I wonder if proper body and vehicle armor is cheaper than prosthetics, multiple surgeries, psychological counseling, and a lifetime of subsequent health problems.
You seem to be blaming the military for not providing proper equipment. While this may have been true early in the war when some people had no armor at all, presently, it's more a case of an age-old military problem: The more armor you put on something, the slower it gets, and the more likely it is to break down.
You can load up a humvee with tons more armor, but then it gets slower, and it's also more likely to break down and not be able to move at all. You can give a soldier more armor, but he won't be able to move as fast, and will tire out much more rapidly.
There is a point where more armor is worse than less armor, and our soldiers are probably operating at about that point.
(But I agree that everyone would be better off, and by everyone I mean Iraqi's, american soldiers who wouldn't be dead/maimed, and other americans who wouldn't be shouldered with a half trillion dollars in debt for future generations to pay off. Even in a cold economic sense, Iraq was a very bad investment.)
Excuse me but "not able to get into Harvard" is not the equivalent of "fuck up your whole life".
It is if you could otherwise have gone to Harvard.
And it's not just about Ivy League schools - competitive programs at even state schools can be fiercely competitive. Usually when you're suspended you get F's on anything that is due during your suspension - that can also hit your GPA. Parents don't want their chances at the best education possible marred by something they do when they are 14.
And education is defnitely NOT just as good going to community college. For one, the other people in your classes are not as bright. For two, community colleges don't have the same opportunities that big schools do - for example, I studied abroad for a year, which wouldn't have happened if I'd blown two years at community college.
Anyway, this isn't about whether community college is an acceptable alternative to regular schools or ivy league schools. It's about why parents are attempting to circumvent school discipline - and the answer is that school discipline, and the long-term consequences of it, has gotten out of hand.
Lets say I make an icon of "kill Bush" and gun pointed at his head and make it an icon for my IM. Now lets say I make similar icon of "kill my boss". Why 'teacher' relationship calls for an exception? Being an idiot is my right protected by constitution.
Uh, it doesn't? Your company will fire you for making that icon of your boss too, and you wouldn't win a lawsuit fighting that either.
When you were a kid, getting suspended once in high school wouldn't drastically reduce your chances of getting accepted into college, or possibly cause severe financial harm to your family by significantly reducing your ability to get scholarships to pay for college.
Your dad would have giving you a good hiding (whatever that is), you would have learned your lesson, and that would have been the end of it. Now stupid kid mistakes can fuck up your whole life, and parents, making the decision between letting you be punished and letting your life be ruined, choose to hire lawyers.
The problem with this study is that it defines drunk as 0.08 BAC. 0.08 BAC is a minor level of impairment. Most people equate 'driving drunk' to behavior associated with 0.12+ BAC. Someone driving with 0.08 BAC is likely going to pass al your field sobriety tests and not exhibit any symptoms of being drunk beyond smelling for alcohol if they get pulled over for some other reason.
So this study is really saying "Cell phones are as bad as barely being impaired at all!".
If the study compared driving while talking on a cell phone to driving while *DRUNK*, they'd discover the obvious: being DRUNK (0.12+) is much worse.
Another poster mentioned that most people who drive drunk don't feel impaired. That's because at the LEGAL DEFINITION of intoxicated, most people are only very slightly impaired - they'd be more impaired if they hadn't been sleeping well, if it was 5 AM and they just got up, or, as this study indicates, they were distracted by any of a number of activities people commonly do in their car.
Old people don't pay lower insurance because they get in FEWER accidents.
They pay lower insurance because they get in LESS SEVERE accidents. A slow-driving old person will not cause nearly as much damage as a quick-driving teenager or drunk.
Teenagers, especially males, pay high insurance because they are far, far, far more likely to get into CATASTROPHICALLY EXPENSIVE accidents where they are grossly exceeding the speed limit, crash into something, and kill people, or cause severe, lifelong, debilitating injuries.
