What I want to know is, why would I have to pay $300 if I didn't have insurance instead of $150?
The doctor knows perfectly well what the insurance company is going to pay for a treatment. If he puts that amount on the bill, next year the insurance company will "negotiate" a lower rate for that treatment.
So he puts more on the bill than he expects to get from insurance, as insurance to keep the insurance company from lowering the payout.
Note that every single time I've ever gone to a doctor uninsured, there was a sizable discount to the bill for "self pay".
Mind you, as in every country, there are a lot of dumb Americans who would rather save a small amount at the gas pump and take their chances about later. It's a bad bet. EVERYBODY is going to get old and need health care, unless they're killed outright early on.
Stupid argument. Once you hit 65 in the USA ("get old"), you'll be under Medicare.
Other countries pay less per person for health care, and they cover everybody. Higher taxes are for other reasons (I will not even guess what). The US could lower taxes by going single payer.
Well, no.
The USA paid out about $330 billion for Medicare in 2005 (the latest year I could easily find a figure for). That's the money that provides government healthcare for people age 65+.
I cannot begin to estimate how much more it would cost to provide the same service to the remaining 250 million of us, but I doubt seriously it'll be a negative cost. So taxes will surely go up.
Though perhaps you meant that total outlays for healthcare will go down? Certainly possible. I should point out that Medicare costs what it does because it forces doctors to accept much less than market price for services, and mandates that doctors accept Medicare patients. Which just shifts some of the costs of Medicare onto the rest of us, since the Doctor certainly isn't going to forgo his salary just because the government requires that he treat some people for free.
It is by no means clear that single-payer in the USA would lower healthcare costs. Anymore than it's clear that spending more per student than any country in the world will give us better education (we do, it doesn't).
Re:Why is govt-provided health care worse?
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Why Doctors Hate Science
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Having said all that, I'd much rather have the UK system - imperfect though it may be - than the US system where nobody seems to think it's so bad for a family to have to take their child home to die simply because they can't afford the procedure necessary to save the child's life.
Citation? I've never heard of this happening in the USA or anywhere else I've lived.
Decades ago, employers liked having health care bundled with jobs, so they would have more control over their employees.
Actually, no. Health insurance was first bundled with jobs in WW2, when wage controls were put in place by the Roosevelt Administration (a Democrat, but Nixon, a Republican, tried the same thing in the 70's).
So, since there was a labour shortage and employers couldn't use higher wages as an inducement to convince people to work for them (as opposed to working for the other fellow down the street), employers started offering perks like free health insurance as an inducement.
Come the end of the war, when the wage controls were lifted, employers mostly tried to go back to the old way of doing things - no perks like free health insurance, just higher pay as an inducement.
Alas, they found people had gotten used to that free health insurance as part of a good job, and weren't as interested in higher-paying jobs without health insurance. So the employers, for the most, sighed, gave in, and made health insurance a permanent part of the deal. Not because THEY wanted to, but because good people wouldn't come to work for them without the health insurance attached to the job.
And the only reason things are changing now is that health insurance costs are skyrocketing, and employers would be perfectly happy if the taxpayers (you and me) paid for everyone's health insurance (note that everyone includes you and me - a single-payer plan basically goes back to the pre-WW2 situation in that we're paying for our own health insurance. Just with an extra stop in Washington on the way).
Is this meant to imply that Universal Healthcare is a bad idea? No. We may not be able to afford it, but that's a completely unrelated question.
Social Security, considered as a mutual fund (it isn't any different than a mutual fund that picks T-bills to invest in) has about 1/10th the cost of a privately run mutual fund of the same kind.
Well...No.
The T-Bills that Social Security "invests in" are ZERO INTEREST T-Bills. The kind used for intragovernmental borrowing.
What actually happens is that Social Security pays out what is needed out of Social Security taxes, then gives the rest to the General Fund in exchange for a zero-interest T-Bill.
When we did this sort of thing as kids, we called "zero-interest T-Bills" IOUs.
Effectively, the stack of IOUs in a vault somewhere are meaningless, though.
When Social Security outlays exceed Social Security revenues, one of two things will have to be done:
A) Social Security taxes will be raised.
B) The Deficit will increase.
If the Social Security Trust Fund (that Mutual Fund you mentioned it being) really meant something, then they'd pull those IOUs out, hand them to Congress, and Congress would immediately borrow more money to pay them, or raise taxes to pay them.
