The companies that produce things raise money by selling shares of their company (stocks) or borrowing money (bonds) on Wall Street. So, no, Wall Street doesn't produce anything on its own, but it provides a service that enables others to. It certainly doesn't resemble a casino.
This BS is +5 Insightful?
Wall Street today, especially the HFT programs, exactly resembles a casino! When you're making million dollar trades, not based on valuations, assets or long-term business strategic planning but based on automatic triggers in a market with irrational herd mentality it is EXACTLY like blowing a wad of cash on a "hot streak" at the craps table or roulette wheel. There are thousands of HFT programs interacting in an unpredictable manner with each other in the market. There is no possible way to track that volatility and rationally invest in the short-term in such a market.
In fact, I was outraged when I heard my son's class was using coin flips to determine the winners and losers in the class's "stock market". Investing is not gambling!
Why are you mad? Your son's class is smarter than you, apparently. Or did you not know that the hedge fund managers being paid millions in fees can outperform monkeys throwing darts at stocks only 61 out of 100 times when tested? (That was run by the Wall Street Journal, by the way.) Or that the professional managers outperformed the Dow Jones Average index only 51 out of 100 times? Short-term investing certainly is gambling!
And the Afghan government didn't have involvement with 9/11. They had involvement with not handing over a person the US wanted.
Don't whitewash the Taliban. Al Qaeda was an active military partner with the Taliban on Afghan territory - helping fight and recruit against the Northern Alliance. In return, the Taliban provided bases and recruiting for al Qaeda with which they planned and organized their attacks. The Taliban's refusal to hand over al Qaeda members after 9/11 was just theatrics after the fact.
Preventing a theocracy from getting a nuclear reaction is inarguably a good thing.
This is rubbish. You are using a premise as its own justification. Israel is not in danger from an Iranian nuclear attack.
QED. I can just as justifiably say that Israel is not in danger from an Iranian nuclear attack until Iran feels like it has plausible deniability. After all, if Stuxnet and other acts of industrial sabotage (presuming, for the moment, almost certainly rightly that Israel and the US were behind it) are acts of war, then what do you call Iran funding and providing weapons and training for Hezbollah, who has probably killed more Israeli soldiers than any other armed militant group in the Middle East in the last 20 years?
And if Iran can wave "plausible deniability" around its proxy war with Israel through Hezbollah, what happens when Hezbollah smuggles and detonates an atomic weapon in northern Israel that was given to them by "an Act of Allah" in the next blowup over the Lebanese/Israeli border? Do they need "undeniable" proof that Iran was behind it before nuking Tehran in retaliation? Should they nuke Beirut and presumably a lot of moderate Sunni and Christian Lebanese that had nothing to do with Hezbollah? Or should they assume, like you seem to be, that if Iran has obtained the Bomb in the Middle East and Israel is struck by one, that Iran has "committed suicide"?
Such an attack would be complete suicide for Iran. At best, Iran wants to play the game of using the Bomb as a political weapon as does everyone else. It isn't e very credible game, given the force asymmetry between them and Israel. Israelis know Iran is not a substantial threat, as some of their intelligence officials have pointed out. The question is, why are Israel and the US conducting open hostilities against Iran, including operations by US Special Forces on Iranian territory and support of terrorist attacks in Iran by Mujahedin e Khalq as well as Flame, Stuxnet, etc.?
See above. Maybe, just maybe, delaying the Iranian nuclear weapons program through sabotage is preferable to hoping and praying that they don't slip a weapon to Hezbollah or another proxy group to use.
In the past one could have speculated that they help maintain the illusion of great instability in the Middle East, which helps justify huge financial support of the US and international arms industry (where Israel is an important player, BTW) as well as high petroleum spot market prices (the traditional reason to ensure that there is always conflict somewhere vaguely near our political allies' oil fields, but not too near). Oddly, though, oil prices have fallen in the recent past, presumably due to unusually weak demand (in spite of that all-time favorite: "The Summer Driving Season"). Military spending has not diminished, however, and in the US Republican politicians are constantly trying to take military spending "off the table" when budget cutting activities heat up.
Frankly, I never am able to figure out why such things occur until well after the fact when the other shoe drops and it becomes clear who is making the big bucks out of the deal. Make no mistake, though. This is about money, one way or the other. The "Israel is in mortal danger from the crazy mullahs" scam is pure horse shit. I guess we'll have to wait for Steve Coll to quietly write a book 10 years from now with the details.
Keep blaming the Republicans - obviously the Democrats and Obama will come and change US policies! Oh wait. I said this in another comment, and I'll say it here - the Iranian theocracy WANTS to be in conflict with the US. They just don't want to turn it into a hot war if at all possible. They can only get away with oppressing their own people and politically cracking down on them if they have someone external to blame it on. If t
Funny how Pakistan, a country that finances and supports terrorism is given a free pass to having a nuclear arsenal
You really have to wonder about that. Since the 1980's they have supported a wide variety of Sunni extremists, often in direct military conflict with US soldiers. Iran has never done that. Why then is Pakistan considered an ally and given billions in military aid even though it has been a Saudi-financed supporter of active enemies of the US for decades?
Because of history and geopolitics, which you need to read up on. Because India used to be much more closely aligned with the so-called "non-aligned" countries and the Soviet Union in the days of the Cold War. Because Pakistan actively helped the US out with the mujahedeen when they were the "good guys" fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Because Pakistan used to be run by a military that maintained close ties with the US military with liaisons and training of Pakistani officers in the US. They were considered once about as allied as Egypt or Turkey in the 1990s, and Turkey is a fellow NATO member. Because if there was going to be geopolitical pressure for an "Islamic bomb" (and there certainly was), said military-run and secular-leaning Pakistan could maybe be the place for it, and show the rest of the Islamic world a path for integration and modernization.
How times change in 20 years. I would argue (like you do) that Pakistan is going to be a major, if not the major, exporter of Sunni Islamic militant extremism for the near future. Of course, the tough question is this: is it better to try to bribe, er, convince through diplomacy and aid for Pakistan to help combat extremism or is it better to say "fuck'em", write them off, continue picking off al Qaeda targets as they pop up and wait for a country with known nuclear weapons to descend into chaos as their poorly trained conscript armed forces battle a well-financed and well-motivated home grown extremist movement?