I agree that old people are shitty drivers, but they're just annoyingly shitty, not 'my fuckup will kill you' shitty.
Obliterating 1,000 EV1's after lease is probably cheaper than leaving 1,000 EV1's (or any other car) in the marketplace. Even if they charged $10,000 each for a post-lease car, it would cost GM more than $10 million to support them for their life cycle.
Do you think it has taken us 50 years to get a car to go supposedly 40mpg?
The *SAME* car? No - the problem is that the American consumer will pay more for a car that is heavier (safer) and has more features/trunk space/acceleration/handling/etc than they will a car that has the weight, trunk space, acceleration and handling of a car from the 1950's that gets 80 MPG.
We have gotten REMARKABLY more efficient with engines in the past 50 years. We just spend that efficiency on things OTHER than MPG because that's what the consumer wants.
...It's not Apple's fault because they're willfully trying to be bad. It's just a natural consequence of Apple having such market dominence over digital song distribution due to the iPod and iTunes. Since nobody can really compete with apple, there's no price pressure on Apple so Apple doesn't exert price pressure on the labels.
What we need is for WalMart to decide to digitally distribute songs. Bet the record companies wouldn't be keeping massively large margins for long after that.
There are very few people who actually have any taste in music. The vast majority of music purchases are made by shleps buying whatever is on the radio or MTV. So who is on the radio or MTV?
Whoever the record labels SAY should be on the radio or MTV.
So, no reason to pay the artists anything - if the artist you're talking to doesn't want to take a small percentage of the record sales, then you just find somebody else who will, make THEM the star, and then they can rake it in on concert ticket sales.
People do not understand that pricing has NOTHING to do with what it costs to provide a service. It has to do with what people are willing to pay to get a service. And most new artists are willing to pay the vast majority of their record (or download) sales to have the services of a record label.
Also, the article is wrong about WHO is getting the artist's money. The money the artist isn't getting isn't going to the LABEL, it's going to the CONSUMER:
Price of Al's CD on Amazon: $14.98 Price of Al's CD on iTunes: $11.88
That's a difference of $3.10. Al 'apparently' loses $0.27 per song (not $0.265, article has rounding problems). $0.27 x 12 = $3.24!
So, when Al comes up short $3.24 because a consumer got an album for $3.24 less on iTuns than on Amazon, who got that $3.24?
The CONSUMER did!
Now, I'm not saying this is FAIR. Clearly, the record label is making much more money on iTunes sales since, as mentioned, they don't have to pay for a lot of things they would if they distributed music by physical CD. But... why should Al get any of that? Al has agreed to pay the record company a certain amount for the record company's services. The record company gets the same amount whether the CD is sold online or on the shelves. If Al doesn't want to lose money to his stuff being sold on iTunes, he should renegotiate his contract to not allow iTunes sales. I bet most artists wouldn't do that though, because they make most of their money on concerts, and being on iTunes helps them sell tickets.
The *REAL* problem here is not that Al isn't getting more money. The real problem is that the CONSUMER is still paying the record company CD distribution prices instead of digital distribution prices. In a free market, we would expect digital downloads to be much cheaper than $0.99, because the various distributors would compete against each other reduce the inflated margins the record companies (and iTunes) are getting based on CD priving. But since iTunes is a fairly insulated monopoly at this point, even though the CD *COSTS* of distribution have gone away, the CD *PRICING* hasn't.
So, who is REALLY at fault for the artist getting no money AND the record company and iTunes still getting full price?
APPLE! They've set the $0.99 price and are putting no pressure on the record labels to lower it.
I was tought in elementary school to check that your results were reasonable. IF you multiply 13 by 19 and get 1,234,567, you throw out your result as not possibly being correct.
If you read an article that says the compensation for developing a video game was $4,250, you should recognize that that number can not possibly be correct and NOT blindly put it in your own coverage.