If the Social Security Trust Fund was a meaningless example of bookkeeping fraud (which, by the way, it would be if it were done by a corporation or private individual), then Congress would immediately borrow more money to pay for SS, or raise taxes to pay for SS.
If the result is exactly the same whether the Social Security Trust Fund exists or doesn't exist, it can safely be said to not exist. It can certainly be said that it doesn't matter whether it exists or not.
Note that the above does not imply that Social Security is a bad thing (we may or may not be able to afford it as currently constituted, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether it's a good thing - I can't afford a 60" HDTV right now, but that doesn't make it any less a good thing to have when the game comes on). Nor does it imply that Social Security is going to implode in 2017 (or whatever year the current guesstimates say it's revenue stream goes negative) - they'll simply raise SS taxes or increase the deficit.
What it does imply is that the Social Security is no more a Mutual Fund that invests in T-Bills than my cat is. And if I had an investment in a Mutual Fund that invested solely in Zero-Interest T-Bills, I'd be calling my broker to get me out of that investment and into one that actually had some chance of a return on investment, then calling the SEC.
Of course the official figures don't count 'uninteresting' people like anyone without an american accent.
Sorry, was trying to compare like with like. The Vietnam Death toll I gave was also only Americans killed.
If you'd rather include ALL deaths, it still looks like he was right though.
Vietnam War civilian casualties, both sides (yes, the North Vietnamese killed South Vietnamese civilians in job lots too) were on the order of millions. They could have been as higher then five million, and one million is about the lower limit. Call it three million.
Vietnamese soldiers, both sides: 1.3 million in round numbers.
American soldiers: 58913 (officially). Since some are still MIA, they're not techincally dead yet.
Total for Iraq (your numbers): 105000, including American losses.
Total for Vietnam: somewhere between 2.4 million and 6.4 million.
I see no such assertion. So where is that assertion of many=most that you claim I made?
Let's see.
He said: Notice where many of these fires occur...Australia.
Note the use of "many".
You responded with: No way. A term that isn't used outside of Australia (OK in a few little islands too) occurs mostly in Australia!Note the use of the word "mostly".
So, he said "many", and you contradicted him using "mostly".
While it is true that the phrase bushfire may be only in use in Australia, the use in the OP's post was largely irrelevant to that, and your comment hinted that you believed that the KEY to his entire post was the use of the word "bushfire".
Of course, he didn't actually say that "most" bushfires were in Australia, so explaining to him that the word was only used there was pretty much irrelevant to his argument ("It's a BEAUTIFUL day", "No, you're wrong, the grass is green").
BLOCKQUOTE>Most is a larger claim than many. It's perfectly normal to show the larger claim in order to show the smaller.
Umm, no. It's not. Two of three is "most". Two is NOT "many". See how that works? They are not necessarily a subset of the other.
Two of three is "a few", but it's also "most".
Two hundred of five hundred is "many", but not "most".
Note that something can be "most" without being "many", and can be "many" without being "most".
Which all reduces to: you shouldn't inflate his claims by using a larger term than he uses. That's not good argument technique (well, it's not if the other fellow is paying attention. It's used quite a lot, and quite a lot of people rather foolishly find themselves believing "most" is what's being talked about when they started out discussing "many").
On a final note, I have a toothache, and I have a catscan tomorrow to determine the progress of my cancer, and I'm generally in a nitpicking grouchy mood.
Considering that your solution didn't suggest a single thing that the Palestinians should concede, I suspect you ARE blaming Israel.
Tell you what, get the Palestinians to not fire even ONE rocket into Israel for 365 consecutive days, and then you might be able to get an idea of what the Israelis are willing to concede.
Or not. They may be the complete bastards you think they are. But I doubt it.
I have not talked to Kim Jong-Il, but I don't think he wants war. He would be foolish. His country would be destroyed, and he would be killed.
Oddly enough, the last time his country invaded South Korea, that didn't happen. His country wasn't destroyed, his dad wasn't killed.
And I doubt it would happen next time either.
Also, on what basis do you believe that he doesn't want a war? You concede that you haven't talked to him, and I can't think of any news about Korea in the last few years that suggest that he's more pacifically inclined than his old man was.
