Judging by the responses I've seen elsewhere in this thread, you apparently want the earth to go to hell.
We can phase in new taxes slowly, so that the poorest of the poor can adjust - perhaps even let the used car market acquire a few of these highly efficient machines. Or we can say the hell with it, and just let cars and gasoline be cheap, but then people are going to get upset that we're killing the earth. We have to make a choice, though, and CAFE is a poor way to do it.
it may be months or years before a person can afford to buy a better car
That's really what I was responding to. TBH I'm not really sure what his point was supposed to be; any change we make (in CAFE or gas tax) is going to result in a slow propagation through the national fleet as new vehicles are produced, and the only failure of market economics I can see would be failure to account for pollution (which is, of course, part of what fuel taxes are supposed to do). Raising CAFE standards doesn't do anything about that, so I'm unsure why he thinks it's a great solution.
What people need and what people want are two different things. They need oxygen, shelter, water, and food. Their wants are unlimited. Nimey seems to think that "people will drive smaller cars less often if gas is expensive" is bullshit, based on the fact that he sees SUVs barreling down the highway. It's obviously not bullshit; look at Europe. Yet people apparently attach a really high value to being able to drive large, comfortable vehicles.
That 1987 Corolla could not be sold with modern safety standards, FWIW, and unless the dog is quite small or the children fairly grown you're going to have a hell of time putting them all in the back seat.
... and so people will continue to use the hell out of it. If you want people to do less of something, tax it. Those who have no reasonable substitute will continue to pay for it, and those who can substitute will do so. This kind of meddling is far worse than just raising gas taxes.
Their point is that the US cannot and will not default - but it can cut government benefits. The outcome of refusal to raise the debt ceiling is unknown and probably unknowable right now, but it is apparent that their hope is to shrink government (I.e., what they've been after from the beginning). I doubt that they will succeed, but they do have one very good point: the US is on an unsustainable path. Sooner or later we will face a reckoning in which taxes will go way up and spending will go way down. That is going to cause a lot of problems. Delaying that day is unlikely to make those problems smaller.
They might even be persuaded to raise taxes, if they had any real reason to believe that Congress would hold to the spending cuts. I don't hold much hope of that happening.
Your lungs are able to extract oxygen from air because there is more oxygen in the air than in the blood. Your blood carries this oxygen to the tissue, where the blood has more oxygen than the tissue - the oxygen then diffuses into the tissue.
In theory, you could do this with an adequate flow of surface seawater (which has a partial pressure of O2 very similar to that of air), but the fact that the oxygen content of seawater is minuscule compared to the oxygen content of air means that you're going to need an enormous water flow. You should be able to extract about a fourth of the oxygen in the seawater before the partial pressure will go low enough that no further net diffusion of oxygen will occur (human not under load typically extract about a fifth, but let's be conservative here). Given that the oxygen content of fresh water is about 0.0089 g/L H2O, that's about 12.5 mL O2 per liter of water. Humans need about 250 mL O2 per minute at rest, so you'll need to extract all the oxygen from 20 L/min of fresh water saturated with air in order to supply each person. However, they're going to need at least four times that flow due to the difficulty of extraction, so now we're up to 80 L/min of water flow at rest, even if you don't consider the efficiency of the exchange process.
The way around this is to do something that captures more of the oxygen content of the water - usually by binding it to some intermediate (as we, and fish, do - hemoglobin is one such). The problem is that the human heart can't handle that level of cardiac output for it to happen within an all-blood system, and that any molecule which can extract a large measure of the oxygen available in water isn't going to give it up easily - it will have an oxygen dissociation curve that lets go a significant amount of the oxygen only at very low tissue pO2. Unfortunately for us, "tissue" in this case is the breathing-air side of the artificial lung. So you can choose chemical sequestration, but that presents the same problem - unless you can figure out some way for humans to live with much lower tissue pO2, you're going to have to expend a lot of energy dissociating that oxygen from whatever carrier you use to get it up to a usable concentration for humans. Fish have much lower metabolic oxygen requirements and so can live with lower tissue pO2.
The vast majority have some form of coverage. This is the first Google hit and says 85%. Of the 46 million who didn't, 10 million were not citizens, 14 million were eligible for coverage under Medicaid or SCHIP but had not actually applied, and over 14 million made more than $50k/yr (and so could presumably afford coverage). Those numbers come from some Census data and a Blue Cross study, and there may be some overlap among groups, but they should give you some idea of the general numbers. In short - about 90% are covered, a nontrivial portion of those who are not could afford to buy insurance but choose not to, and some would not be covered at all under any plan.
