Actually, it works pretty well for slashdot. Have you looked at other, non-moderated forums such as at newspaper websites? It seems at least half the posts there are trolls.
Of course, those few legitimate things (national defense, medicaid, medicare, social security, interest on the national debt, veteran benefits and income security) add up to the great majority of the entire budget (about 90%) and nearly all of those expenses are not discretionary (ie, Congress would have to change existing laws to adjust these expenditures--the administration can only adjust discretionary expenses).
Try telling some retired Tea Partiers you want to remove medicare, medicaid and social security and see how far you get.
"KUN" is the Japanese reading, "ON" is the Chinese reading of the kanji. Originally, all kanji came from Chinese characters. As the Japanese adopted the characters, they would often add their own reading to each character (because the sounds of the Japanese language tend to be quite different from those in Chinese). They also adjusted the use of each character, so usually a character in Japanese doesn't have the same meaning as the character it is based on in Chinese.
Usually (but now always) the Japanese "KUN" reading is used in words involving one kanji and some kana (such as atatakai where 'atata' is the kanji and 'kai' is written with hiragana). The same character, atata, could also be used in a compound word like onsen (hot spring) where 'on' is the same character as used in atatakai and 'sen' is another kanji, both using the Chinese "ON" reading.
There can also be multiple ON and KUN readings for a single kanji--the reading would depend on the word in which the kanji is used (or it can be completely arbitrary and have the same meaning with different readings, such as the different generic ways of saying 'one').
To put it simply, because of the recessionary spiral. As people spend less, businesses cut jobs leading to people having even less money to spend and leading to even further job cuts which can lead to a full-blown depression. If the federal reserve cuts interest rates to zero (increasing the amount of the money supply as much as possible) yet the recession continues to worsen, the only power strong enough to prevent a depression is enormous deficit spending by the federal government. Individual states can only do very modest deficit spending on their own.
Another problem is the needs for government services do not diminish during a recession (rather, the demand increases). People still get sick, the nation still needs to be defended, fires still need to be put out, people still need social security payments in order to meet their bills, kids still need to get an education, etc. If you cut all of these services then many more people will become homeless, be unable to get medical treatment and kids will have a worse education. Teachers now face the worst job prospects since the Great Depression (see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/nyregion/20teachers.html) yet prior to this recession we were already facing an enormous challenge with improving education in this country.
When the US pulled out of the Great Depression it raised deficit spending to the highest rate in our history, up to 100% of GDP (during WWII).
Well, he could still go through the tutorials. He just won't know what the heck he's doing, at least not in detail.
I did pretty much the same thing when I was a little kid, skipping to the back of my programming book and doing the most complicated example programs first (like drawing a house with an animated garage door in BASIC before knowing hardly anything about the programming syntax...).
Sometimes you need to see the reward of what you can do by programming in order to build up the motivation to go through the work of learning how to do it on your own without tutorials. It also can help show you how quickly you can do interesting things once you know what you're doing. The XNA tutorials are very straightforward and at least the early ones are written for people who have never programmed before.
You can try getting him to install XNA Game Studio (free). You can write some simple games with the first couple of tutorials.
However, if he doesn't really want to program he'll quickly get bored and go back to gaming. But of course, not everyone is destined to be a programmer.
Well, that was its top speed. It would have taken some time for it to accelerate from the cruise speed of the B-52 up to mach 6 so it wouldn't have gone quite that far.
Still, it probably would have gone at least half-way across Pennsylvania.
I wish I could recall where I first heard about this story--I believe it was on NPR a few months ago--it included a lot of details not found in the article linked to on slashdot.
The 'news' is that the formulas they use to determine the strength needed for buildings isn't adequate for the Pacific Northwest region. Since the frequency of earthquakes there is relatively low they use lower requirements for building strength. However, the problem is that while the frequency is low when the earthquake finally comes it's going to be so strong that it will topple almost every building within a hundred miles of the epicenter.
The problem is the way buildings are constructed there. Since the odds of an earthquake happening any given year is low they are not built to withstand strong earthquakes (as buildings in California and Chile are). However, it appears that while the Pacific Northwest doesn't get struck by earthquakes often, when it does it will be a very strong earthquake. It's very possible that virtually all buildings will collapse in such an earthquake since they were only built to withstand much weaker earthquakes.
