Because accomplishing things you consider valuable triggers the reward circuits in your brain. That's the reason people do volunteer work, have hobbies, etc.
Both you and the parent are confusing "work" and "job". They are not the same thing, altough if you're lucky they might overlap.
I'm sure that if I won the lottery I wouldn't just lie in bed all day. However, what I spend my time on would change significantly. Right now how I spend the majority of the day is governed by what I can get paid for. There are lots of things that would be more fulfilling to do if I didn't have that constraint.
If a corporation outsources a job for a fifth of the wage of a local worker, then.... yes, that really is more efficient than having a guy paid four fifths of a wage to do nothing.
If a company outsources work a consumer pays $10 for a widget, and the company keeps $9 as profit and sends $1 to the people doing the work in China.
If the employees subcontract their own work to China on the side, then the consumer pays $10 for a widget, and the company keeps $3 as profit and gives $7 to the employees, who secretly give $1 to the people doing the work in China.
In both cases 90% of the money goes to people doing nothing. The only difference is whether those people are executives and shareholders, or employees. Corporations naturally seek rent, and it is only natural for their employees to do so as well.
Less than a third and mostly concentrated in some regions. Almost nobody.
Uh, sure, kind of like how minorities are just minorities and therefore to be trampled upon?
Yes, NRA has passed laws that forbid to study gun-death epidemiology. Nice way to hide the problems, right.
Uh, not sure where that came from, but I don't think that gun is contagious. If somebody wants to kill you they are more likely to succeed if they have a gun. Not sure what there is to study beyond the obvious. That's what guns are designed for - killing people. I guess if you life in the wilderness they can also be used for hunting, but I doubt that that is what the folks who invented them had in mind.
The government does not punish people for doing things that are "wrong". It punishes people for things that are illegal. The US doesn't really have a "Justice" system it has a "Legal" system.
Sounds like the USSR - your argument is nothing more than might makes right.
Of course I realize that the US doesn't care if somebody's actions are right, only if they are illegal. That is precisely the problem here.
That, and the fact that what amounts to a prank that is unlikely to have cost anybody more than a couple of hours of inconvenience here and there is being met with years in prison, even with a deal. I doubt they'd have let him off with a $2000 fine (which is still pretty hefty).
If you buy into might makes right, then what is to stop somebody from using that against you, when at least at that moment they are in a position to do so? The purpose of government is to pass and enforce laws for the benefit of the whole, not to do so simply for the sake of doing so.
This means that the main question is how efficient they can be during the time that they have.
The problem is that you're trying to put the genie back in the bottle. I'd be the first to agree that the world would be a better place if nobody had guns, bombs, or nuclear weapons. However, the fact is that the world is full of sociopaths in control of those things, and passing laws will not change this (especially since the laws tend to be enacted by sociopaths). So, in the compromised real world that we live in we're stuck with ordinary people having guns to defend themselves, until somebody invents Gort and puts him in charge of the police.
Okay, I have a question: what is the purpose of extended magazines? Why do people want them so badly? I can't see any significant benefit for hunting or target shooting.
That's because guns aren't designed for hunting or target shooting. They're designed to kill people. The reason to have an extended magazine is the same as the reason to have a gun - to be able to do it more efficiently.
justified with some thin argument about rights and how reloading is anathema to a well regulated militia
Well, why do armies all over the world use high-capacity magazines, if not for the fact that not having them is counterproductive to the purpose of an army?
Look, if you want to get rid of the 2nd ammendment by all means try to do so, but I think it is a dumb idea. Keep in mind that the people who wrote it made it legal for ordinary citizens to own just about anything owned by the US army at the time...
Can you actually do this stuff if you aren't the person they claim owes the debt?
If they say YOU owe them money you can do all that stuff. However, if they say somebody else owes them money I don't see how you asking them to prove it will do any good.
Up to 30 years in prison - scary yes - but I don't see a minimum sentencing guide line. So we don’t know what kind of deal if any they had in the works.
Frankly there shouldn't be any "deals" - the US legal system is designed to threaten people with sentences that are completely outrageous in order to force people to take deals on sentences that are still excessive.