Why is Iran the big enemy even though it has done far less direct harm to the US or our interests? It is an opaque war between powerful bands of international mobsters that drape themselves with sappy pseudo-patriotic treacle, which is unfortunately swallowed whole by the news media and their vast audience.
Here's a better set of questions. Why is Iran developing a secretive nuclear weapons program, enriching uranium to weapons-grade mixes that aren't needed for civilian power production in secret underground facilities run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard? All of this, while they're signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty? They've basically created their own version of the Manhattan Project, and are trying to pass it off with a bald-faced lie that its for "civilian peaceful purposes only". Err, ok. And let's not discount the activities that Iran does through proxy that directly work against US interests in the region. Hezbollah in Lebanon is armed and trained by two main countries, Syria and Iran, and fights against both a secularized, modernized Lebanon and peace with Israel. Iran supplied advanced IEDs, other weaponry and training to Shiite insurgent groups in Iraq that were fighting the US and US-backed forces before they agreed to more or less integrate with the political process. I'm pretty sure giving away armor-piercing IED technology for the express purpose of killing US soldiers in Iraq falls into the category of "working directly against our interests".
And finally, never discount a huge motivator behind Iran being one of the enemies of the United States: the government of Iran wants TO BE an enemy of the United States. The theocracy/military complex running Iran is not stupid. Its economy is stagnant, at best. The young people of Iran, given a choice, would clearly want to move Iran in a different direction. (Hence the populist Spring that was bloodily suppressed in Iran). What's the best way for Iran to distract its people from domesti
The USA is beginning to look an awful like an awful country run by despotic psychopaths.
The complete history of the endless war over the last 60 years has conclusively proven the USA to be quite evil.
Each action is seemingly taken as a response to provocation, but it is very clear that it openly engages in hostilities well and truly before any open warfare. Being the bully and then pretending the victim is the reson d'être. Pearl harbour, Vietnam, desert storm, 911 and now this. The USA had very deliberately stuck its dick in another counties ass, claims to be the wronged when the victim retaliates, then mobilises the very next week. It is prepared for war instantly. it is premeditated and very deliberately provocative.
The school bully uses this same method. They invariably go to jail or end up in a shit job. Soon, perhaps, the world will react against this menace.
I have to say, you get originality points for being the first I've seen to label the US as "quite evil" for surreptitiously fighting against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany before Pearl Harbor and, uh, I guess the "official" start of hostilities? Maybe if you took your naivete-colored glasses off you'd realize maybe it isn't such a bad thing.
Seriously? Desert Storm (and the 1991 Persian Gulf War) was evil? I suppose you think Kuwait deserved to be invaded?
There's not a big evil conspiracy here - despite what you obviously believe - since about the 1980s, the United States military has been ready to fight a war (or two) in a week's notice in response to world events because (*gasp*) that's what they train to do. That's the point of having an all-volunteer professional armed forces - to have much better trained and prepared soldiers ready to fight. They wargame scenarios against real world potential enemies constantly. Their official doctrine is to be able to fight two regional wars at the same time.
It's become crystal clear over the years that it is everyone's moral imperative to ignore copyright law.
That is the only way we, as a society, are going to conquer the science-and-arts-crippling concept known as "intellectual property" and move forward as a civilization.
Thank you, I agree wholeheartedly!
- GPL violator
More seriously, the concept of intellectual property is neither crippling nor backwards. I think everyone but the entertainment media/attorney complex would agree that copyright can be useful if scaled back to 15 years or so and ending extensions. Same with vigorously limiting the scope of patents. And I hope you can see how trademark law can prevent public confusion.
Seriously though, we are going to see the emergence of "virtual pop stars" designed by committee to be appeal to as many people as possible appear in the next few years. Electronically produced music makes this goal a hell of a lot easier (a robotic arm that can play the guitar or piano as well as a human is probably a long way off).
We already have them. Every single aspect of Justin Bieber / Britney Spears / Beyonce's projection in public life has been fabricated, test marketed, and refined down to the microscopic level. Every non-controversy, image makeover, life-changing interview and comeback has been preprogrammed to push the maximum number of buttons to gather the most attention and make the most profit for the entertainment industry celebrity complex. Why develop a computer program to be a virtual pop star when you have living breathing human beings that are more than willing to sell every aspect of themselves already to be one?
While on the outside the situation has the appearance that there could have been impropriety, the appropriate thing of course is to look at the hard evidence.
Giving a sweet deal on real estate to a friend and doctor for excellent medical care is not illegal. (While I haven't received a house, I get homemade baked goods all the time.) Giving a sweet deal on real estate to a friend as a kickback for being pushed up the transplant list is highly unethical. But there's an easy way to find out: have the state medical review board take a peek at the transplant waiting list records over the time period. If Steve Jobs mysteriously moves up the list for no good medical reason, or is listed in front of other patients with more pressing need or waiting time, then you have your smoking gun. Otherwise, if everything is appropriate with the transplant waiting list, then it sounds like the system worked as designed.
It's called proportionate response. Iran pretends that its "peaceful" nuclear program isn't producing weapons-grade materiel, and the US is doing what it can to make sure that it doesn't produce weapons-grade materiel.
But if Iran were to do something as colossally stupid as bombing the Pentagon or White House, no one would be dismissive. In fact, it would likely unite the people of the United States in conducting a protracted hot war that would send Iran back into the Stone Ages. Think Pearl Harbor and the response. Or 9/11 and what's happened to the leadership of al Qaeda.
Actually, those heroic measures at the end tend to be hyper expensive (and profitable) but are as likely to shorten life as they are to lengthen it and definitely degrade the quality of life.
So, with the profit motive gone, they skip all of that because it's in the patient's best interest. Do you REALLY want your family bankrupted so you can lay in a bed, in pain, unsure of who you are or why you're there for an extra 2 weeks?
Socialist healthcare will gladly do something USEFUL that allows you to be a contributing member of society for a while longer (where contribution may or may not include actual employment).
Spoken like someone who isn't involved in healthcare.