Now, considering this, the problem with North Korea isn't a problem of peace, but of how to integrate him into the international community and get him to step down as dictator. This is a hard problem, I agree, but wouldn't it be easier for him if he felt the world were extending a hand to him in friendship, instead of trying to destroy him? I will leave it at that, since I'm not trying to solve that problem.
Actually, the world HAS been extending a hand to him in friendship. Remember, we shipped him food and oil for years to convince him not to build an atomic bomb. Of course, we stopped after he went ahead and took our food and oil and built the Bomb.
Note that if you offer someone a bribe, and he takes the bribe without doing whatever you were bribing him to do, he probably will do it again. And again.
How long do you want to supply his Army with food and oil?
In Afghanistan the biggest problem seems to be the Taliban/Al Qaeda. Why are they fighting? Hard to say for sure, but they are able to get new recruits in large part because of the actions of the United States. And it's understandable. What has the US done? Lots of questionable stuff. Imagine now if instead the United States made a stand in favor of world peace. It would be very hard to call such an entity a "Great Satan." It would be hard to convince new recruits to come and try to fight against.......peace.
And yet, Afghanistan fought internal wars for most of the last two centuries. And the USA wasn't involved in but two of them, in any way. Blaming the USA for fighting in Afghanistan is silly - the Afhganis have had a feuding, fighting culture since forever. Which you won't upset in five years without killing everyone there, men, women, and children. If you just kill the men, the women will feed hate to the children with their mother's milk, and as soon as they're grown, you're back to the status quo ante.
Note that after we kicked the Taliban out of Afghanistan, Afghanistan HAD peace. Until we stopped paying attention, and the vendettas got going again.
I'll touch briefly on a few of the other conflicts.....where do they come from? A hundred reasons, conflict over oil, over race, over need......but not one of them is made better by war. If a country is in poverty, the war will only make it worse. They happen anyway because some leader is able to convince the people somehow that by fighting the other guys, their situation will be made better. And yet that is never true. Once people realize it is not true, they will not believe such crazy leaders and will look to someone else for solutions.
Oddly enough, history doesn't support your opinion that "some leader is able to convince the people somehow that by fighting the other guys, their situation will be made better" is "never true".
The entire campaign is based on the premise that most people are able to realize peace is better than war, that they would prefer peace to war. If that is not true, then it is pointless.
Ahh, I see now. You believe that not being willing to fight will automatically make the other fellow not be willing to fight.
Doesn't work that way. Consider that WW2 was started at the whim of ONE aging politician. Consider that what YOU believe is right and proper is not necessarily what that fellow over there believes is right and proper. You might think that having a fistfight (or a knife-fight, or a gunfight) is intrinsically wrong, but if the other fellow thinks it's good clean fun (I used to know some guys who thought that their Saturday nights weren't complete without a brawl), then you'll have trouble convincing him that you're not a complete moron who can be disregarded.
In the same way, the people currently affected by war are pretty much screwed, since they generally don't have any way to convince the fighting men to stop without, well, fighting. Which they can't do without weapons and such. Which would mean that one war would become two (or three).
And even if this were possible, five years is too short a time. If you were to start teaching EVERY infant in the world your principles today, and EVERY one of them held strictly to your principles as he/she/it grew older, then in 50 or 60 years, maybe. Five? No chance at all.
And the odds of your lads getting to EVERY infant right now are ZERO.
And if you could get to them all, the odds that EVERY one of them would do what YOU said, and not what their society says, is ZERO.
Let's say that I sent a ping pong ball, a house brick, and a 20t lump of iron heading away from earth at 5 m/s. I would expect the ping pong ball to slow most quickly, followed by the house brick. In some situations, the lump of iron might be able to escape where the others would not. You'd experience the same effect if you tried to stop a car rolling down hill a ten miles per hour and then compared it to stopping a skate board moving at the same speed. Perhaps I'm missing something?
Have you read anything by this guy Newton? Fig, or Isaac, one of the two. He pretty much explained (about 300 years ago) how this whole "gravity" thing works.
And, for what's it's worth, 5 miles/second (I shudder to think you might have meant metres/second) is below escape velocity. It's barely above orbital velocity. So not even your lump of iron would escape. Even if gravity worked they way you think it does, as opposed to the way it really does.
With a thirty metre object you could almost snare it with a net. Then you would need a shock absorbing tether to match velocities.
It's a 30 metre object moving well over escape velocity. You snag it with the net, and then endure 9000 gravities acceleration, and in only a tenth of a second, you've matched orbits.