While it would be expensive, it is possible to add reinforcements to existing structures to be able to better withstand a strong earthquake. They can also change the building codes so that new buildings are required to withstand stronger earthquakes.
I have no idea where you're getting your numbers from and I also have no idea how you would determine them with any certainty.
One of the biggest arguments against private insurance is that they make a profit off of a fraction of the services they cover. The more services people use nationally the more profit private health insurance companies make. So it is in their interest for people to take unnecessary tests and procedures.
How in the world you would calculate how large this effect is accurately is beyond me. The only thing we can do is compare health insurance programs between countries which, of course, involves many variables so still would be difficult to quantify any particular cause of a discrepancy between their costs and ours.
You make a good point, although it doesn't completely invalidate the grandparent's either (very nearly does depending on his diet). An enormous amount of energy is used transporting all of the food and supplies to dense cities, especially NYC. Much of the food has to cross hundreds of miles to reach store shelves there. One of the best ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to buy locally produced food and I simply don't see how that's even possible when you live in a dense urban area.
If you really want to have a minimal impact on the environment you would live at a smaller community where there are farmer markets and it is possible to eat everything you want with nearly all of your food produced within 20-40 miles of where you live (say at Boulder, CO). You still can get around with only a bike or by foot and still pay much less for housing and food than you would at New York City (although Boulder is considered an expensive town to live at by local standards).
But people don't hate their health care plans in other countries. If HMOs are very similar to a government-pays system why are people in other countries so happy with their health care systems while we are so upset at HMOs?
As far as I know we are the only first-world country in the world that allows for-profit health insurance companies to operate (everywhere else only non-profit insurance companies are allowed if even that).
Obviously it isn't a pure market system by any measure, but I challenge you to find any other health care system in the world that allows for as much profit by private health organizations (from pharmaceuticals to health insurance companies).
The great majority of time spent on designing and testing a modern jet is done on a computer. For example, the 787 Dreamliner project used 800,000 hours of computation time on Cray supercomputers, 15,000 hours of wind tunnel testing and substantially less time for actual flight testing -- http://www.boeing.com/commercial/787family/programfacts.html
By the time a design is ready for wind tunnel testing all of its primary handling characteristics are almost fully established. Computers can model everything from aerodynamic characteristics of the airplane to static structural analysis of the airframe to even simulating resonance frequencies of the airplane body.
When he states how he will pay for the federal government with just $160 billion in revenue I'll start paying attention to what he says.
He's also hardly the only politician who has been a doctor and the majority of practicing doctors were in favor of the health care overhaul (63% were in favor of the public option too: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112818960 ). Just because you can find a doctor with a particular political point of view doesn't really mean a whole lot to me.
The interview was given in 2007. The federal budget for 1997 was over $1.6 trillion (see http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy97/browse.html citizen's guide PDF has it on page 10). Of that $1.6 trillion, about $1.25 trillion spent on non-social security expenses.
The budget for 2007 was $2.8 trillion with about $160 billion in non-income tax revenue. This does not include social security revenue either since, obviously, social security revenue is intended to be spent solely on social security.
This also does not take into account inflation. Taking inflation into account, the 1997 budget would be about $2.05 trillion in 2007 dollars (or $1.6 trillion for the non-social security part of the 1997 budget). How you get $160 billion to pay for 10 times that amount is anyone's guess.
The only way to make Ron Paul's numbers even close to reality is to ignore inflation and use social security as a primary income for the federal government while dropping it as an expense.
He also ignores the biggest increase in government spending over the past 10 years--entitlement programs such as social security and Medicare. Those costs are going up due to baby boomers retiring and because health care costs have been climbing much faster than inflation.
His solution? Volunteer work by doctors to treat older people. Also, more market-oriented health care because it's 'cheaper'. Proof of this assertion? Umm...
There's plenty of proof that socialized health care is cheaper by simply looking at how much less other countries spend on their health care while still having better health statistics than us.