I treat critical care patients on a more or less daily basis. I can guarantee you that it is profitable for neither the hospital nor the physician for extremely sick patients to receive multiple heroic interventions at the end of life. Yes, it is "hyper expensive", for everyone involved. And the hospital / physician will likely be reimbursed at a lesser rate or not be reimbursed at all for those measures. From a financial standpoint, the most profitable hospitalized patients are those that recover sooner than expected, with as few expensive procedures and imaging as needed. The reason is that most insurance companies and the government are reimbursing based on "average" costs and hospital stays for the illnesses that are being treated in any given patient. So if patient John Doe takes $100,000 of heroic measures when the reimbursement for his illnesses from the major payers is set at $10,000, the hospital usually ends up eating most of that cost. Conversely, if you only have to incur $5,000 worth of costs to send John Doe home healthy and happy, guess what? Someone probably just made a bunch of money.
The #1 main reason why the end of life has historically been filled with "hyper expensive" heroic measures is because here in the US, public health education (along with public education in general) is horrible. The average Joe has no clue what's going on with his body or what to expect if illness strikes. Conversations about advanced directives, end-of-life decision making, etc. that should take place before you get sick end up being hashed out over days or weeks through multiple emotionally distraught family members. If Grandma Jane goes to the hospital, her family has no reasonable expectation of what the most advanced healthcare system in the world can or can't deliver. All of this, of course, is a recipe for medical cost disaster in aggregate for the US because what should be quiet, comfortable, planned-out deaths with a minimum of fuss and expense and a maximum of comfort becomes long, drawn-out ordeals because no one, the least of all the family of Grandma Jane, knows when to say enough is enough. And the doctors and nurses are professionally obligated in the absence of effective decision making to keep prolonging the inevitable up until the point where A) the decision is made or B) the limits of medical science are exhausted. The US has the most technologically advanced and adept health care available anywhere; but no one ever can ever be bothered to figure out before hand how they want to use it.
As far as the "future" of medicine, when the expensive, lab-grown genetically customized organ replacements hit; I expect it to be limited for decades to a select few who can either A) pay for it out of pocket or B) meet extremely limited selection criteria. Research the history of renal dialysis if you need a good example. Organ transplant surgeries today are more or less already rationed by the scarcity of organs ready to be transplanted; once that ends governments and insurance companies will start inventing other ways to ration it.
Indeed, your genetic makeup is as important as lifestyle, maybe even moreso.
I wouldn't go overboard; genetics is important, but lifestyle is as important or even more so. The three most common causes of premature death in the United States: tobacco, sedentary lifestyle/poor diet, and alcohol.
I've been thin all my life except when I was on Paxil and gained 40 pounds. When I got off the Paxil it just came off, not only did I never diet, it was an effort to keep some of the weight I'd gained on.
A friend of mine was a construction worker, so he got plenty of excersize and was by no means overweight. Yet he died three years ago at age 42 from a sudden heart attack. Niether my lack of obesity or his heart attack were from lifestyle.
If your grandparents all died of heart disease before age 60, you're not likely to live to be 70 no matter how healthy your lifestyle.
Let me amend that; if all your grandparents all died of heart disease before age 60, you're likely to have coronary artery disease and will need to be treated, or you're not likely to live to be 70. Medical sciences, especially in cardiology, has advanced significantly since your grandparents' time. (And even in the last 10 years.)
The US military has had an open goal of expanding its capabilities to kill targets selectively with as little delay as possible. All the gadgetry to achieve real-time eyes-on intelligence on a potential target (like the late UBL) can be worthless if it takes an hour or more to mobilize a strike against it and the target slips away. Having a potential weapons platform already up in the air 24/7 for a year at a time can cut the response time significantly. And if you are hindered by the fixed orbit, like spy satellites, just launch more space planes...
and then you simply get some absolute moronic signs like the one saying "a job is a right".
Is this moronic? Our current society is certainly built around the expectation that everyone has a job. People who don't are resented and denied anything beyond bare substinence income (and sometimes even that). When lack of a job makes you a barely tolerated human cochroach it's hardly surprising that some might start wondering if having one should be a formally recognized right.
Yes it is moronic. The difference is the right to seek a job using your own hard work and qualifications versus "a job is a right". Just because someone else has made poor life decisions, creating an underdeveloped basket case whose only function in life is to drool over the latest bread and circus churned out by the media entertainment complexes, does not mean they are entitled to anything other than bare subsistence provisions. I'm sorry if they're resentful, but tough fucking luck. It's never too late to start making some smarter choices in life.
Yes, but what's the purpose of war? It's not to kill the enemy, it's not to disable their infrastructure, it's not to reduce their ammunition supplies.
Clausewitz suggested the purpose is the imposition of your will on another. Killing civilians in this day and age reduces your chances of successfully imposing your will, so it's counter-productive, for all the damage you may cause to the enemy.
Think bigger picture.
Really? The Taliban must be losing in a landslide then in Afghanistan. The Taliban make it their modus operandi to kill, intimidate, and/or make an example of any civilians that dare cooperate with the international forces in Afghanistan, be it UN, US or NATO allies. How's that war going, again?
The real issue is that even if everyone agreedon global warming, we haven'tthe foggiest realistic solution. All we can do is pray for photovoltaics to follow Moores law for another decade, or a breakthrough in fusion. That's why people prefer to argue whether there is a problem, rather than admit that they're powerless.
Really? I'm pretty sure that if we took the billions of dollars we as a society squander every year on countless books, debates, advertisements, and shitty movies narrated by Al Gore and just spent it all replanting non-harvestable young trees at $1 / tree (or much less) - pretty soon we would have a handle on this "carbon sequestration" problem. But God forbid someone actually implement a workable solution, instead of trying to impose our political viewpoints on each other or spend truckloads of money chasing technological pipedreams that may take a decade or more to realize.
I heard about this some years ago, and the reason was rather sinister.
The way I heard it is that nuclear non-proliferation treaties that the US has signed to limit the number of warheads in its arsenal. However warheads in transit do not count towards this total, and in the interests of security the US is not obliged to reveal how many warheads it has in transit at any one time or where they are going. By keeping a percentage of it arsenal perpetually driving around the US, the US government can effectively sidestep nuclear warhead limits imposed by non-proliferation treaties.
Given that the United States, under current treaty limits, has thousands of warheads more than it needs to demolish every potential adversary in the world several times over, such a conspiracy would be both ridiculous and a huge waste of resources. What would keeping 50 more secret warheads traveling as a security risk accomplish when you have more than 5,000 already on hand?