If your tether will stretch to a length of 450 metres while holding a weight (you, or a satellite your size) of about 2000 tons.
Good luck with that.
Given that materials for tethers are improving all the time, and that high tech space drives are not inventing themselves the way they do on star trek, I wonder if this could be a practical way to travel around the inner solar system
In a word, no. If you want more words, "practical" doesn't begin to describe this notion.
The Soyuz (technically the combination of the Soyuz rocket and the Soyuz capsule) "does its job" when it delivers humans to orbit alive, returns them to Earth alive, and doesn't abort a mission due to a Soyuz capsule flaw. I'm only aware of two such failures though there have been a number of close calls.
Let's see...
Soyuz 1. Failed to complete its mission. And the crew (one guy) died on reentry.
Soyuz 3. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz 10. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz 11. Problems caused the mission to be aborted early. And the crew died on reentry.
Soyuz 15. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz 18a. Failed to complete launch - second stage of booster failed.
Soyuz 23. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz 25. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz 33. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz T-8 (46th launch). Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz T-10-1 (48th launch). Exploded on launch. escape system worked right, even if nothing else did, so crew survived (thankfully).
So, what's that? two where the crew died, plus nine more where it failed without a death. IN 100 flights.
Hmm, eleven percent failure rate...
Shuttle had two loss of crew failures, and four failed mission failures. Six of 124 failures.
Yah, we pay more attention to Shuttle accidents because they get splashed on the front pages of our papers, and because we don't really give a rat's ass if some soviet cosmonaut dies (okay, some people don't. You know which you are in, since you know what your response to reading about the Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 deaths were at the time). But so far, the Shuttle has had two fatal crashes in 124 (~1.6%) as opposed to Soyuz's 2 in 100 (2%). And four incomplete missions in 124 flights (~3.2%) as opposed to Soyuz's 9 in 100 (9%).
This doesn't even count the fact that the nine Soyuz "incomplete missions" were pretty much compete aborts every one (usually because of failure to dock with one station or another - if you're going up to take the crew to the station, and you can't deliver them there, that's a pretty complete failure).
Where the Shuttle "incomplete missions" include things like "the first planned EVA was cancelled due to suit problems". Note that the Shuttle worked flawlessly on that flight, but someone's sapcesuit didn't - I counted that as a "shuttle failure".
Note, for completeness, that some Shuttle flights were Classified DoD missions. Since the DoD isn't in the habit of announcing the failure (or success) of things it considers to be "classified", it's possible that one or more of the Classified DoD missions was an "incomplete mission" failure.
There is a page addressing a lot of the biggest roadblocks to achieving peace [p5y.org] if you are interested. Or ask me, if you have more questions or the answer I gave wasn't enough.
It wasn't.
I followed your link. All it had in the way of solutions were words to the effect of "P:5Y works to understand, address, and solve every violent and threatened conflict in effective and long-lasting ways."
Which is all very well, but doesn't include any answer to "how are they going to SOLVE any particular "threatened conflict"?"
Surely, if they're serious, they've already put some work into something other than high-minded slogans. After all, most of the things they think they can resolve within five years have been issues for years, if not decades. It's not like specific conflicts suddenly sprang up from nothing since their webpage was created.
Why can't we send a probe that will land on this asteroid and then piggy ride on it. That way we don't need more fuel to carry it round the solar system. If the asteroid doesn't go where we want, then have a relaunch mechanism for the probe to get off at the most suitable point in the asteroid's orbit.
If we have the deltaV to land on the rock, then we have the deltaV to match its orbit without bothering to land on it. So why waste time with the landing?
Or were you thinking that little or no deltaV would be required because the rock was passing close by?
Well, no, a quick guesstimate based on the limited information in the article has it passing at about 9km/s relative to Earth, at 64000km altitude. Which is rather more than escape speed. About 8500 m/s over Earth escape speed, in fact. We've sent probes out faster than that a few times. The stuff that goes out past Jupiter, for instance. But it's a non-trivial exercise.
What happens when we line the world's deserts with endless fields of solar panels and tip past the breaking point of global cooling?
Quite a meaningless concern. Long before that could happen, Greenpeace and the other Environmental groups would have successfully sued you into oblivion for "despoiling the pristine desert" or some such.
But if you do have counter-arguments, I can answer them. Every single one. Because world peace IS possible.