The punishment for something like this should be maybe a few thousand in fines, or 90 days of community service.
Regardless of the nobility of his goals, his actions were criminal even given a conservative reading of the current law.
Regardless of the criminality of his actions, his actions were noble. Any punishment is unjust to begin with. The government does not have the authority to punish people for doing things that aren't wrong, even if they have the ability to do so.
Summing up, I think the way that Swartz went about it was ethically wrong, even if I agree with the principle behind it and with you.
His actions were hardly unethical. They were certainly illegal, and perhaps unwise, but I find it difficult to call them unethical.
Research funded by the public should be in the public domain. If people want to publish it with that caveat they are welcome to do so, but the articles will be redistributable. If nobody wants to publish articles as a result, then the NIH or whatever can just set up a website to do it - the cost would be a fraction of what a single academic institution spends on its annual journal subscriptions.
The ongoing challenge is how to make it happen.
It won't. Lots of people make money from the status quo, and few voters are directly hurt by it in ways they understand. This is why special interests are so hard to reign in under democracy.
There's this thing called prosecutorial discretion. As in the prosecutor has full control over what cases they want to prosecute. Just like that.
Aha, so this is how they can go after Assange even though there are no charges against him. It's just all evil psychopaths manipulating media, the law and politicians. Brilliant!
Just wait until Assanage is in a country that is more friendly towards the US extradition-wise. There aren't any charges against him because filing charges would be counter-productive to arresting him.
When the FBI finally gets enough evidence to arrest a spy do they mail him an arrest warrant and tell him that if he doesn't turn himself in within a week they'll go after him? No, as soon as they are in a position to do something about it they nail them first, and then file charges within 24 hours as required by law. Doing it the other way around just tips their hands.
You can bet that as soon as the FBI is sure that filing charges will lead to him being on a plane to the US that they will do so.
The policy of the US Justice Department gave them two: 1. Not report it, in which case they would not effectively be able to stop Swartz from being a PITA. 2. Report it, and watch the wheels of "justice" grind him into a pulp.
I don't see how they lack blame - if I tell a friend in the Mafia that my neighbor is bothering me and they smash all his windows, I can't claim complete innocence as I basically knew what was going to happen. Just because the Justice Department is a branch of the US government does not mean that bringing them in is the right solution. The problem is that we don't have much in the way of alternatives.
Even if they don't freeze accounts, in the US the draconian justice system basically guarantees that you'll bankrupt yourself fighting off the charges even if you're found innocent.
If you're facing 30 years in prison your choices are to either plead guilty to something like 5 years (which is rather extreme for publishing some academic journals - it wasn't like this guy was a risk for assaulting people while planting devices on the network), or mount a VERY strong defense (since you're facing 30 years if you don't take the plea bargain). A vigorous defense is extremely expensive, which means you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills even if you win.
This whole thing should have been 30 days in prison or maybe a few thousand dollars in fines. That would deter almost anybody from just doing something like this any time they felt like it (and frankly, those journal articles should be public domain anyway - at least the ones funded by taxpayers, which is virtually all of them). Instead we're talking about years in prison and tens of thousands of dollars in "fines" even if found innocent.
Plea bargains should be illegal. They're highly unfair to the innocent, and they replace the power of the jury with the power of the prosecutor.
I think the objection is to the penalty for that crime being the possibility of decades in prison, and the certainty of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills (even if found innocent). The punishment doesn't fit the crime, therefore it is unjust, without any regard to what the lawbooks might happen to say on the matter.
Oh, and if convicted I'm sure they'd hit him with one of those "never touch a computer again" parole restrictions even if he got out of prison. Gee, for somebody who was creating world-changing computer technologies at the age of 14 that seems like a really nice gesture.
Uh, find me a professor who claims to profit from research publications (I mean primary publications in journal articles, not books or columns or such).
The only reason the average professor doesn't publish their stuff online for free is that journals would refuse to publish their work under those conditions. They require that they be the first publication of a work, and that the author sign over copyright. There are a few fields where this is the exception, and in those fields you can actually read up on what is going on via arxiv or such and the journals are completely optional.
There are open access journals that have more liberal policies, but due to various customs not everybody publishes in those.
