Actually that one was published in, among other places, the Scientific American - a publication normally quite on board with global warming theories, anthropogenic and otherwise.
If fossil fuels continue to be extracted at the same rate over the next 28 years as they were between 1988 and 2017, says the report, global average temperatures would be on course to rise by 4C by the end of the century.
Even if their modelling was dead-on correct:
By at least one model that would last for about 400 years. Then we run out of fossil carbon. Then we crash, not just back down to the reasonably stable temperatures of most of the time from the taming of fire to the start of the industrial revolution, but onto the already-in-progress and accelerating descent into the next ice age, due to orbital forcing, that has been held off for several millennia by people burning stuff to stay warm (possibly even in a feedback process that may have stabilized the planet's temperature - colder winters, more burning, more CO2,...).
But, as I said: "... IF their modeling was... correct" and "by... one model".
There's little reason to believe any of their current predictions, since their previous predictions, where they could be tested, don't seem to have come anywhere close.
This means spending the weekend on serious leisure activities that require the regular refinement of skills: your barbershop-quartet singing,... You pursue serious leisure with the earnest tenor of a professional, even if the pursuit is amateur.
Or perhaps it's a reference to the (massive, extremely strong, near invulnerable, hyper competent, hyper confident, and utterly laid-back) science fiction graphic novel character Buck Godot.
(Who, himself, is a reference to "Waiting For Godot", but a step removed.)
But the silence is wearing thin for victims of the assaults, as a series of escalating attacks using N.S.A. cyberweapons have hit hospitals, a nuclear site and American businesses.
IMHO it's just getting started. The source code to a whole BUNCH of their tools has gotten out - a treasure trove for the bad guys. Now they don't have to design this stuff themselves - it's all there, ready to be customized. We're just seeing the leading edge from the early adopters.
Now there is growing concern that United States intelligence agencies have rushed to create digital weapons that they cannot keep safe from adversaries or disable once they fall into the wrong hands.
Well, DUH! If you've got the source it's anywhere from reasonably easy to trivial to disable or change any kill switch. Changing vulnerable mechanisms key to the operation are more difficult, but still doable. So even if they did spend extra engineer time to build in the equivalent of "gun smart chips" - and they worked - it would, at best, be initially mitigating but ultimately futile.
Back in the '80s or so I tried to pay for a car repair with a perfectly valid credit card and had it declined. A call to the credit card company disclosed the reason:
When the database was offline the authorization servers would approve charges up to $300 (1980ish dollars) and refuse those above that. This kept them from making all their cards stop working, on one hand, limited the losses to savvy crooks, and only inconvenienced those making the relatively rare high-sticker purchases. (Like me, trying to get my car back from the mechanic. He was willing to accept $300 on the card and other payment for the balance, so it worked out.)
Similarly, the bank machines trusted balance on the mag-stripe card if the server was offline. In the Detroit area this was for a couple of shifts over the weekend. This meant that if you re-wrote the card you could pull out more money, or money from a closed account. I heard that when losses were around $10,000 per weekend they just absorbed it as a cost of business. But when the crooks got organized and losses climbed to $100,000 per weekend they added a shift and kept the servers up 24/7.
Nowadays the cards have a secure chip with rewritable memory, so it's possible for the programmers of the machines to put some trust in the card. But it looks like FreedomPay's system was using the older approach - in an environment where its vulnerability was an issue.
I do not think it is run-off-the-mill individuals who are behind an attack of this magnitude.
The magnitude of the attack is not necessarily any more related to the qualifications and sponsorship of the originator than the magnitude of an Influenza epidemic is related to the size of the virus.
It's a self-reproducing, self-propagating system. The magnitude of its spread is an artifact of its own behavior, the distribution of the vulnerabilities it exploits, and the connectivity of the susceptable machines.
Followed immediately by pointing out that men over 45 are virtually guaranteed to have autistic children.
Aspberger's syndrome appears to be a case of defining being a nerd/geek as a mental disorder.
If they're still considering aspberger's to be a subset of autism, "men over 40 have geekier children" implying "men over 40 are virtually guaranteed to have autistic children" is a tautology.
We've seen this sort of article before:
- Say a bunch of stuff "tested positive" for BAD THING.
- Talk about how bad BAD THING is.
- Talk about where the government sets the (generally very bureaucrat-CYA-low) cutoff of what they consider dangerous (or actionable).
- But never mention the level of BAD THING detected, or where it lies on the government's scale of "Oh HORRORS!" vs. "Meh. There's a trace of BAD THING everywhere." scale.