Okay, I'll bite. What are the solutions, within five years, for Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran, and Korea?
And while you're typing out those solutions, jot down a few lines for Congo, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and the other African countries with similar issues. Note that Zimbabwe isn't quite in a state of armed insurrection like the other two, but it's headed that way within a few years.
Might want to touch on Georgia, Russia, and most of the 'Stans while you're at it.
The biggest problem with "Peace in Five Years" is that it assumes that you can get 6+ billion people to agree on anything, much less something as profound as "So why aren't *I* in charge?"....
Seriously, this (Al powder) isn't an energy generation solution, it's an energy distribution solution. Most (populated) areas have both water and oxygen in the air, so if you can get the water to this powder and get hydrogen back... that could be very interesting.
So, an energy distribution system that gives you, say, 1 kg of H2 for every 9 kg of aluminum (not counting the container, the piping, things like that). If you can ship in that much much aluminum, why not just ship in that much hydrogen instead?
The government is selling a managed spectrum for what its worth. Period.
Actually, neither you nor they have any idea at all what the spectrum is worth. The rent they want to charge in addition to the sale price is arbitrary, not based on the "worth" of something.
What they're doing is essentially adding "property taxes" (at the Federal level) to the spectrum. But by carefully not calling it a tax, they're convincing you that they're not setting up for federal property taxes on everything else.
Now the question is, do we sit back and watch them die or do we try to save some of them.
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We sit back and watch them die. We might learn something about evolution by doing so.
When you spill wine on your friend's carpet, do you watch the stain soak in or do you take some responsibility and try to clean it up?
Depends on whether they noticed me spill it, I guess. Though any of my friends who saw me with wine in my hand would know something was up. "I don't drink...wine." fits me to a T.
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The doctor knows perfectly well what the insurance company is going to pay for a treatment. If he puts that amount on the bill, next year the insurance company will "negotiate" a lower rate for that treatment.
So he puts more on the bill than he expects to get from insurance, as insurance to keep the insurance company from lowering the payout.
Note that every single time I've ever gone to a doctor uninsured, there was a sizable discount to the bill for "self pay".
Stupid argument. Once you hit 65 in the USA ("get old"), you'll be under Medicare.
Well, no.
The USA paid out about $330 billion for Medicare in 2005 (the latest year I could easily find a figure for). That's the money that provides government healthcare for people age 65+.
I cannot begin to estimate how much more it would cost to provide the same service to the remaining 250 million of us, but I doubt seriously it'll be a negative cost. So taxes will surely go up.
Though perhaps you meant that total outlays for healthcare will go down? Certainly possible. I should point out that Medicare costs what it does because it forces doctors to accept much less than market price for services, and mandates that doctors accept Medicare patients. Which just shifts some of the costs of Medicare onto the rest of us, since the Doctor certainly isn't going to forgo his salary just because the government requires that he treat some people for free.
It is by no means clear that single-payer in the USA would lower healthcare costs. Anymore than it's clear that spending more per student than any country in the world will give us better education (we do, it doesn't).
Citation? I've never heard of this happening in the USA or anywhere else I've lived.
Actually, no. Health insurance was first bundled with jobs in WW2, when wage controls were put in place by the Roosevelt Administration (a Democrat, but Nixon, a Republican, tried the same thing in the 70's).
So, since there was a labour shortage and employers couldn't use higher wages as an inducement to convince people to work for them (as opposed to working for the other fellow down the street), employers started offering perks like free health insurance as an inducement.
Come the end of the war, when the wage controls were lifted, employers mostly tried to go back to the old way of doing things - no perks like free health insurance, just higher pay as an inducement.
Alas, they found people had gotten used to that free health insurance as part of a good job, and weren't as interested in higher-paying jobs without health insurance. So the employers, for the most, sighed, gave in, and made health insurance a permanent part of the deal. Not because THEY wanted to, but because good people wouldn't come to work for them without the health insurance attached to the job.
And the only reason things are changing now is that health insurance costs are skyrocketing, and employers would be perfectly happy if the taxpayers (you and me) paid for everyone's health insurance (note that everyone includes you and me - a single-payer plan basically goes back to the pre-WW2 situation in that we're paying for our own health insurance. Just with an extra stop in Washington on the way).
Is this meant to imply that Universal Healthcare is a bad idea? No. We may not be able to afford it, but that's a completely unrelated question.