Very little of the money that goes into journal subscriptions actually goes towards the researchers involved (either in authorship or review) or into just about anything that anybody would actually be willing to pay for.
Was it a crime? Sure. So is blocking an intersection in a protest.
The issue is that he faced an incredibly expensive trial (in the US an accusation of a crime carries an awfully stiff penalty in the form of legal bills). If convicted he faced decades in prison.
In the US a rapist is likely to get off with much less than that all around, as are crimes like armed robbery, or even non-premeditated murder in the commission of a robbery.
There is something wrong when the penalty for recording a movie in a cinema is comparable to crimes like rape.
Honestly, the one thing that I wish people/groups would bother to do (both major and minor) is publish build instructions. Not just a link to some repository that doesn't actually work without a bunch of overlays (not mentioned anywhere) - actual build instructions. By all means start with step one being set up pre-reqs as documented on the AOSP page and all that, but give a series of steps that actually gives you a repository identical to what was used to post the ROM (including all configuration), and build it.
If I want to rebuild Ubuntu or Debian from source I'll have no trouble finding detailed docs on how to do this. AOSP does a reasonable job with this, though they don't actually have build instructions for any Nexus phone that is still being manufactured (a MAJOR omission if you ask me, and the fact that the Nexus 4 is STILL unsupported is a bit of a tarnish on the brand). Cyanogenmod has this for SOME of their phones, but it seems like it takes them 6-12 months after they start publishing nightly build to follow through. Heck, if they just published whatever scripts they're using to autobuild the nightlies that would at least be deterministic.
It just seems like nobody really embraces the community mentality in the Android world. It is almost an afterthought.
Sure, there is a need for some kind of journal-like service.
However, there is no reason that the first-world governments couldn't just set up some kind of web-based publishing system where anybody can submit something similar to arxiv.org, and have it peer-reviewed.
Anything reasonable would be published, and could be flagged as reviewed if it passes review, and could even be rated in some way (which gives you the equivalent of impact/prestige/etc). People could read whatever they care to.
The cost to publish an article can't be more than a few thousand dollars, and that is giving it pretty deluxe treatment. Often the grants that funded the research cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. The value to society of having that data in the public domain is very high. It really doesn't make sense to have some middle-men spend a few thousand dollars adding some value, and then locking up the articles from the public and raking in many times what they spent on the articles themselves.
A law ought to be passed that the results of any research paid for with tax dollars ought to be in the public domain, period. If journals can't handle that, then they can just choose not to publish anything paid for with tax dollars.
The US isn't big on giving free stuff to people even if it will save tax dollars.
There was a good Frontline that covered this issue a few months ago. An advocacy group was tracking cases of extremely expensive Medicare utilization. There was one poor fellow who had been to the ER several times that year at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars - he had all kinds of lung problems. They went to his house and found the drywall was rotting everywhere and the air was full of dust. They spent a few thousand dollars on a contractor who repaired the walls and the health issues disappeared. The guy could have never afforded those repairs, and Medicare would not pay for them. So, for the want of a $5k drywall replacement taxpayers were paying tens of thousands of dollars annually on acute care treatments, and the guy was suffering constantly.
That's the sort of thing that makes the US do so poorly in outcomes, while spending so much. Heaven forbid that some poor guy have a "nice house" to live in.
I think stress is a big factor as well. One of the reasons that US workers are so productive is that many large companies basically fire the bottom 10% or so every few years. Basically everybody is on notice that if you want to keep your job you do as much work as you can. The people who are fired aren't bad workers, and often they're doing the best they can, it is just that in any population there will ALWAYS be 10% that are slower than the other 90%.
However, in the end all that voluntary unpaid overtime, working on vacation days, and so on just puts a toll on your body and your mind. I know people who are fairly good performers who just hope they can last until they can have enough saved up to make it to retirement. In many large companies it is tough to keep your job past age 50. If anything goes wrong and you're out of a job there is almost no safety net in the US - unemployment benefits are low, there are no health benefits (unless you pay an incredibly high sum for COBRA - and until recently that was very short-term anyway), and companies are extremely demanding on skillsets - they don't just hire people for their potential.