The answer to antibiotic-resistant bugs is to develop *new* and *different* antibiotics. It's that whole diversity thing, y'know? The problem is that Big Pharma is no longer interested in developing drugs that make you better. There's far more money involved in developing drugs that you have to take for the rest of your life. When was the last time you saw a television commercial for an antibiotic? Nope, they'd rather have you on an antidepressant, a cholesterol medicine, a supplement for people whose antidepressants are rendered less effective by their cholesterol medicine, something for the high blood pressure resulting from the previous three medications, and of course something to perk up the old limp noodle from time to time.
Oh gee, I don't know. Maybe you simply don't know because ordinary people aren't concerned about curing infections. And pharmaceutical companies understand this with their marketing campaigns. People are more worried about putting their dollars into their mood, their erectile dysfunction, and their botox injections. Have you ever seen a patient walk into an office and write a big check to a cardiologist for a left heart catheterization and possible interventional procedures? Compare that to how many patients walk into an office and write a big check for hCG injections or a tummy tuck...
And keep in mind this is not by any means an all-inclusive list of new and useful antibiotics introduced over the last 5-10 years. Also, contrary to popular belief, older and cheaper antibiotics will, most of the time, get the job done as well or better with most infections today.
Bacteriophages are being used to cure such infections in one of polish hospitals. For example MRSA is being cured in 80% of cases. Therapy is safe and cheap: http://www.aite.wroclaw.pl/phages/phages.html
Why you are not going to see such treatments in your country?? Phages are not patentable, so no way to earn hard cash here.
This is ridiculous. MRSA is curable in 100% of cases in the United States right now using current antibiotics and/or surgery (to remove a source of infection that drugs can't penetrate). The question is not whether or not medical science can kill the infection, the question is whether the patient is healthy enough to recover from the damage already wrought by the infection in the first place by the time they're treated. Anyone who has actually worked in an intensive care unit, instead of armchair doctoring, can attest to this.
Example: had a nursing home patient admitted a year ago for pneumonia. Causative organism was Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Fairly resistant, treated with doripenem and tobramycin. Killed the Pseudomonas with a standard 14 day course of treatment (repeat washings and cultures: negative), but much of her left lung was already chewed up into a necrotic mush. Bronchopleural fistulas from the damage required chest tubes and chronic ventilation through a tracheostomy. Eventually taken to surgery for a pneumonectomy. Survived the surgery, but gradually worsened in her general health and never could be weaned from the ventilator until finally her family withdrew care.
Phages may well have a good clinical benefit, and may eventually take a prominent place as another weapon in the healthcare arsenal against infection, but until I see the randomized controlled trials showing their superiority (or even noninferiority with benefits in other areas) vs standard antibiotics, I could care less. Put up or shut up....
It was available for legal purchase OVER THE COUNTER until 1914. And yet our country survived those terrible, terrible cocaine fueled years.
So....you want to legalize and regulate the sale of this stuff in the US? Too late. You can already get cocaine legally. Right now, cocaine is available as a Schedule II drug...along with the legal forms of meth and heroin, like Dilaudid and Adderall (both of which are widely abused). If the Mexican drug cartels, with all of their inflated high prices and cost of doing business illegally, can still undercut finding a shady local prescriber and getting a prescription for your recreational drugs (a significant portion, if not the vast majority of "medical" marijuana business already), then how is simply expanding the "medical" recreational drug business going to have any further effect on them? So... in order to dent the black market, you would pretty much have to make it available to all comers.
I'm curious.... how would any consumer product safety law ever hold water again if we legalized and made freely available recreational drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine? (And now the newly ubiquitous "bath salts".) Vioxx and other Cox-2 inhibitors increased heart attacks by a few percentage points among patients who took it, and most of them were banned from being sold and their makers sued for hundreds of millions of dollars. But now look! You can get dope that's a hundred times worse for your heart health at the corner store!
Yes, this tribute page, on the Huffington Post of all places, to Macs receiving product placement, is clearly a hallucination.
Apple's advertising department would never target white people who are financially well-off, with social and professional climber written all over them, and a compulsive need to be popular, or at least to be seen as popular.
A list of shows targeted by Apple: Sex and the City The Devil Wears Prada Iron Man Office Space Zack and Miri Make a Porno Zoolander Legally Blonde Funny People Friends with Benefits
What Apple's rivals should do is not just learn a lesson. They should leverage the TouchPad. Get Android working on the TouchPad which just sold hundreds of thousands of units, and keep building the Android app userbase.
Apple has had the advantage of leveraging what was originally the iPod consumer base into a mature ecosystem which has turned out to be one of the iPad's main advantages over its would-be rivals. Here's a golden opportunity for Apple's rivals to influence the future purchasing decisions of hundreds of thousands of consumers.
Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken. Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua. Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
>Every aircraft we have, every cruise missile, launched at once, loaded with conventional bunker busters, would not make a dent in the north's 10,000 artillery tubes which are heavily fortified into the hills.
>They don't need to "keep the lights on at night" to rain unimaginable hell down on the south.
>Artillery is cheap, effective, and when behind three meters of reinforced concrete damn hard to kill.
While you have an effective point, nothing you said contradicts what the parent poster said. The US would most likely steamroll the DPRK in a conventional war. The DPRK trains in massed infantry and outdated armor formations, exactly the type of target-rich environment a precision airpower military like the US would dismantle in a hearbeat.
Those 10,000 artillery tubes of the DPRK in the mountains are meant to cause mass civilian casualties in Seoul which, while horrific, would have little to no effect on the final outcome of a conventional war.
Imagine an armed robber with the police surrounding him, holding a hostage at gunpoint. That hostage is the civilian population of Seoul. Perhaps the only reason the US has not conducted airstrikes at this point against known nuclear facilities of the DPRK is the threat of the DPRK shelling Seoul. Not, as conventional pundit wisdom believes, the fact that they probably have one or two crude nuclear devices.
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The companies that produce things raise money by selling shares of their company (stocks) or borrowing money (bonds) on Wall Street. So, no, Wall Street doesn't produce anything on its own, but it provides a service that enables others to. It certainly doesn't resemble a casino.
This BS is +5 Insightful?
