Privatisation probably works reasonably well for discrete procedures such as hip replacements or cataract surgery, but holistic healthcare is another issue.
It depends on what you mean by "privatization". From the articles the GP linked, the changes the Tories have been making don't create what you'd consider a "private health sytem" - that is, one where the end-user pays. Instead, they're restructuring the NHS model so that instead of the government running the program directly, they hire private medical contractors to perform the same task. This means they can hire multiple providers (generally in different regions), evaluate them against each other, encourage competition between them to lower prices, etc. It's a change to how services are provisioned, not to how they're paid, or to what services are offered.
Another issue is training. At present, doctors trained on the NHS do private work. But without a public system, how do said doctors get trained?
Firstly, despite the changes their proposing, the NHS would still be a public system (that is, funded by the public, and serving public clients). Leaving that aside, if there's no public system, then obviously doctor's would train in the private system. I mean, you don't think there was no medical training before the establishment of publicly-funded medical systems do you? The US has only just implemented a public system, and they've managed to train doctors for quite some time.
By "strong Conservative/Tory assault", you mean the horrors of a competitive tender process to try and find the cheapest provider, so you can offer the most efficient service? Or do you mean they've cut funding? Why ever could that be? I know, I know, conservatives just hate poor people, and the fact that the UK's debt is now 90% of it's GDP is irrelevant - they should just keep pouring money into the NHS and hope the problem just goes away.
Margaret Thatcher still applies - the problem with socialism is, eventually you run out of other people's money. Well, the UK has run out. Now it's running out of money it can borrow too.
We could limit costs. Remember the 80 / 20 rule (actually closer to 90 / 10) - a few patients consume most of the resources. Limit those folks and you've saved quite a bit of money.
Especially since, in a government-provided service, that 10-20% is being forced to pay for treatment that you're suggesting they not have access too. At least in a private system, if an insurance company won't cover you, they don't charge you either.
AFAIK, Unreal4 doesn't support Linux, so the chances of a port are slim. Unity supports Linux though, which is why there are so many Kickstarters offering Linux support - Unity makes it easy to just slap it on.
So do most of the countries higher on that list (Zimbabwe, Bosnia, Libya, etc). That's because most countries in the world have significantly lower standard of living than the west. On the other hand, Australia, Japan and Singapore all spend a smaller percentage than the US, and none of their militaries can be considered "US-supported" unless you water-down that definition into meanginlessness. In fact, New Zealand, which does have almost no military, and relies almost exclusively on treaties for their defence, spends more than the US.
All that list goes to show is that government spending doesn't correlate very well with standard of living.
That's where you're wrong. This isn't a phenomenon limited to this particular generation. The problem is bullying; that the medium now happens to be electronic makes no difference whatsoever. Like many other people here, I was bullied at school, before the internet became a thing. Read some memoirs of people who went through school years ago - same thing.
The only difference now is that electronic communications are logged, so that after the fact, people can go trawl through the evidence to find what happened. The internet is exposing the pre-existing condition of bullying, not causing it.
My answers are "durability", "see below", and "yes". Unlike you, I also have reasons.
Google's Nexus S had a curved screen ages ago. I had one, and it was great - it meant if my phone was placed face down, the screen never made contact with the surface, so there was less chance of scratching. It meant that if it was dropped, there was little chance the screen would be subject to direct impact, meaning less chance of cracking - my phone hit our tiled floors a couple of times, with no harm done.
The classical education (what you're describing) is dead. What we have now is the standardized test education. Reasons vary, depending on your level of paranoia - standardised testing is easier to quantify, the rulers don't want their workers to learn how to think, etc.
Juries also have the ability to judge the law, via nullification. Whether that's a loophole, or an inherent check-and-balance of the system depends largely on your perspective.
You're right that hypotheticals can never be tested, but that's exactly what the OP was doing - asking a hypothetical question: "Makes you wonder where we'd be now if we stopped pissing about on weapons research." Calling me out for proposing a hypothetical answer to a hypothetical question is a big disingenuous.
The idea and the theory of nuclear power were around before the Manhattan Project - but then, so was the idea and theory of nuclear weaponry. It took the massive budget and drive of the Manhattan Project to turn those theories into realities. Without that project, we would have had to invest similar amounts of effort towards a project aimed at power generation instead of survival (which is, generally, the rationale behind military projects like this, reasonable or not). You just need to look at the state of investment in renewable energy technologies now to see how that probably would have played out. As for the differences in electricity generation versus bomb requirements - they actually built a number of nuclear reactors during the course of the Manhattan Project - the "Water Boiler", for instance.
If you think of a renowned physicist, there's a good chance they were involved in the Manhattan Project. It got the most brilliant physicists of the generation all together in one place, and got them all working together, teaching, correcting and challenging each other. Then, when work on the Manhattan Project ceased, those people became available for non-military work. I wonder if Feynman could have done what he did if he hadn't been hanging around Bohr, von Neumann, etc, during his formative years.