I can't speak for others, but when I was in medical school I paid about $150/mo for health insurance - this was during the early 2000s. My in-laws have a high deductible coverage (basically a traditional major medical) that covers the two of them for a little over $400/mo, and they're in their late 50s. He's a salesman working purely on commission, so it's not through an employer. $200 a month, per person, is pretty affordable for all but the poorest. If you don't have a job, of course, everything gets harder, but for those who have income it's less of a burden than many think.
I'm happy to help; our system is poorly understood even within this country. I'd like to address one more thing:
if I should need medical assistance I can go to any random doctor (and will be taken to the nearest hospital in case of emergency)
A doctor's office may choose to treat you on a cash basis (or not), but the emergency department does not have that choice. They must treat you for any acute issues, although this does nothing to handle chronic problems. The law is called EMTALA, and violations of it are severely punished. They can and will bill you for the services, of course, but in general the situation is much less dire than is imagined in much of the rest of the world - you cannot be left bleeding at the site of a car wreck for lack of insurance, which is one of the reasons that so many young, healthy people elect not to buy health insurance (even if they can afford it).
Because he receives the benefit. Police are like national defense: their benefit is largely to society as a whole, not to specific individuals. I can't tell you which police officer prevents my house from being robbed at night, because there is no one police officer that does so. It's the presence of a policing system that prevents that. By contrast, someone who receives health care is simply receiving a clearly defined benefit like any other welfare program. Countries may choose to provide that welfare benefit, or not, just like any other.
The US has public health care provisions through Medicare (for the elderly) and Medicaid (administered by the states, partly funded by the federal government, provides for the indigent and children). You hear quite a lot of complaint here on/. because healthy men are the one slice of the demographic spectrum that cannot qualify for public health care due to poverty. (Women are covered if they are pregnant or have small children at home, for example.)
Don't forget, too, that Americans who have health insurance are accustomed to a very high standard of care and comfort - hospital rooms are large and private, waits even for elective procedures are very short (usually a matter of a few days to a week). Most people are reluctant to exchange something that they know well for something that they don't, especially when they're happy with it. Over 80% of Americans with insurance are happy with it. It's not too surprising, then that they keep rejecting various proposals that always end up sounding like taking the worst aspects of British and Canadian health care and combining them. I think that something like the French system would be pretty effective in the US, but the Republicans won't bring up the subject and the Democrats keep suggesting bad ideas.
Thanks for replying. Abortion polls at 64-35 in favor, but the question asked isn't about the Democratic party's position on abortion, which was (in 2008) "The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right." Roe and its followers have gone well beyond what the majority of Americans believe - as the polls you look at show, "always legal" outpolls "always illegal" by a few points, but most people stand for "usually legal". I'll skip the healthcare because it doesn't tell us any of the questions. On the environment, when you get down to specifics, it looks like you're dead right. I suppose the lesson to be learned there is that people don't choose their votes based on environmental policy.
That page doesn't link to the actual questions, but it does pretty clearly state
That support, however, is conditional: It falls to fewer than four in 10 if it means a limited choice of doctors, or waiting lists for non-emergency treatments.
If it limited Americans' choice of doctors, support drops sharply, from 62 percent to 35 percent. Likewise, if it meant waiting lists for some non-emergency treatments, support falls to 39 percent.
Any public process that doesn't do at least one of those things isn't going to save any money. Like I said, when you start putting actual, firm policies that have a chance of working to the question, people's opinions diverge. Happens to both liberal and conservative views.
The "public option" polled well because it was ill-defined. Many people think that abortion shouldn't be totally illegal but also don't think that late-second-trimester abortions should be legal. And "environmental conservation" is such a nebulous phrase that people will say "sure, yeah, I like that." IOW, if you choose your phrasing well, you can make it seem like your side's opinions are mom and apple pie, but when it comes down to the actual specifics the electorate may not agree with you. Works for both parties.
Given that Friedman's article is probably the first major press this has had, I'd say that it just means that the NY Times' readership is a good bit more liberal than you are. I tried to take their quiz, but it wanted me to sign up, so the hell with it.
about 60% of the electorate tends to support the "liberal" position
I'd love to see that poll. I think self-identification is a lot more accurate: there are more conservatives than liberals, although there are roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, because the Democratic party contains numerous conservative groups (in the past, these were often blue-collar whites, but today the most notable such group is black Americans).
Slashdot Mirror
What's your solution? Or are you just here to complain that being poor sucks? It does - been there, done that.
Judging by the responses I've seen elsewhere in this thread, you apparently want the earth to go to hell.
