energy output.
And you have plutonium factories all over the place. If you don't see the problem with that. Google the news for "Iran nuclear".
>
And remember that that these plutonium factories would not be built to U.S. safety standards, no; many would be being built in China or other developing nations.
If you don't see the problem with that. Google the news for "China contaminated".
And the waste problem remains unsolved.
as uranium runs out, use thorium like india.
Skip uranium entirely. Go to an "energy amplifier", where thorium is hit with a proton beam. It's subcritical - pull the plug and it shuts down. It's proliferation-resistant, and it can even be used to burn up plutonium. And it produces a lot less waste.
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Unless there's evidence he had it before she disappeared, so what? When I was going to court to fight a speeding ticket I went and got a bunch of books on traffic prosecutions. If I was a suspect in a murder, sure thing I'd read up on the topic.
Of course, being a reader is of itself grounds for suspicion in contemporary America.
Thorium isn't fissile, so it's not just a matter of swapping U for Th.
Current fission reactors are based on same chain reaction that makes nuclear weapons work. Some people want to breed Th into U to keep using these reactor designs, but the cool thing about Th is that you can use it in a subcritical accelerator-driven system. This is a truly safe form of nuclear reactor - pull the plug and the reaction stops, no way that it can melt down. It can actually "burn off" nuclear waste. And because no plutonium is created and the mix of uranium isotopes it produces is hard to weaponize, it's proliferation resistant and not a terrorist target the way a conventional plant is. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium, and easier to mine and process.
If fission has a future, it's accelerator-driven systems. We ought to be putting our reasources toward funding the R&D needed to deploy them instead of building dirty and dangerous uranium or plutonium fission plants.
The most distressing part of all this is that the citizens of the United States have come to love liberty so little that when a agent of the state wants to fuck them with a sample swab, wants to remove a part of their living body, they won't fight.
Can you imaging the response of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington to the government demanding tributes of flesh from citizens?
The sovereignty of the government ends at my skin. You want a DNA sample? Get a warrant and see what you dead skin you can find in my bed (the samples with the Y chromosome are mine, guys), or arrest me and give me a bucket toilet and pull a sample out of my shit. But I will not voluntarily give up even a microgram of living flesh to the government. Yes, they'll probably get able to get a lot of samples out of my blood on the floor after they beat me, but I'll mix as much of theirs with it as I can. I will not let the government inside my body, and this is a bright and clear line I will fight for.
I'm not a Christian, but I always liked Jesus's line about the separation of church and state: render onto Caesar what is Caesar's, and onto God what is God's. My body does not belong to Caesar, and I will render no part of it onto him.
So, yes, if it comes to that: you can have my DNA when you extract it from my cold dead hand.
Well, that's damning with faint praise.
The whole Outlook/Notes notion of "collaboration" or "messaging" software is broken from the start. You want to know what the F/OSS replacement is? It's a collection of tools that follow the Unix philosophy: do one thing and do it well. Avoid these bloated monstrosities to start with.
Set up a mail server that only does mail. Give everyone a POP3 or IMAP client. Set up some local newsgroups for ongoing group discussions, and give everyone a news client. Set up an internal website with a wiki or CMS like Drupal for collaboration on documents, or use shared folders.
If you did have stuff that justified $3,000 in security spending, I think better locks and a loud alarm would be more useful than video cameras.
But ethanol doesn't have to be, and should not be, taken from food sources.
We should be working towards decentralized production of cellulosic ethanol from waste biomass. Decentralized production - you (or maybe your neighborhood) have your own still, feed it your lawn clippings and vegetable peels and autumn leaves, out comes alcohol. No piping.
Ethanol from food crops is indeed stupid, and has more to do with enriching agribusiness than solving energy supply issues.
No. You can't do an experiment to see what happens when no observation is being made, because doing an experiment involves making an observation. It has nothing to do anyone being "narrow minded and short sighted", it has to do with a logical impossibility.
We're not talking about using methods to reduce observational biases; we're talking about what is and is not ultimately observable. What happens in the absence of observation is by definition not observable.
You can't see what someone would see if there was no one around to see, because if you're there to see it, then it's not the case that no one was around to see. See?
We assume that what we see is the same as what's there when we're not there to see it. It's proved a useful working assumption - an assumption so deep that most of us are unaware of it. It's probably wired into our nervous system, a sort of intellectual equivalent of the persistence of vision.
But if we're going to have a philosophical discussion about the nature of knowledge, we need to list all of our axioms. "The universe continues to exist and behave in the same way whether observed or not" is an axiom, not a demonstrable fact.
How's that follow? Not all natural numbers, nor all relationships between them, will be observed within the physical universe, which is finite in both area and time. A complete description of the universe need only describe all the observed data.
Indeed, all the observations that will ever be made will be a finite set. Bam, there's a trivial way to get a theory that axiomatizes the universe: after it runs down, go back and collect every observation ever made, and there's a finite set of axioms that completely describe the universe. (Or, collect all observations up to time T, then destroy the universe. Whichever.)