From what I've heard from colleagues in the UK, the overall level of stress at work is a lot different as well. People actually take breaks, and each lunch away from their desk. People generally don't work odd hours either - at least not for typical office jobs. And from what I can tell the UK is closer to the US than much of the rest of Europe.
Job security in general is quite a bit better in Europe as well. That means a lot less stress all around. Companies have to ask permission to have layoffs, and countries tend to play hardball when it comes to jobs (if you don't want your products stuck in registration limbo for a decade you build a factory in the country you want to sell in, and if you announce a layoff prepare to lose all your government contracts).
I think some countries in Europe tend to go a bit far with it, but it is pretty clear the US is way too far to the other extreme. Countries like the UK and Germany might be a good balance.
All true. However, the one big caveat with the NAS is their journal. Submissions by non-academy-members are peer-reviewed, but the last I had checked the submissions by academy members are not. It is still very prestigious, but it is important to bear that caveat in mind.
The actual reports produced by the academy as a whole are fairly extensive in general, as you've pointed out.
I'm more than happy to have alternatives supported, and will likely try them.
What I don't want is for me to have some random less-useful service appear, just so that somebody can be happy that it isn't Google. Let me have the choice - I'm the consumer.
Yup, I get a ton of vacation time, and right now my schedule is flexible enough that for odd things I don't even need to use it unless I'm really going somewhere.
However, my deadlines are not in any way affected by vacations and such. If I have 8 weeks to do 8 week's worth of work, and I take two of them off, then I just have to get done 8 week's worth of work in 6 weeks. It isn't like somebody would just assign the work to somebody else. Often I end up responding to email when on vacation and so on as well.
It almost isn't worth going on vacation unless you really have a lull in your work, or unless you can disappear for a whole month so that they're forced to make somebody else do your work. Otherwise you just end up running around like a headless chicken before/after.
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Because accomplishing things you consider valuable triggers the reward circuits in your brain. That's the reason people do volunteer work, have hobbies, etc.
Both you and the parent are confusing "work" and "job". They are not the same thing, altough if you're lucky they might overlap.
I'm sure that if I won the lottery I wouldn't just lie in bed all day. However, what I spend my time on would change significantly. Right now how I spend the majority of the day is governed by what I can get paid for. There are lots of things that would be more fulfilling to do if I didn't have that constraint.
If a corporation outsources a job for a fifth of the wage of a local worker, then.... yes, that really is more efficient than having a guy paid four fifths of a wage to do nothing.
If a company outsources work a consumer pays $10 for a widget, and the company keeps $9 as profit and sends $1 to the people doing the work in China.
If the employees subcontract their own work to China on the side, then the consumer pays $10 for a widget, and the company keeps $3 as profit and gives $7 to the employees, who secretly give $1 to the people doing the work in China.
In both cases 90% of the money goes to people doing nothing. The only difference is whether those people are executives and shareholders, or employees. Corporations naturally seek rent, and it is only natural for their employees to do so as well.
Less than a third and mostly concentrated in some regions. Almost nobody.
Uh, sure, kind of like how minorities are just minorities and therefore to be trampled upon?
Yes, NRA has passed laws that forbid to study gun-death epidemiology. Nice way to hide the problems, right.
Uh, not sure where that came from, but I don't think that gun is contagious. If somebody wants to kill you they are more likely to succeed if they have a gun. Not sure what there is to study beyond the obvious. That's what guns are designed for - killing people. I guess if you life in the wilderness they can also be used for hunting, but I doubt that that is what the folks who invented them had in mind.
The government does not punish people for doing things that are "wrong". It punishes people for things that are illegal. The US doesn't really have a "Justice" system it has a "Legal" system.
Sounds like the USSR - your argument is nothing more than might makes right.
Of course I realize that the US doesn't care if somebody's actions are right, only if they are illegal. That is precisely the problem here.
That, and the fact that what amounts to a prank that is unlikely to have cost anybody more than a couple of hours of inconvenience here and there is being met with years in prison, even with a deal. I doubt they'd have let him off with a $2000 fine (which is still pretty hefty).