Most modern cars are more of a robot than this machine was in 1981. Manufacturing machines are programmed to manufacture when you turn them on. Cars are programmed to accelerate when you hit the gas. You don't get mad at the car when the old guy mows down 17 people in a farmer's market, do you?
It's a machine. Machines are dumb. Turning on a machine and then being surprised when it does what it is designed to do is equally dumb.
First, I will say that the rich defininitely get richer faster than the poor get richer, but that's probably OK and unavoidable. The government should tax the rich at a higher rate to help with this - not because it's 'fair' to redistribute wealth, but because the rich derrive a MUCH greater benefit from government services, and should therefore pay more taxes. (The rich are rich because of things like an extensive road system, the government protecting their international business interests, the government inforing intellectual property law, etc.)
But, to suggest that the US stands by and watches people die because of lack of healthcare is just stupid. Contries with socialist healthcare systems do exactly the same thing - they just let more middle class people die.
The fact of the matter is there are only so many good doctors and so much medical equipment. As a society, we can't afford to give everyone top-quality healthcare, and frankly, most people don't want to pay for it. If yo have a rare disaease that can be treated with $300,000/yr in drugs, do you want that covered? Of course. But if you don't have the disease, are you going to pay for an insurance plan that covers those perscriptions, or are you going to select an insurance plan that lets those people die and hope you don't need that perscrption? Most people will choose the later, because saving $1,000/yr on medical costs is more important to them than the change they'll die from an exotic disease that is cured with a high-price perscription.
The other part of this is that there are a finite amount of good doctors. In order to get more people to be doctors, we need to make it more attractive to be a doctor - less up-front medical costs, more long-term payout for services. That makes healthcare not only LINEARLY more expensive as you add people, but actually EXPONENTIALLY more expensive. And it's not like Europeans have solved this problem - the choice isn't "Some people get healthcare in the US, everybody gets healthcare in Europe", the choices are "People who can/want to pay a lot for healthcare get great healthcare in the US, everybody gets mediocre healthcare in Europe." It's the difference between people who have good insurance can all get an MRI within 24 hours in the US and nobody can get an MRI for months in Canada.
The reason healthcare is expensive in the US is that the people who REALLY want is have BID UP the costs of healthcare. You can't 'just give everyone healthcare'. If 30% of the country is not insured, suddenly insuring them is almost a 50% increase in users of the healthcare system. Who is going to treat all these people? Where are the 50% extra doctors and nurses going to come from?
The truth is, you can't just insure everybody without a significant drop in care quality. Paying for everyone to have universal healthcare doesn't get everyone the same level of coverage we have now. That's how socialist healthcare systems work: They don't provide everyone with the same great treatment, they allow more people to die before they can be treated.
Now, I'm not saying that the Americans have it right. Personally, I think we should deny more people treatment - if you're 85 and can't really walk anymore and have alzhiemers and have end-stage cancer, we should send you to hospice and let you die. If it takes $200,000/yr to give you medicine to keep you alive, and you didn't see fit to save the money during your real life to pay for insurance that covers those costs, you should die. If you're born 12 weeks premature, we should let you die. That's basically how socialist healthcare works - if you get seriously ill, the wait time to get an expensive treatment option gives you a chance to die before you can burden the system with your care.
I know this sounds crass, but if people spend their whole lives not saving for money for their own care, it doesn't mean we should then turn around and tax everybody else to pay for it. There needs to be a limit on what we are willing to spend to exte
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I wonder if proper body and vehicle armor is cheaper than prosthetics, multiple surgeries, psychological counseling, and a lifetime of subsequent health problems.
You seem to be blaming the military for not providing proper equipment. While this may have been true early in the war when some people had no armor at all, presently, it's more a case of an age-old military problem: The more armor you put on something, the slower it gets, and the more likely it is to break down.
You can load up a humvee with tons more armor, but then it gets slower, and it's also more likely to break down and not be able to move at all. You can give a soldier more armor, but he won't be able to move as fast, and will tire out much more rapidly.