Wall Street today, especially the HFT programs, exactly resembles a casino! When you're making million dollar trades, not based on valuations, assets or long-term business strategic planning but based on automatic triggers in a market with irrational herd mentality it is EXACTLY like blowing a wad of cash on a "hot streak" at the craps table or roulette wheel. There are thousands of HFT programs interacting in an unpredictable manner with each other in the market. There is no possible way to track that volatility and rationally invest in the short-term in such a market.
In fact, I was outraged when I heard my son's class was using coin flips to determine the winners and losers in the class's "stock market". Investing is not gambling!
Why are you mad? Your son's class is smarter than you, apparently. Or did you not know that the hedge fund managers being paid millions in fees can outperform monkeys throwing darts at stocks only 61 out of 100 times when tested? (That was run by the Wall Street Journal, by the way.) Or that the professional managers outperformed the Dow Jones Average index only 51 out of 100 times? Short-term investing certainly is gambling!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage - also espionage, not war.
And the Afghan government didn't have involvement with 9/11. They had involvement with not handing over a person the US wanted.
Don't whitewash the Taliban. Al Qaeda was an active military partner with the Taliban on Afghan territory - helping fight and recruit against the Northern Alliance. In return, the Taliban provided bases and recruiting for al Qaeda with which they planned and organized their attacks. The Taliban's refusal to hand over al Qaeda members after 9/11 was just theatrics after the fact.
Preventing a theocracy from getting a nuclear reaction is inarguably a good thing.
This is rubbish. You are using a premise as its own justification. Israel is not in danger from an Iranian nuclear attack.
QED. I can just as justifiably say that Israel is not in danger from an Iranian nuclear attack until Iran feels like it has plausible deniability. After all, if Stuxnet and other acts of industrial sabotage (presuming, for the moment, almost certainly rightly that Israel and the US were behind it) are acts of war, then what do you call Iran funding and providing weapons and training for Hezbollah, who has probably killed more Israeli soldiers than any other armed militant group in the Middle East in the last 20 years?
And if Iran can wave "plausible deniability" around its proxy war with Israel through Hezbollah, what happens when Hezbollah smuggles and detonates an atomic weapon in northern Israel that was given to them by "an Act of Allah" in the next blowup over the Lebanese/Israeli border? Do they need "undeniable" proof that Iran was behind it before nuking Tehran in retaliation? Should they nuke Beirut and presumably a lot of moderate Sunni and Christian Lebanese that had nothing to do with Hezbollah? Or should they assume, like you seem to be, that if Iran has obtained the Bomb in the Middle East and Israel is struck by one, that Iran has "committed suicide"?
Such an attack would be complete suicide for Iran. At best, Iran wants to play the game of using the Bomb as a political weapon as does everyone else. It isn't e very credible game, given the force asymmetry between them and Israel. Israelis know Iran is not a substantial threat, as some of their intelligence officials have pointed out. The question is, why are Israel and the US conducting open hostilities against Iran, including operations by US Special Forces on Iranian territory and support of terrorist attacks in Iran by Mujahedin e Khalq as well as Flame, Stuxnet, etc.?
See above. Maybe, just maybe, delaying the Iranian nuclear weapons program through sabotage is preferable to hoping and praying that they don't slip a weapon to Hezbollah or another proxy group to use.
In the past one could have speculated that they help maintain the illusion of great instability in the Middle East, which helps justify huge financial support of the US and international arms industry (where Israel is an important player, BTW) as well as high petroleum spot market prices (the traditional reason to ensure that there is always conflict somewhere vaguely near our political allies' oil fields, but not too near). Oddly, though, oil prices have fallen in the recent past, presumably due to unusually weak demand (in spite of that all-time favorite: "The Summer Driving Season"). Military spending has not diminished, however, and in the US Republican politicians are constantly trying to take military spending "off the table" when budget cutting activities heat up.
Frankly, I never am able to figure out why such things occur until well after the fact when the other shoe drops and it becomes clear who is making the big bucks out of the deal. Make no mistake, though. This is about money, one way or the other. The "Israel is in mortal danger from the crazy mullahs" scam is pure horse shit. I guess we'll have to wait for Steve Coll to quietly write a book 10 years from now with the details.
Keep blaming the Republicans - obviously the Democrats and Obama will come and change US policies! Oh wait. I said this in another comment, and I'll say it here - the Iranian theocracy WANTS to be in conflict with the US. They just don't want to turn it into a hot war if at all possible. They can only get away with oppressing their own people and politically cracking down on them if they have someone external to blame it on. If t
Funny how Pakistan, a country that finances and supports terrorism is given a free pass to having a nuclear arsenal
You really have to wonder about that. Since the 1980's they have supported a wide variety of Sunni extremists, often in direct military conflict with US soldiers. Iran has never done that. Why then is Pakistan considered an ally and given billions in military aid even though it has been a Saudi-financed supporter of active enemies of the US for decades?
Because of history and geopolitics, which you need to read up on. Because India used to be much more closely aligned with the so-called "non-aligned" countries and the Soviet Union in the days of the Cold War. Because Pakistan actively helped the US out with the mujahedeen when they were the "good guys" fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Because Pakistan used to be run by a military that maintained close ties with the US military with liaisons and training of Pakistani officers in the US. They were considered once about as allied as Egypt or Turkey in the 1990s, and Turkey is a fellow NATO member. Because if there was going to be geopolitical pressure for an "Islamic bomb" (and there certainly was), said military-run and secular-leaning Pakistan could maybe be the place for it, and show the rest of the Islamic world a path for integration and modernization.
How times change in 20 years. I would argue (like you do) that Pakistan is going to be a major, if not the major, exporter of Sunni Islamic militant extremism for the near future. Of course, the tough question is this: is it better to try to bribe, er, convince through diplomacy and aid for Pakistan to help combat extremism or is it better to say "fuck'em", write them off, continue picking off al Qaeda targets as they pop up and wait for a country with known nuclear weapons to descend into chaos as their poorly trained conscript armed forces battle a well-financed and well-motivated home grown extremist movement?
Why is Iran the big enemy even though it has done far less direct harm to the US or our interests? It is an opaque war between powerful bands of international mobsters that drape themselves with sappy pseudo-patriotic treacle, which is unfortunately swallowed whole by the news media and their vast audience.