Moreover, there are quite a few more direct effects that are easier to hypothesise about. The Manhattan Project created lots of state-of-the-art labs that are still maintained today (Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Lawrence-Berkeley, Ames, etc). The initial cost of those labs was borne by the Manhattan Project, but their ongoing research is now often not military. The reactors those labs designed were the ones that produced isotopes now frequently used in nuclear medicine.
So yeah, we can't say for certain what would have happened if we'd taken another course. But there are certainly indicators it would have been significantly different.
Doesn't matter - know what your government is doing in your name with your money is deemed unessential, so none will be answered during the shutdown anyway.
Off the top of my head - you'd need to get a warrant to get slashdot to disclose Cito's account and IP address information. Then you'd need to figure out WHERE in the world he is(presumably the USA). You have to hope that he was using home or at least work for his slashdot postings rather than using the same anonymous internet cafe. Once you've figured out where he is, you have to contact the appropriate state police agency to coordinate with, along with the postmaster general(assuming USPS was used as opposed to UPS/Fedex).
Or, you could read his last few slashdot posts, discover that he's said he gets his power from Colquitt EMC, which a quick Google tells me, means that he's in Tifton, Georgia. Read a bit more, and you'll find he claims to be a licensed HAM operator. That shrinks the suspect pool considerably. People who overshare on one post probably have in the past too.
What, were they threatening to reveal his secret past as a hitman? Do you even know what that word means? Pretty sure they'd be being locked away as we speak if they'd even attempted blackmail.
Putting aside your attempt to invigorate your argument through emotive phraseology at the expense of accuracy, you do know this shutdown is just a small taste of things to come if your government doesn't get it's spending under control right? Look at Europe if you want an object lesson.
Like I said in another thread, I'm not an American, and definitely not a Republican partisan. I personally think the first thing you should be thinking about doing to reduce the budget is ditching some of your "defence" budget - like, say, those oh-so-very defensive carrier groups, that are only useful for projecting force, and of which you have more than the rest of the world put together.
That said, the Tea Party people have a point in trying to force a reduction in government spending. Yes, going after the ACA is partisan crap, but then, so is 80% of your politics, on a good day. But when it comes down to it, your debt is soaring. You're getting away with it now, because interest rates are so low. But if interest rates return to historic levels, the cost of servicing it will increase between 200-300%. There's a lot of pork and wastage that. IMO, would be a higher priority to eliminate than the ACA, but something will have to give eventually.
Yeah, they're being extortionate too; the difference is, they're keeping within the political ambit. All politics is really about extortion, after all - that is to say, compromise. We'll pass your bill if you add this rider; we'll reject your bill unless you also give us this. It's a ridiculous way to determine policies (which is why you get so much unrelated crap and pork-barrel projects wrapped up in every piece of legislation) but it's also the way Washington's done things for years.
Note, I'm not American, and not particularly partisan - while I think the Democrat government is playing political theatre here, I also think the best way to reduce America's budget would be to stop spending so much damn money on the military, which I don't imagine the Republicans would be too fond of either.
So what, it's not really extortion if the mafia burns down your local pizza place for not paying protection money, as pizza isn't essential? Nothing about extortion requires it to be essential.
The guards probably keep all the tigers away from the monuments, too. It must be working - I don't see any tigers. Exactly how many Americans have been killed by terrorist attacks on monuments again?
but either way shutting the gov't sites is a great way to remind people that gov't does things they want done.
Uh-huh. Nice monument there. It would be a shame if someone barricaded it off. The shutdown is revealing government's true nature - a bunch of petty extortionists. Give us money, or we'll shut down things that you like. Not because we can't afford it - it will actually cost us money - but because we can.
Does anyone really believe the facilities they shut down are due to lack of funds?
All the actually expensive stuff is "essential", and they keep paying for it. Instead, they pay people to barricade off open-air monuments, and to add modify websites to become non-functional; they pay rangers to stop people from "recreating" in national parks. It's fairly obvious that the shutdown is just Washington Monument Syndrome writ large.
1) Make controversial statement (Micromanaging is good!) 2) Redefine your terms so that actually, it's not that controversial (Micromanagers "can't delve into the details of everything") 3) Spam your headline around the place 4) Profit
Slashdot Mirror
Privatisation probably works reasonably well for discrete procedures such as hip replacements or cataract surgery, but holistic healthcare is another issue.
It depends on what you mean by "privatization". From the articles the GP linked, the changes the Tories have been making don't create what you'd consider a "private health sytem" - that is, one where the end-user pays. Instead, they're restructuring the NHS model so that instead of the government running the program directly, they hire private medical contractors to perform the same task. This means they can hire multiple providers (generally in different regions), evaluate them against each other, encourage competition between them to lower prices, etc. It's a change to how services are provisioned, not to how they're paid, or to what services are offered.