There is a point where more armor is worse than less armor, and our soldiers are probably operating at about that point.
(But I agree that everyone would be better off, and by everyone I mean Iraqi's, american soldiers who wouldn't be dead/maimed, and other americans who wouldn't be shouldered with a half trillion dollars in debt for future generations to pay off. Even in a cold economic sense, Iraq was a very bad investment.)
Right Arm, Left Arm... (There was some weird "hokey pokey"ish dance aspect to it.)
It helps the brainwashing take.
Excuse me but "not able to get into Harvard" is not the equivalent of "fuck up your whole life".
It is if you could otherwise have gone to Harvard.
And it's not just about Ivy League schools - competitive programs at even state schools can be fiercely competitive. Usually when you're suspended you get F's on anything that is due during your suspension - that can also hit your GPA. Parents don't want their chances at the best education possible marred by something they do when they are 14.
And education is defnitely NOT just as good going to community college. For one, the other people in your classes are not as bright. For two, community colleges don't have the same opportunities that big schools do - for example, I studied abroad for a year, which wouldn't have happened if I'd blown two years at community college.
Anyway, this isn't about whether community college is an acceptable alternative to regular schools or ivy league schools. It's about why parents are attempting to circumvent school discipline - and the answer is that school discipline, and the long-term consequences of it, has gotten out of hand.
Lets say I make an icon of "kill Bush" and gun pointed at his head and make it an icon for my IM. Now lets say I make similar icon of "kill my boss". Why 'teacher' relationship calls for an exception? Being an idiot is my right protected by constitution.
Uh, it doesn't? Your company will fire you for making that icon of your boss too, and you wouldn't win a lawsuit fighting that either.
When you were a kid, getting suspended once in high school wouldn't drastically reduce your chances of getting accepted into college, or possibly cause severe financial harm to your family by significantly reducing your ability to get scholarships to pay for college.
Your dad would have giving you a good hiding (whatever that is), you would have learned your lesson, and that would have been the end of it. Now stupid kid mistakes can fuck up your whole life, and parents, making the decision between letting you be punished and letting your life be ruined, choose to hire lawyers.
Clearly the court prefers that you don't threaten people before you kill them.
The problem with this study is that it defines drunk as 0.08 BAC. 0.08 BAC is a minor level of impairment. Most people equate 'driving drunk' to behavior associated with 0.12+ BAC. Someone driving with 0.08 BAC is likely going to pass al your field sobriety tests and not exhibit any symptoms of being drunk beyond smelling for alcohol if they get pulled over for some other reason.
So this study is really saying "Cell phones are as bad as barely being impaired at all!".
If the study compared driving while talking on a cell phone to driving while *DRUNK*, they'd discover the obvious: being DRUNK (0.12+) is much worse.
Another poster mentioned that most people who drive drunk don't feel impaired. That's because at the LEGAL DEFINITION of intoxicated, most people are only very slightly impaired - they'd be more impaired if they hadn't been sleeping well, if it was 5 AM and they just got up, or, as this study indicates, they were distracted by any of a number of activities people commonly do in their car.
Old people don't pay lower insurance because they get in FEWER accidents.
They pay lower insurance because they get in LESS SEVERE accidents. A slow-driving old person will not cause nearly as much damage as a quick-driving teenager or drunk.
Teenagers, especially males, pay high insurance because they are far, far, far more likely to get into CATASTROPHICALLY EXPENSIVE accidents where they are grossly exceeding the speed limit, crash into something, and kill people, or cause severe, lifelong, debilitating injuries.
I agree that old people are shitty drivers, but they're just annoyingly shitty, not 'my fuckup will kill you' shitty.
Or, possibly, that's what the consumer is told they want.
What's the difference?
Cars have better safety features. Most safety features have mass.
Mass, in and of itself, doesn't make a car safer, but most safer things take mass, and a safer vehicle will tend to be heavier than a not as safe one.
search for lost hikers
Did LA grow a big forest in the middle of it that I'm not aware of?