Here's a better set of questions. Why is Iran developing a secretive nuclear weapons program, enriching uranium to weapons-grade mixes that aren't needed for civilian power production in secret underground facilities run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard? All of this, while they're signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty? They've basically created their own version of the Manhattan Project, and are trying to pass it off with a bald-faced lie that its for "civilian peaceful purposes only". Err, ok. And let's not discount the activities that Iran does through proxy that directly work against US interests in the region. Hezbollah in Lebanon is armed and trained by two main countries, Syria and Iran, and fights against both a secularized, modernized Lebanon and peace with Israel. Iran supplied advanced IEDs, other weaponry and training to Shiite insurgent groups in Iraq that were fighting the US and US-backed forces before they agreed to more or less integrate with the political process. I'm pretty sure giving away armor-piercing IED technology for the express purpose of killing US soldiers in Iraq falls into the category of "working directly against our interests".
And finally, never discount a huge motivator behind Iran being one of the enemies of the United States: the government of Iran wants TO BE an enemy of the United States. The theocracy/military complex running Iran is not stupid. Its economy is stagnant, at best. The young people of Iran, given a choice, would clearly want to move Iran in a different direction. (Hence the populist Spring that was bloodily suppressed in Iran). What's the best way for Iran to distract its people from domesti
The USA is beginning to look an awful like an awful country run by despotic psychopaths.
The complete history of the endless war over the last 60 years has conclusively proven the USA to be quite evil.
Each action is seemingly taken as a response to provocation, but it is very clear that it openly engages in hostilities well and truly before any open warfare. Being the bully and then pretending the victim is the reson d'être. Pearl harbour, Vietnam, desert storm, 911 and now this. The USA had very deliberately stuck its dick in another counties ass, claims to be the wronged when the victim retaliates, then mobilises the very next week. It is prepared for war instantly. it is premeditated and very deliberately provocative.
The school bully uses this same method. They invariably go to jail or end up in a shit job. Soon, perhaps, the world will react against this menace.
I have to say, you get originality points for being the first I've seen to label the US as "quite evil" for surreptitiously fighting against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany before Pearl Harbor and, uh, I guess the "official" start of hostilities? Maybe if you took your naivete-colored glasses off you'd realize maybe it isn't such a bad thing.
Seriously? Desert Storm (and the 1991 Persian Gulf War) was evil? I suppose you think Kuwait deserved to be invaded?
There's not a big evil conspiracy here - despite what you obviously believe - since about the 1980s, the United States military has been ready to fight a war (or two) in a week's notice in response to world events because (*gasp*) that's what they train to do. That's the point of having an all-volunteer professional armed forces - to have much better trained and prepared soldiers ready to fight. They wargame scenarios against real world potential enemies constantly. Their official doctrine is to be able to fight two regional wars at the same time.
It's become crystal clear over the years that it is everyone's moral imperative to ignore copyright law.
That is the only way we, as a society, are going to conquer the science-and-arts-crippling concept known as "intellectual property" and move forward as a civilization.
Thank you, I agree wholeheartedly!
- GPL violator
More seriously, the concept of intellectual property is neither crippling nor backwards. I think everyone but the entertainment media/attorney complex would agree that copyright can be useful if scaled back to 15 years or so and ending extensions. Same with vigorously limiting the scope of patents. And I hope you can see how trademark law can prevent public confusion.
Seriously though, we are going to see the emergence of "virtual pop stars" designed by committee to be appeal to as many people as possible appear in the next few years. Electronically produced music makes this goal a hell of a lot easier (a robotic arm that can play the guitar or piano as well as a human is probably a long way off).
We already have them. Every single aspect of Justin Bieber / Britney Spears / Beyonce's projection in public life has been fabricated, test marketed, and refined down to the microscopic level. Every non-controversy, image makeover, life-changing interview and comeback has been preprogrammed to push the maximum number of buttons to gather the most attention and make the most profit for the entertainment industry celebrity complex. Why develop a computer program to be a virtual pop star when you have living breathing human beings that are more than willing to sell every aspect of themselves already to be one?
While on the outside the situation has the appearance that there could have been impropriety, the appropriate thing of course is to look at the hard evidence.
Giving a sweet deal on real estate to a friend and doctor for excellent medical care is not illegal. (While I haven't received a house, I get homemade baked goods all the time.) Giving a sweet deal on real estate to a friend as a kickback for being pushed up the transplant list is highly unethical. But there's an easy way to find out: have the state medical review board take a peek at the transplant waiting list records over the time period. If Steve Jobs mysteriously moves up the list for no good medical reason, or is listed in front of other patients with more pressing need or waiting time, then you have your smoking gun. Otherwise, if everything is appropriate with the transplant waiting list, then it sounds like the system worked as designed.
It's called proportionate response. Iran pretends that its "peaceful" nuclear program isn't producing weapons-grade materiel, and the US is doing what it can to make sure that it doesn't produce weapons-grade materiel.
But if Iran were to do something as colossally stupid as bombing the Pentagon or White House, no one would be dismissive. In fact, it would likely unite the people of the United States in conducting a protracted hot war that would send Iran back into the Stone Ages. Think Pearl Harbor and the response. Or 9/11 and what's happened to the leadership of al Qaeda.
Actually, those heroic measures at the end tend to be hyper expensive (and profitable) but are as likely to shorten life as they are to lengthen it and definitely degrade the quality of life.
So, with the profit motive gone, they skip all of that because it's in the patient's best interest. Do you REALLY want your family bankrupted so you can lay in a bed, in pain, unsure of who you are or why you're there for an extra 2 weeks?
Socialist healthcare will gladly do something USEFUL that allows you to be a contributing member of society for a while longer (where contribution may or may not include actual employment).
Spoken like someone who isn't involved in healthcare.