We can phase in new taxes slowly, so that the poorest of the poor can adjust - perhaps even let the used car market acquire a few of these highly efficient machines. Or we can say the hell with it, and just let cars and gasoline be cheap, but then people are going to get upset that we're killing the earth. We have to make a choice, though, and CAFE is a poor way to do it.
it may be months or years before a person can afford to buy a better car
That's really what I was responding to. TBH I'm not really sure what his point was supposed to be; any change we make (in CAFE or gas tax) is going to result in a slow propagation through the national fleet as new vehicles are produced, and the only failure of market economics I can see would be failure to account for pollution (which is, of course, part of what fuel taxes are supposed to do). Raising CAFE standards doesn't do anything about that, so I'm unsure why he thinks it's a great solution.
What people need and what people want are two different things. They need oxygen, shelter, water, and food. Their wants are unlimited. Nimey seems to think that "people will drive smaller cars less often if gas is expensive" is bullshit, based on the fact that he sees SUVs barreling down the highway. It's obviously not bullshit; look at Europe. Yet people apparently attach a really high value to being able to drive large, comfortable vehicles.
That 1987 Corolla could not be sold with modern safety standards, FWIW, and unless the dog is quite small or the children fairly grown you're going to have a hell of time putting them all in the back seat.
It doesn't matter that they sell 10,000 of the 20mpg units and only 500 of the 100mpg units.
Actually, CAFE doesn't make that mistake.
If it was that simple I wouldn't be seeing mommy SUVs speeding down the highway anymore, because gas is so expensive.
Perhaps you underestimate just how much people value the ability to go where they want, when they want, in a vehicle they own.
Gosh, because we've never phased taxes in before. Who could imagine such a thing?
... and so people will continue to use the hell out of it. If you want people to do less of something, tax it. Those who have no reasonable substitute will continue to pay for it, and those who can substitute will do so. This kind of meddling is far worse than just raising gas taxes.
Their point is that the US cannot and will not default - but it can cut government benefits. The outcome of refusal to raise the debt ceiling is unknown and probably unknowable right now, but it is apparent that their hope is to shrink government (I.e., what they've been after from the beginning). I doubt that they will succeed, but they do have one very good point: the US is on an unsustainable path. Sooner or later we will face a reckoning in which taxes will go way up and spending will go way down. That is going to cause a lot of problems. Delaying that day is unlikely to make those problems smaller.
They might even be persuaded to raise taxes, if they had any real reason to believe that Congress would hold to the spending cuts. I don't hold much hope of that happening.
Look at the Tea Party whining that the government won't give them jobs.
I am somewhat confused by just where you get this idea. The whole Tea Party movement grew out of an idea that the government is too large.
Your lungs are able to extract oxygen from air because there is more oxygen in the air than in the blood. Your blood carries this oxygen to the tissue, where the blood has more oxygen than the tissue - the oxygen then diffuses into the tissue.
In theory, you could do this with an adequate flow of surface seawater (which has a partial pressure of O2 very similar to that of air), but the fact that the oxygen content of seawater is minuscule compared to the oxygen content of air means that you're going to need an enormous water flow. You should be able to extract about a fourth of the oxygen in the seawater before the partial pressure will go low enough that no further net diffusion of oxygen will occur (human not under load typically extract about a fifth, but let's be conservative here). Given that the oxygen content of fresh water is about 0.0089 g/L H2O, that's about 12.5 mL O2 per liter of water. Humans need about 250 mL O2 per minute at rest, so you'll need to extract all the oxygen from 20 L/min of fresh water saturated with air in order to supply each person. However, they're going to need at least four times that flow due to the difficulty of extraction, so now we're up to 80 L/min of water flow at rest, even if you don't consider the efficiency of the exchange process.
The way around this is to do something that captures more of the oxygen content of the water - usually by binding it to some intermediate (as we, and fish, do - hemoglobin is one such). The problem is that the human heart can't handle that level of cardiac output for it to happen within an all-blood system, and that any molecule which can extract a large measure of the oxygen available in water isn't going to give it up easily - it will have an oxygen dissociation curve that lets go a significant amount of the oxygen only at very low tissue pO2. Unfortunately for us, "tissue" in this case is the breathing-air side of the artificial lung. So you can choose chemical sequestration, but that presents the same problem - unless you can figure out some way for humans to live with much lower tissue pO2, you're going to have to expend a lot of energy dissociating that oxygen from whatever carrier you use to get it up to a usable concentration for humans. Fish have much lower metabolic oxygen requirements and so can live with lower tissue pO2.
Extracting the oxygen from water isn't the problem. Concentrating it is.
It's a site that often publishes rumors and other poorly-sourced information. That's not the same as disinformation.
Why is it surprising that the people who do best in science fairs are the children of some of the world's top scientists?
Yeah, I should have been clearer about that. Thanks for straightening it out.