If you buy into might makes right, then what is to stop somebody from using that against you, when at least at that moment they are in a position to do so? The purpose of government is to pass and enforce laws for the benefit of the whole, not to do so simply for the sake of doing so.
Uh, something like half of the US population owns guns, and the fact that they're practically sold out all over the country right now confirms this.
However, all of this is a bit of a moot point - if you can 3D print guns, then there really is little chance of regulating them.
This means that the main question is how efficient they can be during the time that they have.
The problem is that you're trying to put the genie back in the bottle. I'd be the first to agree that the world would be a better place if nobody had guns, bombs, or nuclear weapons. However, the fact is that the world is full of sociopaths in control of those things, and passing laws will not change this (especially since the laws tend to be enacted by sociopaths). So, in the compromised real world that we live in we're stuck with ordinary people having guns to defend themselves, until somebody invents Gort and puts him in charge of the police.
Okay, I have a question: what is the purpose of extended magazines? Why do people want them so badly? I can't see any significant benefit for hunting or target shooting.
That's because guns aren't designed for hunting or target shooting. They're designed to kill people. The reason to have an extended magazine is the same as the reason to have a gun - to be able to do it more efficiently.
justified with some thin argument about rights and how reloading is anathema to a well regulated militia
Well, why do armies all over the world use high-capacity magazines, if not for the fact that not having them is counterproductive to the purpose of an army?
Look, if you want to get rid of the 2nd ammendment by all means try to do so, but I think it is a dumb idea. Keep in mind that the people who wrote it made it legal for ordinary citizens to own just about anything owned by the US army at the time...
Can you actually do this stuff if you aren't the person they claim owes the debt?
If they say YOU owe them money you can do all that stuff. However, if they say somebody else owes them money I don't see how you asking them to prove it will do any good.
Up to 30 years in prison - scary yes - but I don't see a minimum sentencing guide line. So we don’t know what kind of deal if any they had in the works.
Frankly there shouldn't be any "deals" - the US legal system is designed to threaten people with sentences that are completely outrageous in order to force people to take deals on sentences that are still excessive.
The punishment for something like this should be maybe a few thousand in fines, or 90 days of community service.
Regardless of the nobility of his goals, his actions were criminal even given a conservative reading of the current law.
Regardless of the criminality of his actions, his actions were noble. Any punishment is unjust to begin with. The government does not have the authority to punish people for doing things that aren't wrong, even if they have the ability to do so.
RSS is used for all kinds of back-end uses - many who benefit from it don't even know that it exists.
How many software update systems use it? How many news aggregators?
Summing up, I think the way that Swartz went about it was ethically wrong, even if I agree with the principle behind it and with you.
His actions were hardly unethical. They were certainly illegal, and perhaps unwise, but I find it difficult to call them unethical.
Research funded by the public should be in the public domain. If people want to publish it with that caveat they are welcome to do so, but the articles will be redistributable. If nobody wants to publish articles as a result, then the NIH or whatever can just set up a website to do it - the cost would be a fraction of what a single academic institution spends on its annual journal subscriptions.
The ongoing challenge is how to make it happen.
It won't. Lots of people make money from the status quo, and few voters are directly hurt by it in ways they understand. This is why special interests are so hard to reign in under democracy.
There's this thing called prosecutorial discretion. As in the prosecutor has full control over what cases they want to prosecute. Just like that.
Aha, so this is how they can go after Assange even though there are no charges against him. It's just all evil psychopaths manipulating media, the law and politicians. Brilliant!
Just wait until Assanage is in a country that is more friendly towards the US extradition-wise. There aren't any charges against him because filing charges would be counter-productive to arresting him.
When the FBI finally gets enough evidence to arrest a spy do they mail him an arrest warrant and tell him that if he doesn't turn himself in within a week they'll go after him? No, as soon as they are in a position to do something about it they nail them first, and then file charges within 24 hours as required by law. Doing it the other way around just tips their hands.
You can bet that as soon as the FBI is sure that filing charges will lead to him being on a plane to the US that they will do so.
Unfortunately they didn't have many options.