Well...No.
The T-Bills that Social Security "invests in" are ZERO INTEREST T-Bills. The kind used for intragovernmental borrowing.
What actually happens is that Social Security pays out what is needed out of Social Security taxes, then gives the rest to the General Fund in exchange for a zero-interest T-Bill.
When we did this sort of thing as kids, we called "zero-interest T-Bills" IOUs.
Effectively, the stack of IOUs in a vault somewhere are meaningless, though.
When Social Security outlays exceed Social Security revenues, one of two things will have to be done:
A) Social Security taxes will be raised.
B) The Deficit will increase.
If the Social Security Trust Fund (that Mutual Fund you mentioned it being) really meant something, then they'd pull those IOUs out, hand them to Congress, and Congress would immediately borrow more money to pay them, or raise taxes to pay them.
If the Social Security Trust Fund was a meaningless example of bookkeeping fraud (which, by the way, it would be if it were done by a corporation or private individual), then Congress would immediately borrow more money to pay for SS, or raise taxes to pay for SS.
If the result is exactly the same whether the Social Security Trust Fund exists or doesn't exist, it can safely be said to not exist. It can certainly be said that it doesn't matter whether it exists or not.
Note that the above does not imply that Social Security is a bad thing (we may or may not be able to afford it as currently constituted, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether it's a good thing - I can't afford a 60" HDTV right now, but that doesn't make it any less a good thing to have when the game comes on). Nor does it imply that Social Security is going to implode in 2017 (or whatever year the current guesstimates say it's revenue stream goes negative) - they'll simply raise SS taxes or increase the deficit.
What it does imply is that the Social Security is no more a Mutual Fund that invests in T-Bills than my cat is. And if I had an investment in a Mutual Fund that invested solely in Zero-Interest T-Bills, I'd be calling my broker to get me out of that investment and into one that actually had some chance of a return on investment, then calling the SEC.
Sorry, was trying to compare like with like. The Vietnam Death toll I gave was also only Americans killed.
If you'd rather include ALL deaths, it still looks like he was right though.
Vietnam War civilian casualties, both sides (yes, the North Vietnamese killed South Vietnamese civilians in job lots too) were on the order of millions. They could have been as higher then five million, and one million is about the lower limit. Call it three million.
Vietnamese soldiers, both sides: 1.3 million in round numbers.
American soldiers: 58913 (officially). Since some are still MIA, they're not techincally dead yet.
Total for Iraq (your numbers): 105000, including American losses.
Total for Vietnam: somewhere between 2.4 million and 6.4 million.
Still looks like he was right.
Let's see.
He said: Notice where many of these fires occur...Australia.
Note the use of "many".
You responded with: No way. A term that isn't used outside of Australia (OK in a few little islands too) occurs mostly in Australia!Note the use of the word "mostly".
So, he said "many", and you contradicted him using "mostly".
While it is true that the phrase bushfire may be only in use in Australia, the use in the OP's post was largely irrelevant to that, and your comment hinted that you believed that the KEY to his entire post was the use of the word "bushfire".
Of course, he didn't actually say that "most" bushfires were in Australia, so explaining to him that the word was only used there was pretty much irrelevant to his argument ("It's a BEAUTIFUL day", "No, you're wrong, the grass is green").
BLOCKQUOTE>Most is a larger claim than many. It's perfectly normal to show the larger claim in order to show the smaller.
Umm, no. It's not. Two of three is "most". Two is NOT "many". See how that works? They are not necessarily a subset of the other.
Two of three is "a few", but it's also "most".
Two hundred of five hundred is "many", but not "most".
Note that something can be "most" without being "many", and can be "many" without being "most".
Which all reduces to: you shouldn't inflate his claims by using a larger term than he uses. That's not good argument technique (well, it's not if the other fellow is paying attention. It's used quite a lot, and quite a lot of people rather foolishly find themselves believing "most" is what's being talked about when they started out discussing "many").
On a final note, I have a toothache, and I have a catscan tomorrow to determine the progress of my cancer, and I'm generally in a nitpicking grouchy mood.
For which I apologize.
Considering that your solution didn't suggest a single thing that the Palestinians should concede, I suspect you ARE blaming Israel.
Tell you what, get the Palestinians to not fire even ONE rocket into Israel for 365 consecutive days, and then you might be able to get an idea of what the Israelis are willing to concede.