He puts all of the blame of higher costs on the government, ignoring the obvious increase in technology over the years that has greatly increased the costs of care due to more expensive tests and treatments that simply weren't available in the past (like MRIs and CAT scans).
I'm not sure if that's unique to modern politics. What seems more unique to me is basic issues like taxes. If I ask someone who wants lower taxes what the tax rate should be and why they never have a good answer (by 'good', something that is consistent with the rest of their logic, like having a balanced budget, while still receiving social security and medicaid benefits as well as supporting the most expensive military force in the world).
And raising taxes anywhere is treated as the ultimate sin even if the last tax cut that was passed wasn't accompanied by any reductions in spending and the current recession is causing a significant drop in tax revenues while simultaneously greatly increasing the demand for social services.
I expect to find disagreement always. But I also expect to be able to find party leaders capable of rational debate--and if you consider Ron Paul's debate on Meet the Press as 'rational' then I don't know what to say (from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22342301/ ):
MR. RUSSERT: Let's start right at the very top, the issues. This is what you have been saying on the campaign stump, "I'd like to get rid of the IRS. I want to get rid of the income tax." Abolish it.
REP. PAUL: That's a good idea. I like that idea.
MR. RUSSERT: What would happen to all those lost revenues? How would we fund our government?
REP. PAUL: We have to cut spending. You can't get rid of the income tax if you don't get rid of some spending. But, you know, if you got rid of the income tax today you'd have about as much revenue as, as we had 10 years ago, and the size of government wasn't all that bad 10 years ago. So there're sources of revenues other than the income tax. You know, you have, you have tariff, excise taxes, user fees, highway fees. So, so there's still a lot of money. But the real problem is spending. But, you know, we lived a long time in this country without an income tax. Up until 1913 we didn't have it.
MR. RUSSERT: But, but you eliminate the income tax, do you know how much lost revenue that would be?
REP. PAUL: A lot. But...
MR. RUSSERT: Over a trillion dollars.
REP. PAUL: That's good. I mean, we--but we could save hundreds of billions of dollars if we had a sensible foreign policy.
MR. RUSSERT: Well...
REP. PAUL: And if you go--if you're going to be the policeman of the world, you need that. You need the income tax to police the world and run the welfare state. I want a constitutional-size government.
MR. RUSSERT: Would you replace the income tax with anything else?
REP. PAUL: Not if I could help it. You know, there are some proposals where probably almost anything would be better than income tax. But there's a lot of shortcomings with the, with the sales tax. But it would probably be slightly better than the income tax--it would be an improvement. But the goal is to cut the spending, get back to a sensible-size government.
MR. RUSSERT: But if you had a flat tax, 30 percent consumption tax, that would be very, very punishing to the poor and middle class.
REP. PAUL: Well, I know. That's why I don't want it.
MR. RUSSERT: So you have nothing?
REP. PAUL: I want to cut spending. I want to get a--use the Constitution as our guide, and you wouldn't need the income tax.
Basically, "I want to cut taxes almost completely." Great, so where will you cut a trillion dollars+ from spending? Umm, start with cutting off funding for the military and set a flat consumption tax (although I really don't want to do that) but I do want to cut those taxes!
Texas tried to join the United States just a year after declaring their independence from Mexico. The only reason it took so long for them to join the US was due to resistance by abolitionists from admitting another slave state to the union.
BP has stated that they have already spent over $450 million on cleanup costs. The $75 million is the maximum they could be sued for in total by people affected by the spill.
You're making many more assumptions than the original author. Where do I say what my opinion is? How in the world can you tell what my take on things even is based on my previous comment?
All I ask is how he knows all of this when the information it would require to know the answer either isn't public (yet) or hasn't happened (yet).
He also capitalized 'natural gas' in his article. Have you ever seen that either?
Slashdot Mirror
American healthcare costs substantially more compared to countries with similar if not even higher labor costs (such as in Japan and Germany).
Actually, it works pretty well for slashdot. Have you looked at other, non-moderated forums such as at newspaper websites? It seems at least half the posts there are trolls.