I treat critical care patients on a more or less daily basis. I can guarantee you that it is profitable for neither the hospital nor the physician for extremely sick patients to receive multiple heroic interventions at the end of life. Yes, it is "hyper expensive", for everyone involved. And the hospital / physician will likely be reimbursed at a lesser rate or not be reimbursed at all for those measures. From a financial standpoint, the most profitable hospitalized patients are those that recover sooner than expected, with as few expensive procedures and imaging as needed. The reason is that most insurance companies and the government are reimbursing based on "average" costs and hospital stays for the illnesses that are being treated in any given patient. So if patient John Doe takes $100,000 of heroic measures when the reimbursement for his illnesses from the major payers is set at $10,000, the hospital usually ends up eating most of that cost. Conversely, if you only have to incur $5,000 worth of costs to send John Doe home healthy and happy, guess what? Someone probably just made a bunch of money.
The #1 main reason why the end of life has historically been filled with "hyper expensive" heroic measures is because here in the US, public health education (along with public education in general) is horrible. The average Joe has no clue what's going on with his body or what to expect if illness strikes. Conversations about advanced directives, end-of-life decision making, etc. that should take place before you get sick end up being hashed out over days or weeks through multiple emotionally distraught family members. If Grandma Jane goes to the hospital, her family has no reasonable expectation of what the most advanced healthcare system in the world can or can't deliver. All of this, of course, is a recipe for medical cost disaster in aggregate for the US because what should be quiet, comfortable, planned-out deaths with a minimum of fuss and expense and a maximum of comfort becomes long, drawn-out ordeals because no one, the least of all the family of Grandma Jane, knows when to say enough is enough. And the doctors and nurses are professionally obligated in the absence of effective decision making to keep prolonging the inevitable up until the point where A) the decision is made or B) the limits of medical science are exhausted. The US has the most technologically advanced and adept health care available anywhere; but no one ever can ever be bothered to figure out before hand how they want to use it.
As far as the "future" of medicine, when the expensive, lab-grown genetically customized organ replacements hit; I expect it to be limited for decades to a select few who can either A) pay for it out of pocket or B) meet extremely limited selection criteria. Research the history of renal dialysis if you need a good example. Organ transplant surgeries today are more or less already rationed by the scarcity of organs ready to be transplanted; once that ends governments and insurance companies will start inventing other ways to ration it.
Indeed, your genetic makeup is as important as lifestyle, maybe even moreso.
I wouldn't go overboard; genetics is important, but lifestyle is as important or even more so. The three most common causes of premature death in the United States: tobacco, sedentary lifestyle/poor diet, and alcohol.
I've been thin all my life except when I was on Paxil and gained 40 pounds. When I got off the Paxil it just came off, not only did I never diet, it was an effort to keep some of the weight I'd gained on.
A friend of mine was a construction worker, so he got plenty of excersize and was by no means overweight. Yet he died three years ago at age 42 from a sudden heart attack. Niether my lack of obesity or his heart attack were from lifestyle.
If your grandparents all died of heart disease before age 60, you're not likely to live to be 70 no matter how healthy your lifestyle.
Let me amend that; if all your grandparents all died of heart disease before age 60, you're likely to have coronary artery disease and will need to be treated, or you're not likely to live to be 70. Medical sciences, especially in cardiology, has advanced significantly since your grandparents' time. (And even in the last 10 years.)
The US military has had an open goal of expanding its capabilities to kill targets selectively with as little delay as possible. All the gadgetry to achieve real-time eyes-on intelligence on a potential target (like the late UBL) can be worthless if it takes an hour or more to mobilize a strike against it and the target slips away. Having a potential weapons platform already up in the air 24/7 for a year at a time can cut the response time significantly. And if you are hindered by the fixed orbit, like spy satellites, just launch more space planes...
Is this moronic? Our current society is certainly built around the expectation that everyone has a job. People who don't are resented and denied anything beyond bare substinence income (and sometimes even that). When lack of a job makes you a barely tolerated human cochroach it's hardly surprising that some might start wondering if having one should be a formally recognized right.
Yes it is moronic. The difference is the right to seek a job using your own hard work and qualifications versus "a job is a right". Just because someone else has made poor life decisions, creating an underdeveloped basket case whose only function in life is to drool over the latest bread and circus churned out by the media entertainment complexes, does not mean they are entitled to anything other than bare subsistence provisions. I'm sorry if they're resentful, but tough fucking luck. It's never too late to start making some smarter choices in life.
Yes, but what's the purpose of war? It's not to kill the enemy, it's not to disable their infrastructure, it's not to reduce their ammunition supplies.
Clausewitz suggested the purpose is the imposition of your will on another. Killing civilians in this day and age reduces your chances of successfully imposing your will, so it's counter-productive, for all the damage you may cause to the enemy.
Think bigger picture.
Really? The Taliban must be losing in a landslide then in Afghanistan. The Taliban make it their modus operandi to kill, intimidate, and/or make an example of any civilians that dare cooperate with the international forces in Afghanistan, be it UN, US or NATO allies. How's that war going, again?
See examples:
servo-skulls
servitors
The artist was just honoring a pious and worthy cat in death!
The real issue is that even if everyone agreedon global warming, we haven'tthe foggiest realistic solution.
All we can do is pray for photovoltaics to follow Moores law for another decade, or a breakthrough in fusion.
That's why people prefer to argue whether there is a problem, rather than admit that they're powerless.
Really? I'm pretty sure that if we took the billions of dollars we as a society squander every year on countless books, debates, advertisements, and shitty movies narrated by Al Gore and just spent it all replanting non-harvestable young trees at $1 / tree (or much less) - pretty soon we would have a handle on this "carbon sequestration" problem. But God forbid someone actually implement a workable solution, instead of trying to impose our political viewpoints on each other or spend truckloads of money chasing technological pipedreams that may take a decade or more to realize.
It's a good one, but there are several competing theories out there too. One of the best I've seen is the correlation between acetaminophen use in children and the development of asthma in children. It just so happens that clean, microbe-adverse developed nations have much more access to acetaminophen than dirty, unsanitized third world countries....
I heard about this some years ago, and the reason was rather sinister.
The way I heard it is that nuclear non-proliferation treaties that the US has signed to limit the number of warheads in its arsenal. However warheads in transit do not count towards this total, and in the interests of security the US is not obliged to reveal how many warheads it has in transit at any one time or where they are going. By keeping a percentage of it arsenal perpetually driving around the US, the US government can effectively sidestep nuclear warhead limits imposed by non-proliferation treaties.