The policy of the US Justice Department gave them two:
1. Not report it, in which case they would not effectively be able to stop Swartz from being a PITA.
2. Report it, and watch the wheels of "justice" grind him into a pulp.
I don't see how they lack blame - if I tell a friend in the Mafia that my neighbor is bothering me and they smash all his windows, I can't claim complete innocence as I basically knew what was going to happen. Just because the Justice Department is a branch of the US government does not mean that bringing them in is the right solution. The problem is that we don't have much in the way of alternatives.
Even if they don't freeze accounts, in the US the draconian justice system basically guarantees that you'll bankrupt yourself fighting off the charges even if you're found innocent.
If you're facing 30 years in prison your choices are to either plead guilty to something like 5 years (which is rather extreme for publishing some academic journals - it wasn't like this guy was a risk for assaulting people while planting devices on the network), or mount a VERY strong defense (since you're facing 30 years if you don't take the plea bargain). A vigorous defense is extremely expensive, which means you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills even if you win.
This whole thing should have been 30 days in prison or maybe a few thousand dollars in fines. That would deter almost anybody from just doing something like this any time they felt like it (and frankly, those journal articles should be public domain anyway - at least the ones funded by taxpayers, which is virtually all of them). Instead we're talking about years in prison and tens of thousands of dollars in "fines" even if found innocent.
Plea bargains should be illegal. They're highly unfair to the innocent, and they replace the power of the jury with the power of the prosecutor.
I think the objection is to the penalty for that crime being the possibility of decades in prison, and the certainty of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills (even if found innocent). The punishment doesn't fit the crime, therefore it is unjust, without any regard to what the lawbooks might happen to say on the matter.
Oh, and if convicted I'm sure they'd hit him with one of those "never touch a computer again" parole restrictions even if he got out of prison. Gee, for somebody who was creating world-changing computer technologies at the age of 14 that seems like a really nice gesture.
Uh, find me a professor who claims to profit from research publications (I mean primary publications in journal articles, not books or columns or such).
The only reason the average professor doesn't publish their stuff online for free is that journals would refuse to publish their work under those conditions. They require that they be the first publication of a work, and that the author sign over copyright. There are a few fields where this is the exception, and in those fields you can actually read up on what is going on via arxiv or such and the journals are completely optional.
There are open access journals that have more liberal policies, but due to various customs not everybody publishes in those.
Very little of the money that goes into journal subscriptions actually goes towards the researchers involved (either in authorship or review) or into just about anything that anybody would actually be willing to pay for.
Was it a crime? Sure. So is blocking an intersection in a protest.
The issue is that he faced an incredibly expensive trial (in the US an accusation of a crime carries an awfully stiff penalty in the form of legal bills). If convicted he faced decades in prison.
In the US a rapist is likely to get off with much less than that all around, as are crimes like armed robbery, or even non-premeditated murder in the commission of a robbery.
There is something wrong when the penalty for recording a movie in a cinema is comparable to crimes like rape.
Honestly, the one thing that I wish people/groups would bother to do (both major and minor) is publish build instructions. Not just a link to some repository that doesn't actually work without a bunch of overlays (not mentioned anywhere) - actual build instructions. By all means start with step one being set up pre-reqs as documented on the AOSP page and all that, but give a series of steps that actually gives you a repository identical to what was used to post the ROM (including all configuration), and build it.
If I want to rebuild Ubuntu or Debian from source I'll have no trouble finding detailed docs on how to do this. AOSP does a reasonable job with this, though they don't actually have build instructions for any Nexus phone that is still being manufactured (a MAJOR omission if you ask me, and the fact that the Nexus 4 is STILL unsupported is a bit of a tarnish on the brand). Cyanogenmod has this for SOME of their phones, but it seems like it takes them 6-12 months after they start publishing nightly build to follow through. Heck, if they just published whatever scripts they're using to autobuild the nightlies that would at least be deterministic.
It just seems like nobody really embraces the community mentality in the Android world. It is almost an afterthought.
Sure, there is a need for some kind of journal-like service.
However, there is no reason that the first-world governments couldn't just set up some kind of web-based publishing system where anybody can submit something similar to arxiv.org, and have it peer-reviewed.