Of course, those few legitimate things (national defense, medicaid, medicare, social security, interest on the national debt, veteran benefits and income security) add up to the great majority of the entire budget (about 90%) and nearly all of those expenses are not discretionary (ie, Congress would have to change existing laws to adjust these expenditures--the administration can only adjust discretionary expenses).
Try telling some retired Tea Partiers you want to remove medicare, medicaid and social security and see how far you get.
"KUN" is the Japanese reading, "ON" is the Chinese reading of the kanji. Originally, all kanji came from Chinese characters. As the Japanese adopted the characters, they would often add their own reading to each character (because the sounds of the Japanese language tend to be quite different from those in Chinese). They also adjusted the use of each character, so usually a character in Japanese doesn't have the same meaning as the character it is based on in Chinese.
Usually (but now always) the Japanese "KUN" reading is used in words involving one kanji and some kana (such as atatakai where 'atata' is the kanji and 'kai' is written with hiragana). The same character, atata, could also be used in a compound word like onsen (hot spring) where 'on' is the same character as used in atatakai and 'sen' is another kanji, both using the Chinese "ON" reading.
There can also be multiple ON and KUN readings for a single kanji--the reading would depend on the word in which the kanji is used (or it can be completely arbitrary and have the same meaning with different readings, such as the different generic ways of saying 'one').
You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#On.27yomi_.28Chinese_reading.29
To put it simply, because of the recessionary spiral. As people spend less, businesses cut jobs leading to people having even less money to spend and leading to even further job cuts which can lead to a full-blown depression. If the federal reserve cuts interest rates to zero (increasing the amount of the money supply as much as possible) yet the recession continues to worsen, the only power strong enough to prevent a depression is enormous deficit spending by the federal government. Individual states can only do very modest deficit spending on their own.
Another problem is the needs for government services do not diminish during a recession (rather, the demand increases). People still get sick, the nation still needs to be defended, fires still need to be put out, people still need social security payments in order to meet their bills, kids still need to get an education, etc. If you cut all of these services then many more people will become homeless, be unable to get medical treatment and kids will have a worse education. Teachers now face the worst job prospects since the Great Depression (see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/nyregion/20teachers.html) yet prior to this recession we were already facing an enormous challenge with improving education in this country.
When the US pulled out of the Great Depression it raised deficit spending to the highest rate in our history, up to 100% of GDP (during WWII).
Well, he could still go through the tutorials. He just won't know what the heck he's doing, at least not in detail.
I did pretty much the same thing when I was a little kid, skipping to the back of my programming book and doing the most complicated example programs first (like drawing a house with an animated garage door in BASIC before knowing hardly anything about the programming syntax...).
Sometimes you need to see the reward of what you can do by programming in order to build up the motivation to go through the work of learning how to do it on your own without tutorials. It also can help show you how quickly you can do interesting things once you know what you're doing. The XNA tutorials are very straightforward and at least the early ones are written for people who have never programmed before.
You can try getting him to install XNA Game Studio (free). You can write some simple games with the first couple of tutorials.
However, if he doesn't really want to program he'll quickly get bored and go back to gaming. But of course, not everyone is destined to be a programmer.
Well, that was its top speed. It would have taken some time for it to accelerate from the cruise speed of the B-52 up to mach 6 so it wouldn't have gone quite that far.
Still, it probably would have gone at least half-way across Pennsylvania.
According to the article there's three more vehicles which will be tested in the fall.
I wish I could recall where I first heard about this story--I believe it was on NPR a few months ago--it included a lot of details not found in the article linked to on slashdot.
The 'news' is that the formulas they use to determine the strength needed for buildings isn't adequate for the Pacific Northwest region. Since the frequency of earthquakes there is relatively low they use lower requirements for building strength. However, the problem is that while the frequency is low when the earthquake finally comes it's going to be so strong that it will topple almost every building within a hundred miles of the epicenter.
The problem is the way buildings are constructed there. Since the odds of an earthquake happening any given year is low they are not built to withstand strong earthquakes (as buildings in California and Chile are). However, it appears that while the Pacific Northwest doesn't get struck by earthquakes often, when it does it will be a very strong earthquake. It's very possible that virtually all buildings will collapse in such an earthquake since they were only built to withstand much weaker earthquakes.