Another issue is training. At present, doctors trained on the NHS do private work. But without a public system, how do said doctors get trained?
Firstly, despite the changes their proposing, the NHS would still be a public system (that is, funded by the public, and serving public clients). Leaving that aside, if there's no public system, then obviously doctor's would train in the private system. I mean, you don't think there was no medical training before the establishment of publicly-funded medical systems do you? The US has only just implemented a public system, and they've managed to train doctors for quite some time.
By "strong Conservative/Tory assault", you mean the horrors of a competitive tender process to try and find the cheapest provider, so you can offer the most efficient service? Or do you mean they've cut funding? Why ever could that be? I know, I know, conservatives just hate poor people, and the fact that the UK's debt is now 90% of it's GDP is irrelevant - they should just keep pouring money into the NHS and hope the problem just goes away.
Margaret Thatcher still applies - the problem with socialism is, eventually you run out of other people's money. Well, the UK has run out. Now it's running out of money it can borrow too.
We could limit costs. Remember the 80 / 20 rule (actually closer to 90 / 10) - a few patients consume most of the resources. Limit those folks and you've saved quite a bit of money.
Especially since, in a government-provided service, that 10-20% is being forced to pay for treatment that you're suggesting they not have access too. At least in a private system, if an insurance company won't cover you, they don't charge you either.
AFAIK, Unreal4 doesn't support Linux, so the chances of a port are slim. Unity supports Linux though, which is why there are so many Kickstarters offering Linux support - Unity makes it easy to just slap it on.
So do most of the countries higher on that list (Zimbabwe, Bosnia, Libya, etc). That's because most countries in the world have significantly lower standard of living than the west. On the other hand, Australia, Japan and Singapore all spend a smaller percentage than the US, and none of their militaries can be considered "US-supported" unless you water-down that definition into meanginlessness. In fact, New Zealand, which does have almost no military, and relies almost exclusively on treaties for their defence, spends more than the US.
All that list goes to show is that government spending doesn't correlate very well with standard of living.
I feel this is a behavioral bump in the road
That's where you're wrong. This isn't a phenomenon limited to this particular generation. The problem is bullying; that the medium now happens to be electronic makes no difference whatsoever. Like many other people here, I was bullied at school, before the internet became a thing. Read some memoirs of people who went through school years ago - same thing.
The only difference now is that electronic communications are logged, so that after the fact, people can go trawl through the evidence to find what happened. The internet is exposing the pre-existing condition of bullying, not causing it.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess the cop wasn't prosecuted for murder/manslaughter. Did he even lose his job?
Maybe his whole speech was, but the quoted section was in defence of fiction, not libraries.
I know this won't happen, especially since the EU mandates Micro-USB.
And even more especially because Apple has patented aspects of the Lightning connector, and have no intentions of sharing.
My answers are "durability", "see below", and "yes". Unlike you, I also have reasons.
Google's Nexus S had a curved screen ages ago. I had one, and it was great - it meant if my phone was placed face down, the screen never made contact with the surface, so there was less chance of scratching. It meant that if it was dropped, there was little chance the screen would be subject to direct impact, meaning less chance of cracking - my phone hit our tiled floors a couple of times, with no harm done.
The classical education (what you're describing) is dead. What we have now is the standardized test education. Reasons vary, depending on your level of paranoia - standardised testing is easier to quantify, the rulers don't want their workers to learn how to think, etc.
Juries also have the ability to judge the law, via nullification. Whether that's a loophole, or an inherent check-and-balance of the system depends largely on your perspective.
Nobody wants to pay for Obamacare, but once the state's already gotten your money, you might as well get what value you can out of it.
Besides, who says many people want it? This article's about the fragility of the site, and how to doesn't cope even without load.
You're right that hypotheticals can never be tested, but that's exactly what the OP was doing - asking a hypothetical question: "Makes you wonder where we'd be now if we stopped pissing about on weapons research." Calling me out for proposing a hypothetical answer to a hypothetical question is a big disingenuous.
The idea and the theory of nuclear power were around before the Manhattan Project - but then, so was the idea and theory of nuclear weaponry. It took the massive budget and drive of the Manhattan Project to turn those theories into realities. Without that project, we would have had to invest similar amounts of effort towards a project aimed at power generation instead of survival (which is, generally, the rationale behind military projects like this, reasonable or not). You just need to look at the state of investment in renewable energy technologies now to see how that probably would have played out. As for the differences in electricity generation versus bomb requirements - they actually built a number of nuclear reactors during the course of the Manhattan Project - the "Water Boiler", for instance.