The vast majority have some form of coverage. This is the first Google hit and says 85%. Of the 46 million who didn't, 10 million were not citizens, 14 million were eligible for coverage under Medicaid or SCHIP but had not actually applied, and over 14 million made more than $50k/yr (and so could presumably afford coverage). Those numbers come from some Census data and a Blue Cross study, and there may be some overlap among groups, but they should give you some idea of the general numbers. In short - about 90% are covered, a nontrivial portion of those who are not could afford to buy insurance but choose not to, and some would not be covered at all under any plan.
I can't speak for others, but when I was in medical school I paid about $150/mo for health insurance - this was during the early 2000s. My in-laws have a high deductible coverage (basically a traditional major medical) that covers the two of them for a little over $400/mo, and they're in their late 50s. He's a salesman working purely on commission, so it's not through an employer. $200 a month, per person, is pretty affordable for all but the poorest. If you don't have a job, of course, everything gets harder, but for those who have income it's less of a burden than many think.
if I should need medical assistance I can go to any random doctor (and will be taken to the nearest hospital in case of emergency)
A doctor's office may choose to treat you on a cash basis (or not), but the emergency department does not have that choice. They must treat you for any acute issues, although this does nothing to handle chronic problems. The law is called EMTALA, and violations of it are severely punished. They can and will bill you for the services, of course, but in general the situation is much less dire than is imagined in much of the rest of the world - you cannot be left bleeding at the site of a car wreck for lack of insurance, which is one of the reasons that so many young, healthy people elect not to buy health insurance (even if they can afford it).
why should it be borne by the citizen?
Because he receives the benefit. Police are like national defense: their benefit is largely to society as a whole, not to specific individuals. I can't tell you which police officer prevents my house from being robbed at night, because there is no one police officer that does so. It's the presence of a policing system that prevents that. By contrast, someone who receives health care is simply receiving a clearly defined benefit like any other welfare program. Countries may choose to provide that welfare benefit, or not, just like any other.
/. because healthy men are the one slice of the demographic spectrum that cannot qualify for public health care due to poverty. (Women are covered if they are pregnant or have small children at home, for example.)
The US has public health care provisions through Medicare (for the elderly) and Medicaid (administered by the states, partly funded by the federal government, provides for the indigent and children). You hear quite a lot of complaint here on
Don't forget, too, that Americans who have health insurance are accustomed to a very high standard of care and comfort - hospital rooms are large and private, waits even for elective procedures are very short (usually a matter of a few days to a week). Most people are reluctant to exchange something that they know well for something that they don't, especially when they're happy with it. Over 80% of Americans with insurance are happy with it. It's not too surprising, then that they keep rejecting various proposals that always end up sounding like taking the worst aspects of British and Canadian health care and combining them. I think that something like the French system would be pretty effective in the US, but the Republicans won't bring up the subject and the Democrats keep suggesting bad ideas.
Thanks for replying. Abortion polls at 64-35 in favor, but the question asked isn't about the Democratic party's position on abortion, which was (in 2008) "The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right." Roe and its followers have gone well beyond what the majority of Americans believe - as the polls you look at show, "always legal" outpolls "always illegal" by a few points, but most people stand for "usually legal". I'll skip the healthcare because it doesn't tell us any of the questions. On the environment, when you get down to specifics, it looks like you're dead right. I suppose the lesson to be learned there is that people don't choose their votes based on environmental policy.
That support, however, is conditional: It falls to fewer than four in 10 if it means a limited choice of doctors, or waiting lists for non-emergency treatments.
If it limited Americans' choice of doctors, support drops sharply, from 62 percent to 35 percent. Likewise, if it meant waiting lists for some non-emergency treatments, support falls to 39 percent.
Any public process that doesn't do at least one of those things isn't going to save any money. Like I said, when you start putting actual, firm policies that have a chance of working to the question, people's opinions diverge. Happens to both liberal and conservative views.
The "public option" polled well because it was ill-defined. Many people think that abortion shouldn't be totally illegal but also don't think that late-second-trimester abortions should be legal. And "environmental conservation" is such a nebulous phrase that people will say "sure, yeah, I like that." IOW, if you choose your phrasing well, you can make it seem like your side's opinions are mom and apple pie, but when it comes down to the actual specifics the electorate may not agree with you. Works for both parties.
Given that Friedman's article is probably the first major press this has had, I'd say that it just means that the NY Times' readership is a good bit more liberal than you are. I tried to take their quiz, but it wanted me to sign up, so the hell with it.
Because your local cops are the ones who actually arrest people for possessing small quantities of pot - it's usually not the state police or the FBI.
about 60% of the electorate tends to support the "liberal" position
I'd love to see that poll. I think self-identification is a lot more accurate: there are more conservatives than liberals, although there are roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, because the Democratic party contains numerous conservative groups (in the past, these were often blue-collar whites, but today the most notable such group is black Americans).