Or not. They may be the complete bastards you think they are. But I doubt it.
Oddly enough, the last time his country invaded South Korea, that didn't happen. His country wasn't destroyed, his dad wasn't killed.
And I doubt it would happen next time either.
Also, on what basis do you believe that he doesn't want a war? You concede that you haven't talked to him, and I can't think of any news about Korea in the last few years that suggest that he's more pacifically inclined than his old man was.
Actually, the world HAS been extending a hand to him in friendship. Remember, we shipped him food and oil for years to convince him not to build an atomic bomb. Of course, we stopped after he went ahead and took our food and oil and built the Bomb.
Note that if you offer someone a bribe, and he takes the bribe without doing whatever you were bribing him to do, he probably will do it again. And again.
How long do you want to supply his Army with food and oil?
And yet, Afghanistan fought internal wars for most of the last two centuries. And the USA wasn't involved in but two of them, in any way. Blaming the USA for fighting in Afghanistan is silly - the Afhganis have had a feuding, fighting culture since forever. Which you won't upset in five years without killing everyone there, men, women, and children. If you just kill the men, the women will feed hate to the children with their mother's milk, and as soon as they're grown, you're back to the status quo ante.
Note that after we kicked the Taliban out of Afghanistan, Afghanistan HAD peace. Until we stopped paying attention, and the vendettas got going again.
Oddly enough, history doesn't support your opinion that "some leader is able to convince the people somehow that by fighting the other guys, their situation will be made better" is "never true".
Ahh, I see now. You believe that not being willing to fight will automatically make the other fellow not be willing to fight.
Doesn't work that way. Consider that WW2 was started at the whim of ONE aging politician. Consider that what YOU believe is right and proper is not necessarily what that fellow over there believes is right and proper. You might think that having a fistfight (or a knife-fight, or a gunfight) is intrinsically wrong, but if the other fellow thinks it's good clean fun (I used to know some guys who thought that their Saturday nights weren't complete without a brawl), then you'll have trouble convincing him that you're not a complete moron who can be disregarded.
In the same way, the people currently affected by war are pretty much screwed, since they generally don't have any way to convince the fighting men to stop without, well, fighting. Which they can't do without weapons and such. Which would mean that one war would become two (or three).
And even if this were possible, five years is too short a time. If you were to start teaching EVERY infant in the world your principles today, and EVERY one of them held strictly to your principles as he/she/it grew older, then in 50 or 60 years, maybe. Five? No chance at all.
And the odds of your lads getting to EVERY infant right now are ZERO.
And if you could get to them all, the odds that EVERY one of them would do what YOU said, and not what their society says, is ZERO.
Show me the magic that will convince EVERYONE of this in only five years, and I might take the idea seriously.
100 years? Maybe, but I doubt it.
Note that "everyone" (your word) includes those people who fighting and killing and dying right now. And none of them will be gone in only five years.
Well, the ones who lose will be gone.
But the winners won't. And the winners will then have more proof that war DOES work.
Vietnam - ten years, 50,000 dead.
Iraq - six years, less than 5000 dead.
Looks like he was right.
The biggest ever detonated was Soviet made. I'm not sure who would know what the biggest ever built was, but I doubt seriously it's any of us.
And besides, a 15 MT bomb would do nicely here. And we have those.
Unless we decommissioned them as part of one of the SALTs. Anyone know?
Have you read anything by this guy Newton? Fig, or Isaac, one of the two. He pretty much explained (about 300 years ago) how this whole "gravity" thing works.
And, for what's it's worth, 5 miles/second (I shudder to think you might have meant metres/second) is below escape velocity. It's barely above orbital velocity. So not even your lump of iron would escape. Even if gravity worked they way you think it does, as opposed to the way it really does.
Good imagery. Note that the the rock is moving about five times as fast (relative to Earth) as the fastest bullet.
It's a 30 metre object moving well over escape velocity. You snag it with the net, and then endure 9000 gravities acceleration, and in only a tenth of a second, you've matched orbits.
If your tether will stretch to a length of 450 metres while holding a weight (you, or a satellite your size) of about 2000 tons.
Good luck with that.
In a word, no. If you want more words, "practical" doesn't begin to describe this notion.
Let's see...
Soyuz 1. Failed to complete its mission. And the crew (one guy) died on reentry.
Soyuz 3. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz 10. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz 11. Problems caused the mission to be aborted early. And the crew died on reentry.