If you think of a renowned physicist, there's a good chance they were involved in the Manhattan Project. It got the most brilliant physicists of the generation all together in one place, and got them all working together, teaching, correcting and challenging each other. Then, when work on the Manhattan Project ceased, those people became available for non-military work. I wonder if Feynman could have done what he did if he hadn't been hanging around Bohr, von Neumann, etc, during his formative years.
Moreover, there are quite a few more direct effects that are easier to hypothesise about. The Manhattan Project created lots of state-of-the-art labs that are still maintained today (Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Lawrence-Berkeley, Ames, etc). The initial cost of those labs was borne by the Manhattan Project, but their ongoing research is now often not military. The reactors those labs designed were the ones that produced isotopes now frequently used in nuclear medicine.
So yeah, we can't say for certain what would have happened if we'd taken another course. But there are certainly indicators it would have been significantly different.
You're modded as funny, but I'm betting the state of nuclear science would be nowhere near the state it is now if not for the Manhattan Project.
Doesn't matter - know what your government is doing in your name with your money is deemed unessential, so none will be answered during the shutdown anyway.
Off the top of my head - you'd need to get a warrant to get slashdot to disclose Cito's account and IP address information. Then you'd need to figure out WHERE in the world he is(presumably the USA). You have to hope that he was using home or at least work for his slashdot postings rather than using the same anonymous internet cafe. Once you've figured out where he is, you have to contact the appropriate state police agency to coordinate with, along with the postmaster general(assuming USPS was used as opposed to UPS/Fedex).
Or, you could read his last few slashdot posts, discover that he's said he gets his power from Colquitt EMC, which a quick Google tells me, means that he's in Tifton, Georgia. Read a bit more, and you'll find he claims to be a licensed HAM operator. That shrinks the suspect pool considerably. People who overshare on one post probably have in the past too.
attempting to blackmail the president
What, were they threatening to reveal his secret past as a hitman? Do you even know what that word means? Pretty sure they'd be being locked away as we speak if they'd even attempted blackmail.
Putting aside your attempt to invigorate your argument through emotive phraseology at the expense of accuracy, you do know this shutdown is just a small taste of things to come if your government doesn't get it's spending under control right? Look at Europe if you want an object lesson.
Like I said in another thread, I'm not an American, and definitely not a Republican partisan. I personally think the first thing you should be thinking about doing to reduce the budget is ditching some of your "defence" budget - like, say, those oh-so-very defensive carrier groups, that are only useful for projecting force, and of which you have more than the rest of the world put together.
That said, the Tea Party people have a point in trying to force a reduction in government spending. Yes, going after the ACA is partisan crap, but then, so is 80% of your politics, on a good day. But when it comes down to it, your debt is soaring. You're getting away with it now, because interest rates are so low. But if interest rates return to historic levels, the cost of servicing it will increase between 200-300%. There's a lot of pork and wastage that. IMO, would be a higher priority to eliminate than the ACA, but something will have to give eventually.
Yeah, they're being extortionate too; the difference is, they're keeping within the political ambit. All politics is really about extortion, after all - that is to say, compromise. We'll pass your bill if you add this rider; we'll reject your bill unless you also give us this. It's a ridiculous way to determine policies (which is why you get so much unrelated crap and pork-barrel projects wrapped up in every piece of legislation) but it's also the way Washington's done things for years.
Note, I'm not American, and not particularly partisan - while I think the Democrat government is playing political theatre here, I also think the best way to reduce America's budget would be to stop spending so much damn money on the military, which I don't imagine the Republicans would be too fond of either.
So what, it's not really extortion if the mafia burns down your local pizza place for not paying protection money, as pizza isn't essential? Nothing about extortion requires it to be essential.
The guards probably keep all the tigers away from the monuments, too. It must be working - I don't see any tigers. Exactly how many Americans have been killed by terrorist attacks on monuments again?
but either way shutting the gov't sites is a great way to remind people that gov't does things they want done.
Uh-huh. Nice monument there. It would be a shame if someone barricaded it off. The shutdown is revealing government's true nature - a bunch of petty extortionists. Give us money, or we'll shut down things that you like. Not because we can't afford it - it will actually cost us money - but because we can.
Does anyone really believe the facilities they shut down are due to lack of funds?
All the actually expensive stuff is "essential", and they keep paying for it. Instead, they pay people to barricade off open-air monuments, and to add modify websites to become non-functional; they pay rangers to stop people from "recreating" in national parks. It's fairly obvious that the shutdown is just Washington Monument Syndrome writ large.
They don't need to. When you don't offer end users any choices, comparisons are meaningless.
1) Make controversial statement (Micromanaging is good!)
2) Redefine your terms so that actually, it's not that controversial (Micromanagers "can't delve into the details of everything")
3) Spam your headline around the place
4) Profit
There's a difference between "right to privacy" and "right to slack off at work without my boss finding out about it".
Access slashdot on your own time, from your own equipment, and your boss will never know your UID, https or no.