Anything reasonable would be published, and could be flagged as reviewed if it passes review, and could even be rated in some way (which gives you the equivalent of impact/prestige/etc). People could read whatever they care to.
The cost to publish an article can't be more than a few thousand dollars, and that is giving it pretty deluxe treatment. Often the grants that funded the research cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. The value to society of having that data in the public domain is very high. It really doesn't make sense to have some middle-men spend a few thousand dollars adding some value, and then locking up the articles from the public and raking in many times what they spent on the articles themselves.
A law ought to be passed that the results of any research paid for with tax dollars ought to be in the public domain, period. If journals can't handle that, then they can just choose not to publish anything paid for with tax dollars.
The US isn't big on giving free stuff to people even if it will save tax dollars.
There was a good Frontline that covered this issue a few months ago. An advocacy group was tracking cases of extremely expensive Medicare utilization. There was one poor fellow who had been to the ER several times that year at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars - he had all kinds of lung problems. They went to his house and found the drywall was rotting everywhere and the air was full of dust. They spent a few thousand dollars on a contractor who repaired the walls and the health issues disappeared. The guy could have never afforded those repairs, and Medicare would not pay for them. So, for the want of a $5k drywall replacement taxpayers were paying tens of thousands of dollars annually on acute care treatments, and the guy was suffering constantly.
That's the sort of thing that makes the US do so poorly in outcomes, while spending so much. Heaven forbid that some poor guy have a "nice house" to live in.
I think stress is a big factor as well. One of the reasons that US workers are so productive is that many large companies basically fire the bottom 10% or so every few years. Basically everybody is on notice that if you want to keep your job you do as much work as you can. The people who are fired aren't bad workers, and often they're doing the best they can, it is just that in any population there will ALWAYS be 10% that are slower than the other 90%.
However, in the end all that voluntary unpaid overtime, working on vacation days, and so on just puts a toll on your body and your mind. I know people who are fairly good performers who just hope they can last until they can have enough saved up to make it to retirement. In many large companies it is tough to keep your job past age 50. If anything goes wrong and you're out of a job there is almost no safety net in the US - unemployment benefits are low, there are no health benefits (unless you pay an incredibly high sum for COBRA - and until recently that was very short-term anyway), and companies are extremely demanding on skillsets - they don't just hire people for their potential.
From what I've heard from colleagues in the UK, the overall level of stress at work is a lot different as well. People actually take breaks, and each lunch away from their desk. People generally don't work odd hours either - at least not for typical office jobs. And from what I can tell the UK is closer to the US than much of the rest of Europe.
Job security in general is quite a bit better in Europe as well. That means a lot less stress all around. Companies have to ask permission to have layoffs, and countries tend to play hardball when it comes to jobs (if you don't want your products stuck in registration limbo for a decade you build a factory in the country you want to sell in, and if you announce a layoff prepare to lose all your government contracts).
I think some countries in Europe tend to go a bit far with it, but it is pretty clear the US is way too far to the other extreme. Countries like the UK and Germany might be a good balance.
All true. However, the one big caveat with the NAS is their journal. Submissions by non-academy-members are peer-reviewed, but the last I had checked the submissions by academy members are not. It is still very prestigious, but it is important to bear that caveat in mind.
The actual reports produced by the academy as a whole are fairly extensive in general, as you've pointed out.
I'm more than happy to have alternatives supported, and will likely try them.
What I don't want is for me to have some random less-useful service appear, just so that somebody can be happy that it isn't Google. Let me have the choice - I'm the consumer.
Yup, I get a ton of vacation time, and right now my schedule is flexible enough that for odd things I don't even need to use it unless I'm really going somewhere.
However, my deadlines are not in any way affected by vacations and such. If I have 8 weeks to do 8 week's worth of work, and I take two of them off, then I just have to get done 8 week's worth of work in 6 weeks. It isn't like somebody would just assign the work to somebody else. Often I end up responding to email when on vacation and so on as well.
It almost isn't worth going on vacation unless you really have a lull in your work, or unless you can disappear for a whole month so that they're forced to make somebody else do your work. Otherwise you just end up running around like a headless chicken before/after.