While it would be expensive, it is possible to add reinforcements to existing structures to be able to better withstand a strong earthquake. They can also change the building codes so that new buildings are required to withstand stronger earthquakes.
I have no idea where you're getting your numbers from and I also have no idea how you would determine them with any certainty.
One of the biggest arguments against private insurance is that they make a profit off of a fraction of the services they cover. The more services people use nationally the more profit private health insurance companies make. So it is in their interest for people to take unnecessary tests and procedures.
How in the world you would calculate how large this effect is accurately is beyond me. The only thing we can do is compare health insurance programs between countries which, of course, involves many variables so still would be difficult to quantify any particular cause of a discrepancy between their costs and ours.
You don't see much nuclear power in Japan, in large part due to stories like these:
(July 2007)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003793900_quake18.html
(September 1999)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/461446.stm
(July 1999)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/393216.stm
Probably not the best idea to rely on nuclear power in a very active seismic area.
You make a good point, although it doesn't completely invalidate the grandparent's either (very nearly does depending on his diet). An enormous amount of energy is used transporting all of the food and supplies to dense cities, especially NYC. Much of the food has to cross hundreds of miles to reach store shelves there. One of the best ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to buy locally produced food and I simply don't see how that's even possible when you live in a dense urban area.
If you really want to have a minimal impact on the environment you would live at a smaller community where there are farmer markets and it is possible to eat everything you want with nearly all of your food produced within 20-40 miles of where you live (say at Boulder, CO). You still can get around with only a bike or by foot and still pay much less for housing and food than you would at New York City (although Boulder is considered an expensive town to live at by local standards).
But people don't hate their health care plans in other countries. If HMOs are very similar to a government-pays system why are people in other countries so happy with their health care systems while we are so upset at HMOs?
As far as I know we are the only first-world country in the world that allows for-profit health insurance companies to operate (everywhere else only non-profit insurance companies are allowed if even that).
Obviously it isn't a pure market system by any measure, but I challenge you to find any other health care system in the world that allows for as much profit by private health organizations (from pharmaceuticals to health insurance companies).
The great majority of time spent on designing and testing a modern jet is done on a computer. For example, the 787 Dreamliner project used 800,000 hours of computation time on Cray supercomputers, 15,000 hours of wind tunnel testing and substantially less time for actual flight testing -- http://www.boeing.com/commercial/787family/programfacts.html
By the time a design is ready for wind tunnel testing all of its primary handling characteristics are almost fully established. Computers can model everything from aerodynamic characteristics of the airplane to static structural analysis of the airframe to even simulating resonance frequencies of the airplane body.
When he states how he will pay for the federal government with just $160 billion in revenue I'll start paying attention to what he says.
He's also hardly the only politician who has been a doctor and the majority of practicing doctors were in favor of the health care overhaul (63% were in favor of the public option too: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112818960 ). Just because you can find a doctor with a particular political point of view doesn't really mean a whole lot to me.
The interview was given in 2007. The federal budget for 1997 was over $1.6 trillion (see http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy97/browse.html citizen's guide PDF has it on page 10). Of that $1.6 trillion, about $1.25 trillion spent on non-social security expenses.
The budget for 2007 was $2.8 trillion with about $160 billion in non-income tax revenue. This does not include social security revenue either since, obviously, social security revenue is intended to be spent solely on social security.
This also does not take into account inflation. Taking inflation into account, the 1997 budget would be about $2.05 trillion in 2007 dollars (or $1.6 trillion for the non-social security part of the 1997 budget). How you get $160 billion to pay for 10 times that amount is anyone's guess.
The only way to make Ron Paul's numbers even close to reality is to ignore inflation and use social security as a primary income for the federal government while dropping it as an expense.
He also ignores the biggest increase in government spending over the past 10 years--entitlement programs such as social security and Medicare. Those costs are going up due to baby boomers retiring and because health care costs have been climbing much faster than inflation.
His solution? Volunteer work by doctors to treat older people. Also, more market-oriented health care because it's 'cheaper'. Proof of this assertion? Umm...
There's plenty of proof that socialized health care is cheaper by simply looking at how much less other countries spend on their health care while still having better health statistics than us.