All statements about reality are statements about human observation; all physical laws are just patterns seen in observations. What is "real" outside of human observation is not answerable.
The idea that reality continues when no one is looking is a convenient simplifying assumption, but is ultimately, by definition, not determinable - you can't do the experiment to check.
Only if the function, or group of functions, represent natural borders on encapsulation. People who create arbitrary subroutines out of some misguided notion that a a function/procedure/method should not be longer than N lines, don't understand the basic concept of encapsulation.
Oh, please. Don't put on object-oriented airs. A "method" ain't a nothing more than a function associated with a class..
A function (method, procedure, subroutine) should be just as long as it has to be to encapsulate the work it's doing. Sometimes that's one line. Sometimes it's pages.
Breaking those pages of code into a bunch of other subroutines solely on some misguided notion that a function shouldn't be longer than N lines, makes for code that is harder to understand an maintain.
Not at all. People are quite capable of decorating their own houses; if you own all the paintings in the world, I can still make a new one. But if you own all the land in the world - as homes or as farms - I can't make new land to live on or to farm.
A painting is a product of human labor. Land is not. If you want to claim land - which you did not create - as your own and exclude the rest of the human race, you owe something in return.
Food literally grows on trees; the fact that we need to "produce" it gets at the fact that we've been building society on a crooked foundation since the Neolithic revolution. And no one "produces" real estate. (The buildings on them, yes; but just about anyone can put up a shanty from salvage if they have some land. You ought to see some of the huts that homeless Japanese have built in the public parks in Osaka.)
Of course they could exist, if the government lab continued on to do full development. Or private development could continue with a different sort of incentive: model it after the X Prize. $100,000,000 for whoever develops an AIDS vaccine, but the vaccine is free for anyone to make.
Nonsense. A private company needs to make back the cost of research plus a profit. A publicly financed lab needs only to take in the cost of research, without having to feed parasitic investors.
That's the nature of health care. It doesn't fit the preconditions necessary for a market to function effectively.
I know, I know: to some ideologues out there, to whom the "free market" is a manifestation of the divine, it's blasphemy to say that there are conditions where markets don't work. But they only work where buyer and sellers meet with full knowledge, equal power, and no externalized costs.
Buyers and sellers of health care do not meet with full knowledge: not only does your doctor know a lot more than you, but diagnosis and treatment are intricately intertwined. It's not like, "We won't know what the problem is until we do the exploratory surgery. We'll bring you out of the anesthesia and give you and estimate then, and you can decide if you want to have the work done here or shop around for a better price..."
They don't meet with equal power. If I have the treatment you need to survive - especially if I have a monopoly on it through the patent process, or if you need it immediately and have no time to shop around - I have a hell of a lot more power than you do.
And not all costs are accounted for: there are tremendous external costs when people don't have health care or choose not to get their conditions treated, because many diseases are contagious.
If your neighbor doesn't get his TB treated, if your future girlfriend's current boyfriend doesn't get that the little problem checked out, if the postal worker who feels sick after handling that funny looking package from (insert bioterrorist haven here) doesn't get checked out before he coughs on you, you're at risk.
Basic health care is part of the government's mandate to provide for the common defense, especially as bioterrorist threats grow.
Completely nationalize it? No. But the means of food production, distribution, et cetera, are very heavily regulated, from farm policy to food stamps. (And if a food emergency hit, yes, nationalizing the food supply might be the best option.)
But the poster wasn't asking about a situation with no possibility of failure. Just softening the landing of one does fail.
But yet, if said asshole sets up camp on your front lawn, you want to use the power of government to move him. (To where?) And you want to use the power of government to seize the product of my labor to make me pay for the police force to do it.
Paying for a social safety net is the ante you owe if you want to play the game of private property. If you want to border off some land for your home and keep others off, use government force to turn land into real estate, the price you owe is providing everyone minimal shelter. If you want to border off some land to make a farm and keep the harvest to yourself, turn the bounty of the earth into agricultural commodities - again, using government force - the price is making sure nobody starves. If you want the government to issue patents on drugs, use government force to keep people from making copies in order to secure profits to big pharma, you have to make sure no one dies from lack of access to them.
For some people. For others, it takes them forever, because the tests don't get done, because the patient can't afford them.
Of course people wait. They wait to get that little problem looked at until they get a job with health insurance and the pre-existing condition exclusion period is over. Or they wait - wait forever - because they can't afford the services.
"Socialized medicine" really has nothing to do with whether you have an economic system based on the exchange of labor (socialism) or on the private ownership of economic resources (capitalism). It's entirely possible to have a health care system in a libertarian socialist system that would not be government run, and it's possible to have a capitalist government run healthcare system. (Such as Clinton's latest offering, which would make us all buy from private insurers. The worst of both worlds!)
A better term - and one less likely to trigger the conditioned reflexes of Americans who don't know what socialism is other than that it's the devil's work - would be "public medicine." Like public libraries, public roads, public parks, public fire service, public police...