Given that the United States, under current treaty limits, has thousands of warheads more than it needs to demolish every potential adversary in the world several times over, such a conspiracy would be both ridiculous and a huge waste of resources. What would keeping 50 more secret warheads traveling as a security risk accomplish when you have more than 5,000 already on hand?
The answer to antibiotic-resistant bugs is to develop *new* and *different* antibiotics. It's that whole diversity thing, y'know? The problem is that Big Pharma is no longer interested in developing drugs that make you better. There's far more money involved in developing drugs that you have to take for the rest of your life. When was the last time you saw a television commercial for an antibiotic? Nope, they'd rather have you on an antidepressant, a cholesterol medicine, a supplement for people whose antidepressants are rendered less effective by their cholesterol medicine, something for the high blood pressure resulting from the previous three medications, and of course something to perk up the old limp noodle from time to time.
Cure sickness? Once? Where's the money in that?
ceftaroline
daptomycin
linezolid
tigecycline
fidaxomicin
telavancin
doripenem
ertapenem
Oh gee, I don't know. Maybe you simply don't know because ordinary people aren't concerned about curing infections. And pharmaceutical companies understand this with their marketing campaigns. People are more worried about putting their dollars into their mood, their erectile dysfunction, and their botox injections. Have you ever seen a patient walk into an office and write a big check to a cardiologist for a left heart catheterization and possible interventional procedures? Compare that to how many patients walk into an office and write a big check for hCG injections or a tummy tuck...
And keep in mind this is not by any means an all-inclusive list of new and useful antibiotics introduced over the last 5-10 years. Also, contrary to popular belief, older and cheaper antibiotics will, most of the time, get the job done as well or better with most infections today.
Bacteriophages are being used to cure such infections in one of polish hospitals. For example MRSA is being cured in 80% of cases.
Therapy is safe and cheap:
http://www.aite.wroclaw.pl/phages/phages.html
Why you are not going to see such treatments in your country?? Phages are not patentable, so no way to earn hard cash here.
This is ridiculous. MRSA is curable in 100% of cases in the United States right now using current antibiotics and/or surgery (to remove a source of infection that drugs can't penetrate). The question is not whether or not medical science can kill the infection, the question is whether the patient is healthy enough to recover from the damage already wrought by the infection in the first place by the time they're treated. Anyone who has actually worked in an intensive care unit, instead of armchair doctoring, can attest to this.
Example: had a nursing home patient admitted a year ago for pneumonia. Causative organism was Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Fairly resistant, treated with doripenem and tobramycin. Killed the Pseudomonas with a standard 14 day course of treatment (repeat washings and cultures: negative), but much of her left lung was already chewed up into a necrotic mush. Bronchopleural fistulas from the damage required chest tubes and chronic ventilation through a tracheostomy. Eventually taken to surgery for a pneumonectomy. Survived the surgery, but gradually worsened in her general health and never could be weaned from the ventilator until finally her family withdrew care.
Phages may well have a good clinical benefit, and may eventually take a prominent place as another weapon in the healthcare arsenal against infection, but until I see the randomized controlled trials showing their superiority (or even noninferiority with benefits in other areas) vs standard antibiotics, I could care less. Put up or shut up....
Do you really need me to answer that?
It was available for legal purchase OVER THE COUNTER until 1914. And yet our country survived those terrible, terrible cocaine fueled years.
So....you want to legalize and regulate the sale of this stuff in the US? Too late. You can already get cocaine legally. Right now, cocaine is available as a Schedule II drug...along with the legal forms of meth and heroin, like Dilaudid and Adderall (both of which are widely abused). If the Mexican drug cartels, with all of their inflated high prices and cost of doing business illegally, can still undercut finding a shady local prescriber and getting a prescription for your recreational drugs (a significant portion, if not the vast majority of "medical" marijuana business already), then how is simply expanding the "medical" recreational drug business going to have any further effect on them? So... in order to dent the black market, you would pretty much have to make it available to all comers.
I'm curious.... how would any consumer product safety law ever hold water again if we legalized and made freely available recreational drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine? (And now the newly ubiquitous "bath salts".) Vioxx and other Cox-2 inhibitors increased heart attacks by a few percentage points among patients who took it, and most of them were banned from being sold and their makers sued for hundreds of millions of dollars. But now look! You can get dope that's a hundred times worse for your heart health at the corner store!
>Apple has never done "product placement".
Yes, this tribute page, on the Huffington Post of all places, to Macs receiving product placement, is clearly a hallucination.
Apple's advertising department would never target white people who are financially well-off, with social and professional climber written all over them, and a compulsive need to be popular, or at least to be seen as popular.
A list of shows targeted by Apple:
Sex and the City
The Devil Wears Prada
Iron Man
Office Space
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Zoolander
Legally Blonde
Funny People
Friends with Benefits
What Apple's rivals should do is not just learn a lesson. They should leverage the TouchPad. Get Android working on the TouchPad which just sold hundreds of thousands of units, and keep building the Android app userbase.
Apple has had the advantage of leveraging what was originally the iPod consumer base into a mature ecosystem which has turned out to be one of the iPad's main advantages over its would-be rivals. Here's a golden opportunity for Apple's rivals to influence the future purchasing decisions of hundreds of thousands of consumers.
Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
>Every aircraft we have, every cruise missile, launched at once, loaded with conventional bunker busters, would not make a dent in the north's 10,000 artillery tubes which are heavily fortified into the hills.
>They don't need to "keep the lights on at night" to rain unimaginable hell down on the south.
>Artillery is cheap, effective, and when behind three meters of reinforced concrete damn hard to kill.
While you have an effective point, nothing you said contradicts what the parent poster said. The US would most likely steamroll the DPRK in a conventional war. The DPRK trains in massed infantry and outdated armor formations, exactly the type of target-rich environment a precision airpower military like the US would dismantle in a hearbeat.
Those 10,000 artillery tubes of the DPRK in the mountains are meant to cause mass civilian casualties in Seoul which, while horrific, would have little to no effect on the final outcome of a conventional war.
Imagine an armed robber with the police surrounding him, holding a hostage at gunpoint. That hostage is the civilian population of Seoul. Perhaps the only reason the US has not conducted airstrikes at this point against known nuclear facilities of the DPRK is the threat of the DPRK shelling Seoul. Not, as conventional pundit wisdom believes, the fact that they probably have one or two crude nuclear devices.