Because you know the police helicopter is there.
I'm going to start moving all my drugs in a jeep.
Obliterating 1,000 EV1's after lease is probably cheaper than leaving 1,000 EV1's (or any other car) in the marketplace. Even if they charged $10,000 each for a post-lease car, it would cost GM more than $10 million to support them for their life cycle.
Do you think it has taken us 50 years to get a car to go supposedly 40mpg?
The *SAME* car? No - the problem is that the American consumer will pay more for a car that is heavier (safer) and has more features/trunk space/acceleration/handling/etc than they will a car that has the weight, trunk space, acceleration and handling of a car from the 1950's that gets 80 MPG.
We have gotten REMARKABLY more efficient with engines in the past 50 years. We just spend that efficiency on things OTHER than MPG because that's what the consumer wants.
The sponsored links are clearly in a different order.
Talk to me when they can analyze my congressman's calling patterns.
... the point of no return was Liesure Suit Larry 1.
Hrm, I better hurry up and patent naked chicks on video iPods.
People are not willing to pay as much when they can get the same thing for less from somebody else.
Ergo, it's "Apple's fault" for having such a lock on downloadable music with the iPod - there's no downward price pressure from 'someone else'.
...It's not Apple's fault because they're willfully trying to be bad. It's just a natural consequence of Apple having such market dominence over digital song distribution due to the iPod and iTunes. Since nobody can really compete with apple, there's no price pressure on Apple so Apple doesn't exert price pressure on the labels.
What we need is for WalMart to decide to digitally distribute songs. Bet the record companies wouldn't be keeping massively large margins for long after that.
There are very few people who actually have any taste in music. The vast majority of music purchases are made by shleps buying whatever is on the radio or MTV. So who is on the radio or MTV?
Whoever the record labels SAY should be on the radio or MTV.
So, no reason to pay the artists anything - if the artist you're talking to doesn't want to take a small percentage of the record sales, then you just find somebody else who will, make THEM the star, and then they can rake it in on concert ticket sales.
People do not understand that pricing has NOTHING to do with what it costs to provide a service. It has to do with what people are willing to pay to get a service. And most new artists are willing to pay the vast majority of their record (or download) sales to have the services of a record label.
Also, the article is wrong about WHO is getting the artist's money. The money the artist isn't getting isn't going to the LABEL, it's going to the CONSUMER:
Price of Al's CD on Amazon: $14.98
Price of Al's CD on iTunes: $11.88
That's a difference of $3.10. Al 'apparently' loses $0.27 per song (not $0.265, article has rounding problems). $0.27 x 12 = $3.24!
So, when Al comes up short $3.24 because a consumer got an album for $3.24 less on iTuns than on Amazon, who got that $3.24?
The CONSUMER did!
Now, I'm not saying this is FAIR. Clearly, the record label is making much more money on iTunes sales since, as mentioned, they don't have to pay for a lot of things they would if they distributed music by physical CD. But... why should Al get any of that? Al has agreed to pay the record company a certain amount for the record company's services. The record company gets the same amount whether the CD is sold online or on the shelves. If Al doesn't want to lose money to his stuff being sold on iTunes, he should renegotiate his contract to not allow iTunes sales. I bet most artists wouldn't do that though, because they make most of their money on concerts, and being on iTunes helps them sell tickets.
The *REAL* problem here is not that Al isn't getting more money. The real problem is that the CONSUMER is still paying the record company CD distribution prices instead of digital distribution prices. In a free market, we would expect digital downloads to be much cheaper than $0.99, because the various distributors would compete against each other reduce the inflated margins the record companies (and iTunes) are getting based on CD priving. But since iTunes is a fairly insulated monopoly at this point, even though the CD *COSTS* of distribution have gone away, the CD *PRICING* hasn't.
So, who is REALLY at fault for the artist getting no money AND the record company and iTunes still getting full price?