He puts all of the blame of higher costs on the government, ignoring the obvious increase in technology over the years that has greatly increased the costs of care due to more expensive tests and treatments that simply weren't available in the past (like MRIs and CAT scans).
See: http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Ron_Paul_Health_Care.htm
The problem is Ron Paul's numbers don't add up. Your 'point' is meaningless if you're objectively wrong.
I'm not sure if that's unique to modern politics. What seems more unique to me is basic issues like taxes. If I ask someone who wants lower taxes what the tax rate should be and why they never have a good answer (by 'good', something that is consistent with the rest of their logic, like having a balanced budget, while still receiving social security and medicaid benefits as well as supporting the most expensive military force in the world).
And raising taxes anywhere is treated as the ultimate sin even if the last tax cut that was passed wasn't accompanied by any reductions in spending and the current recession is causing a significant drop in tax revenues while simultaneously greatly increasing the demand for social services.
I expect to find disagreement always. But I also expect to be able to find party leaders capable of rational debate--and if you consider Ron Paul's debate on Meet the Press as 'rational' then I don't know what to say (from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22342301/ ):
MR. RUSSERT: Let's start right at the very top, the issues. This is what you have been saying on the campaign stump, "I'd like to get rid of the IRS. I want to get rid of the income tax." Abolish it.
REP. PAUL: That's a good idea. I like that idea.
MR. RUSSERT: What would happen to all those lost revenues? How would we fund our government?
REP. PAUL: We have to cut spending. You can't get rid of the income tax if you don't get rid of some spending. But, you know, if you got rid of the income tax today you'd have about as much revenue as, as we had 10 years ago, and the size of government wasn't all that bad 10 years ago. So there're sources of revenues other than the income tax. You know, you have, you have tariff, excise taxes, user fees, highway fees. So, so there's still a lot of money. But the real problem is spending. But, you know, we lived a long time in this country without an income tax. Up until 1913 we didn't have it.
MR. RUSSERT: But, but you eliminate the income tax, do you know how much lost revenue that would be?
REP. PAUL: A lot. But...
MR. RUSSERT: Over a trillion dollars.
REP. PAUL: That's good. I mean, we--but we could save hundreds of billions of dollars if we had a sensible foreign policy.
MR. RUSSERT: Well...
REP. PAUL: And if you go--if you're going to be the policeman of the world, you need that. You need the income tax to police the world and run the welfare state. I want a constitutional-size government.
MR. RUSSERT: Would you replace the income tax with anything else?
REP. PAUL: Not if I could help it. You know, there are some proposals where probably almost anything would be better than income tax. But there's a lot of shortcomings with the, with the sales tax. But it would probably be slightly better than the income tax--it would be an improvement. But the goal is to cut the spending, get back to a sensible-size government.
MR. RUSSERT: But if you had a flat tax, 30 percent consumption tax, that would be very, very punishing to the poor and middle class.
REP. PAUL: Well, I know. That's why I don't want it.
MR. RUSSERT: So you have nothing?
REP. PAUL: I want to cut spending. I want to get a--use the Constitution as our guide, and you wouldn't need the income tax.
Basically, "I want to cut taxes almost completely." Great, so where will you cut a trillion dollars+ from spending? Umm, start with cutting off funding for the military and set a flat consumption tax (although I really don't want to do that) but I do want to cut those taxes!
Texas tried to join the United States just a year after declaring their independence from Mexico. The only reason it took so long for them to join the US was due to resistance by abolitionists from admitting another slave state to the union.
BP has stated that they have already spent over $450 million on cleanup costs. The $75 million is the maximum they could be sued for in total by people affected by the spill.
After the Exxon Valdez accident the Oil Pollution Act was passed that explicitly made the oil company responsible for paying the cleanup costs: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ha08OW3ueCMBc6oEsdyoXp9JAGDw
You're making many more assumptions than the original author. Where do I say what my opinion is? How in the world can you tell what my take on things even is based on my previous comment?
All I ask is how he knows all of this when the information it would require to know the answer either isn't public (yet) or hasn't happened (yet).
He also capitalized 'natural gas' in his article. Have you ever seen that either?