Soyuz 15. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz 18a. Failed to complete launch - second stage of booster failed.
Soyuz 23. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz 25. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz 33. Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz T-8 (46th launch). Failed to complete its mission.
Soyuz T-10-1 (48th launch). Exploded on launch. escape system worked right, even if nothing else did, so crew survived (thankfully).
So, what's that? two where the crew died, plus nine more where it failed without a death. IN 100 flights.
Hmm, eleven percent failure rate...
Shuttle had two loss of crew failures, and four failed mission failures. Six of 124 failures.
Yah, we pay more attention to Shuttle accidents because they get splashed on the front pages of our papers, and because we don't really give a rat's ass if some soviet cosmonaut dies (okay, some people don't. You know which you are in, since you know what your response to reading about the Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 deaths were at the time). But so far, the Shuttle has had two fatal crashes in 124 (~1.6%) as opposed to Soyuz's 2 in 100 (2%). And four incomplete missions in 124 flights (~3.2%) as opposed to Soyuz's 9 in 100 (9%).
This doesn't even count the fact that the nine Soyuz "incomplete missions" were pretty much compete aborts every one (usually because of failure to dock with one station or another - if you're going up to take the crew to the station, and you can't deliver them there, that's a pretty complete failure).
Where the Shuttle "incomplete missions" include things like "the first planned EVA was cancelled due to suit problems". Note that the Shuttle worked flawlessly on that flight, but someone's sapcesuit didn't - I counted that as a "shuttle failure".
Note, for completeness, that some Shuttle flights were Classified DoD missions. Since the DoD isn't in the habit of announcing the failure (or success) of things it considers to be "classified", it's possible that one or more of the Classified DoD missions was an "incomplete mission" failure.
How? Come up with, say, half a dozen ways that, if used twenty years ago, would have headed off every conflict in the last 20 years.
It wasn't.
I followed your link. All it had in the way of solutions were words to the effect of "P:5Y works to understand, address, and solve every violent and threatened conflict in effective and long-lasting ways."
Which is all very well, but doesn't include any answer to "how are they going to SOLVE any particular "threatened conflict"?"
Surely, if they're serious, they've already put some work into something other than high-minded slogans. After all, most of the things they think they can resolve within five years have been issues for years, if not decades. It's not like specific conflicts suddenly sprang up from nothing since their webpage was created.
So, where's the beef?
If we have the deltaV to land on the rock, then we have the deltaV to match its orbit without bothering to land on it. So why waste time with the landing?
Or were you thinking that little or no deltaV would be required because the rock was passing close by?
Well, no, a quick guesstimate based on the limited information in the article has it passing at about 9km/s relative to Earth, at 64000km altitude. Which is rather more than escape speed. About 8500 m/s over Earth escape speed, in fact. We've sent probes out faster than that a few times. The stuff that goes out past Jupiter, for instance. But it's a non-trivial exercise.
Quite a meaningless concern. Long before that could happen, Greenpeace and the other Environmental groups would have successfully sued you into oblivion for "despoiling the pristine desert" or some such.
Okay, I'll bite. What are the solutions, within five years, for Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran, and Korea?
And while you're typing out those solutions, jot down a few lines for Congo, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and the other African countries with similar issues. Note that Zimbabwe isn't quite in a state of armed insurrection like the other two, but it's headed that way within a few years.
Might want to touch on Georgia, Russia, and most of the 'Stans while you're at it.
The biggest problem with "Peace in Five Years" is that it assumes that you can get 6+ billion people to agree on anything, much less something as profound as "So why aren't *I* in charge?"....
So, an energy distribution system that gives you, say, 1 kg of H2 for every 9 kg of aluminum (not counting the container, the piping, things like that). If you can ship in that much much aluminum, why not just ship in that much hydrogen instead?
Actually, neither you nor they have any idea at all what the spectrum is worth. The rent they want to charge in addition to the sale price is arbitrary, not based on the "worth" of something.
What they're doing is essentially adding "property taxes" (at the Federal level) to the spectrum. But by carefully not calling it a tax, they're convincing you that they're not setting up for federal property taxes on everything else.
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We sit back and watch them die. We might learn something about evolution by doing so.
Depends on whether they noticed me spill it, I guess. Though any of my friends who saw me with wine in my hand would know something was up. "I don't drink...wine." fits me to a T.