APPLE! They've set the $0.99 price and are putting no pressure on the record labels to lower it.
But we double the rate of climate change every 2 years, so now it only takes 10 years.
I was tought in elementary school to check that your results were reasonable. IF you multiply 13 by 19 and get 1,234,567, you throw out your result as not possibly being correct.
If you read an article that says the compensation for developing a video game was $4,250, you should recognize that that number can not possibly be correct and NOT blindly put it in your own coverage.
Most modern cars are more of a robot than this machine was in 1981. Manufacturing machines are programmed to manufacture when you turn them on. Cars are programmed to accelerate when you hit the gas. You don't get mad at the car when the old guy mows down 17 people in a farmer's market, do you?
It's a machine. Machines are dumb. Turning on a machine and then being surprised when it does what it is designed to do is equally dumb.
First, I will say that the rich defininitely get richer faster than the poor get richer, but that's probably OK and unavoidable. The government should tax the rich at a higher rate to help with this - not because it's 'fair' to redistribute wealth, but because the rich derrive a MUCH greater benefit from government services, and should therefore pay more taxes. (The rich are rich because of things like an extensive road system, the government protecting their international business interests, the government inforing intellectual property law, etc.)
But, to suggest that the US stands by and watches people die because of lack of healthcare is just stupid. Contries with socialist healthcare systems do exactly the same thing - they just let more middle class people die.
The fact of the matter is there are only so many good doctors and so much medical equipment. As a society, we can't afford to give everyone top-quality healthcare, and frankly, most people don't want to pay for it. If yo have a rare disaease that can be treated with $300,000/yr in drugs, do you want that covered? Of course. But if you don't have the disease, are you going to pay for an insurance plan that covers those perscriptions, or are you going to select an insurance plan that lets those people die and hope you don't need that perscrption? Most people will choose the later, because saving $1,000/yr on medical costs is more important to them than the change they'll die from an exotic disease that is cured with a high-price perscription.
The other part of this is that there are a finite amount of good doctors. In order to get more people to be doctors, we need to make it more attractive to be a doctor - less up-front medical costs, more long-term payout for services. That makes healthcare not only LINEARLY more expensive as you add people, but actually EXPONENTIALLY more expensive. And it's not like Europeans have solved this problem - the choice isn't "Some people get healthcare in the US, everybody gets healthcare in Europe", the choices are "People who can/want to pay a lot for healthcare get great healthcare in the US, everybody gets mediocre healthcare in Europe." It's the difference between people who have good insurance can all get an MRI within 24 hours in the US and nobody can get an MRI for months in Canada.
The reason healthcare is expensive in the US is that the people who REALLY want is have BID UP the costs of healthcare. You can't 'just give everyone healthcare'. If 30% of the country is not insured, suddenly insuring them is almost a 50% increase in users of the healthcare system. Who is going to treat all these people? Where are the 50% extra doctors and nurses going to come from?
The truth is, you can't just insure everybody without a significant drop in care quality. Paying for everyone to have universal healthcare doesn't get everyone the same level of coverage we have now. That's how socialist healthcare systems work: They don't provide everyone with the same great treatment, they allow more people to die before they can be treated.
Now, I'm not saying that the Americans have it right. Personally, I think we should deny more people treatment - if you're 85 and can't really walk anymore and have alzhiemers and have end-stage cancer, we should send you to hospice and let you die. If it takes $200,000/yr to give you medicine to keep you alive, and you didn't see fit to save the money during your real life to pay for insurance that covers those costs, you should die. If you're born 12 weeks premature, we should let you die. That's basically how socialist healthcare works - if you get seriously ill, the wait time to get an expensive treatment option gives you a chance to die before you can burden the system with your care.
I know this sounds crass, but if people spend their whole lives not saving for money for their own care, it doesn't mean we should then turn around and tax everybody else to pay for it. There needs to be a limit on what we are willing to spend to exte