- Foam up a nice head of panic.
- Sell a lot of papers/eyeball views/whatever if you're a media outlet. Get a bunch more donations for your "good work" to fight poisoning people with BAD THING if you're an advocacy group (as in this case).
- PROFIT!
"Tested Positive" says there's enough to detect. As the tests get better the level of detectability gets vanishingly small. This not only gives more opportunities to pull this stunt as time goes on, but it also enables the use of an apples-orange comparison with the less sensitive tests of the past to make up a fake-news item about how "this many decades ago only THIS LOWER PERCENTAGE of things tested for BAD THING tested positive."
I looked through the whole article for any statement of what level of lead was detected, but didn't find it. Did I miss something? Or was this yet another bogus scare story by an organization with an axe to grind (and/or being removed from the government funding teat and trying to fill in with extra donations).
Some are, some aren't. (Elemental tritium, for instance, is a VERY light gas.)
They nearly always change what atom they are when they decay. (Exception being those, such as tecnetium-99m, where the nucleus is in an excited state and decays to a non-excited state by emitting a gamma - though it then becomes tecnetium-99 which eventually decays further.)
Some decay processes make heavy atoms lighter - e.g. by emitting alpha particles or by spontaneous fission.
Let me know when Kansas can supply 100% of it's electrical needs through renewables when the electricity is actually needed...
That really doesn't matter. Both home and industrial scale energy storage with days of full-load capacity are already here and affordable. They're also improving rapidly, both in capability and cost. Solar generation, even with old-school energy storage, has already crossed price break-even for much of the continental US.
Also: Solar + wind does a very good job of tracking the variable part of the load, leaving a modest fraction that's almost constant and easy to predict for the storage to cover.
... they forget the much worse stuff, mercury, lead, cadmium and other neurotoxic stuff. Especially mercury.
Also: Radioactives are temporary (on geologic, and mostly on historic or shorter, timescales.) Heavy metals are forever.
(Or at least until the planet falls into a sun or black hole, or perhaps near the heat-death if it turns out protons DO decay. By which point, of course, it won't matter that it wasn't really forever.)
They can be produced, in turn, by varying magnetic fields. This allows treatments to be done with magnetic coils, rather than electrodes.
While they are used for cancer treatment, they work by killing ALL cells that attempt division while exposed to the fields.
This is very handy for treating, say, glioblastoma (an aggressive brain tumor), because cells that are NOT trying to divide are apparently unaffected, and non-cancer cell division in the brain is very rare.
(This might be why epidemiological studies of cellphone use versus brain cancer incidence has indicated a slight REDUCTION in brain cancer risk.)
In other tissues (like the hand, for instance), I'd expect such fields to be more problematic. If they kill off, say, the stem cells needed for wound repair, there might be substantial damage or eventual destruction of the hand - but nothing would be noticeable for perhaps years.
I see lots of complaints. But no suggestions for alternatives.
(Example of a bad alternative: Google Hangouts. Some of my correspondents don't have skype and set up a business conference on that. Turns out Netscape removed the feature it depended on (as a glaring security tarpit) back in March, and Google has yet to come up with an alternative so I had to install a variant that could still run it - miss the first about eight minutes of the meeting when it didn't join correctly - and later unscrew my browser history after it made itself the default - for a total loss of several hours of work time. Also: It assumes video is almost always wanted (a bandwidth disaster) and makes it nearly impossible to do voice-only without an initial video connection.)
So:
* What are good alternatives?
* Are there any good open source alternatives?
Are they also making the service available to all election challengers, at both the primary and general election levels? If so, are they advertising this availability and addressing as broadly for challengers as they are for incumbents?
If not, they may find the service's entire cost treated as campaign contributions by the Federal Election Commission.
"If you go through a legal name change you may run into issues with not being able to switch your name to something that amounts to a title of nobility..." Well then, best to start off with the Title then: Barron Trump
Are you saying that Trump's 11 year old offspring was originally named something other than "Baron" and had his name changed? B-)
As I understand it, registering a name on a birth certificate is merely recording the name of the child, which was selected and applied by the parent(s), not the state granting a name TO a child.
(That's also why things like immigration historic stripping "von"s and the like was a high-handed misapplication of law by low-ranking bureaucrats.)
But IANAL If you're really interested in this, it might be worth the bux to consult one.
So, you couldn't change your name to "Prince", for example?
The "title of nobility' prohibition is on the Federal government. (I'm not sure whether it has been "incorporated" against the States.) Legal name changes are a state issue, and interpreting the law in the absence of binding precedent is a judge's call, which may result in far more than fifty different venues to shop. So your mileage may vary.