And? Genetic testing doesn't give you a guarantee your won't get cancer or whatever. It's just an enhanced version of the family history information we've always known.
I've always known that my paternal grandfather had adult-onset diabetes, that both my grandfathers required multiple bypass surgery, that my mom has high blood pressure, than a distant umpity-great aunt was institutionalized after running down the street naked chasing someone with a knife. My insurer knows none of this. (My insurer also doesn't know that I eat a vegan diet, exercise regularly, and get acupuncture and massage and do meditation to relieve stress.)
Stupid healthy people, perhaps.
The best way to stay healthy is to seek care at the first sign of trouble. If you don't have insurance, or have a high deductible plan, you have an incentive to wait - hey, maybe it'll go away on its own, and treatment would be expensive anyway, so I'll assume the best. So you wait. And by the time you get seen, the tumor has grown or the infection has spread or whatever, and your prognosis is worse, and your treatment more expensive.
If you have a plan with a low co-pay, you call your doctor as soon as you feel that lump where there shouldn't be one - hey, it's only a $20 office visit, and treatment would be covered. So you get treated while it's still simple. And cheap.
And of course being genetically healthy doesn't protect you against accidental injury.
If you can afford it (and of course that's the rub), failing to buy health insurance is dumb.
There are good reasons to move to single payer, sure. But banning genetic discrimination adds nothing to the issue.
Yes, of course. But what does that have to do with the submitter's claim that banning genetic discrimination means the end of private insurance?
We've had private insurance for a long time without genetic discrimination, because genetic discrimination wasn't possible. This legislation bans genetic discrimination, thus keeping the status quo on this issue. How does that mean the end of private insurance?
We've had private insurance with no genetic testing for a long time how.
How is keeping the second condition going to mandate the end of the first? It's ridiculous.
Supposed to pay for? Says who?
I say you're supposed to pay me a dollar for every breath you take. At a textbook value of twelve breaths a minute, let's see, that'll be $17,280 a day. $6,307,200 for every year of your age. (I'm giving you leap days for free.)
All claims of "property rights" that originate from government fiat - in other words, most of them, and certainly all copyrights - are just as arbitrary as the breathing charge I'm leveling on you. Governments just have more guns at their disposal to extract payment.
If you want to actually follow the law, you won't get out the door in the morning. It's almost inevitable that you will break some law today - fail to fix a minor building code violation in your house, use a pesticide or disinfectant in a manner contrary to its labeling, break a minor traffic law...there are so many laws that no one can hope to be compliant with them all.
Yes, about 5 mg per bulb is right (though falling as technology improves).
I think this is where I first saw a calculation of Hg emissions: if mercury emissions are about 0.079 mg/kWh, and a CFL saves 296 kWh of electricity over its lifetime, then 23 mg of mercury emissions are prevented. Even if you take one quarter of the mercury emissions (the author of the linked page notes that his value is high), you still save 5.9 mg of mercury, more than the 5 mg in the bulb.
And of course if you recycle them, no mercury is emitted. (Well, maybe some trace.) If you live near a large city, there's probably an IkeaMOM's stores collect CFLs for recycling.
Amendment IX: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
As a U.S. Citizen, I have the right to re-enter the country. If citizenship doesn't include that, it's meaningless.
The feds can pick and choose which of dem dang furriners they let in, make 'em jump through flaming hoops or whatever. Fine, our policies may be rude and stupid but you're right, they don't have a right to enter the U.S. But I do, and they don't get to make me waive my rights to do so.
There's nothing directly in it you you to use a toilet rather than taking a dump in the middle of the road, yet through legal and social means we've managed to get most people to use toilets.
Throwing away recyclables is an indication you're not housebroken yet.
Citation needed. Wikipedia says glass recycling saves 5-30% of the energy, and 20% of the air pollution. Bimetal, I don't know about, but recycling aluminum can saves 95% of the energy, and steel 60%; recycling bimetal cans would only waste energy if it took a tremendous amount of energy to separate the parts, and if that's the case we ought to redesign or eliminate them.
Where do you live that paper, aluminum cans, and glass bottles, are supposed to be specially marked for recycling? Here in the U.S. the only things marked are plastic, so you can tell what type it is. It was the same way when I was in Japan (where they do a tremendous job of recycling).
Uh, no, at least not nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium.
No. There's already been one accident with radiation release at a pebble bed reactor, and adding a whole bunch of graphite - the stuff that caught fire at Chernobyl - to a reactor is not a good idea.
And you have plutonium factories all over the place. If you don't see the problem with that. Google the news for "Iran nuclear". >
And remember that that these plutonium factories would not be built to U.S. safety standards, no; many would be being built in China or other developing nations. If you don't see the problem with that. Google the news for "China contaminated".
And the waste problem remains unsolved.
Skip uranium entirely. Go to an "energy amplifier", where thorium is hit with a proton beam. It's subcritical - pull the plug and it shuts down. It's proliferation-resistant, and it can even be used to burn up plutonium. And it produces a lot less waste.