As a non-native English speaker, I ask: is this an actual, socially acceptable name in English-speaking countries?
Unlike, say, French, American English does not have a ruling body. It's whatever the speakers of it chose to say.
That includes names. You can call your child or yourself anything you chose - as long as you do not do so to defraud.
(My wife's career was blighted by an abusive father - a professor - who solicited name suggestions from his students. Though she is native born and a native speaker of American English, she missed out on a lot of job interviews because HR droids thought, from the name he hung on her, that she was a new immigrant who would have communication problems.)
If you go through a legal name change you may run into issues with not being able to switch your name to something that amounts to a title of nobility (due to article 1 section 9 paragraph 8: No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States:..."). Immigration had a history of misapplying that to strip things like "von" from immigrants' names as they filled out their paperwork.
As for "socially acceptable", that depends on the prejudices of the particular social subgroups in question. Regardless of what they might think of neologisms labeling a person, any name from any established cultural group anywhere in the world is necessarily acceptable.
If Frank Zappa can name his son "Dweezil" and his daughter "Moon Unit", it's easy to see that anything goes. B-)
A subgroup of students made their own private group to share raunchy stuff, and to get in they decided you had to post rude crap in the official group.
Harvard had nothing to do with the second group, or it's rules about what you had to post..
"students were required to post provocative memes in the bigger group before being allowed into the smaller one"
That sounds like entrapment.
Also like an assignment to post memes which would produce a reaction in the viewer ("provocative") but with which the students themselves didn't necessary agree.
The most provocative memes entering freshmen (with little social experience in the adult society) might be familiar with would be those that were offensive - perhaps even to themselves.
For one part of the school to demand they produce something like this, then another to use it to eject them as unsuitable for enrollment in the school, certainly looks like a sucker punch.
Perhaps Harvard wants only students who would rather fail an assignment than even mention a politically incorrect idea. If that's the case, then this action WOULD be legitimate.
But it should also be informative to anyone who would, from now on, consider hiring their graduates.
Sorry, the US is still a first-world (NATO-aligned) country (although Trump might have changed that if the threat of the US dropping out hadn't caused the deadbeat members to start paying toward their share of the costs.)
Of course if you're using the evolved meaning of "poor, economically peripheral" or "mass of underpaid or unemployed serfs under the domination of a Fearless Leader and/or an elite", the US is on the track to that, by replacing the lower class workers with cheap, illegal, immigrant labor and the middle class workers with H1-B effectively indentured servants.
The modern countries on this planet provide health care instead of selling it.
Actually, obtaining necessities via a market incentivizing their production and competition creating redundancy and driving down prices IS the "modern country" approach, dating from "Adam Smith" a couple centuries back.
Having it provided to the serfs by the rulers is a legacy of noblesse oblige, where the royalty of Europe (and their predecessors), having confiscated all the wealth and productivity of the serfs, were obliged to provide them with enough health care to keep them healthy enough to keep producing more wealth. Just enough more to keep the nobles living "like kings" and able to hold off takeover of their serfs by their neighbors, of course. Not enough fo the serfs to live comfortably.
How can cities be a week from starvation when the human body can go for 3 weeks without food?
That's a different definition of "starvation" than I was using:
One week to the start of starvation (having no food avilable, the ongoing process). Four weeks to death by starvation.
Not that it matters all that much. With the power out the pumping and purification of water will also be interrupted. Death by thirst is much faster, and death by contaminated water (e.g. cholera) is not that much more prolonged.
Whenever the media pompously mention "capable of reaching the U.S.", what they mean is the Guam base.
ORLY?
I recall news items a year or more ago. As I recall their ICBMs were estimated at being able to hit the western 2/3s of the continental US, but hitting the east coast or Florida was a stretch. If they've improved the range (loaded with a nuke), or lightened the nuke, even moderately, look out DC.
From what I see now they're working (successfully) on reliability and accuracy.
Further: since they've gotten (at least) two payloads into low Earth orbit, they've go the whole globe underfoot.
And that's more of a worry for me (AND for the DOD). LEO is ideal for an enhanced EMP attack, using a small bomb optimized for gamma output (to smack the electrons in the upper atmosphere down a bunch, converting the bulk of the earthward-directed energy of the bomb into low frequency radio energy).
An EMP attack, with the current state of the power grid, could depower the east coast for a year or more. With the cities just a week or so from starvation without constant food shipments that could lead to a substantially more-than-half casualty rate.
Slashdot Mirror
What model are you using ? Your ass ?
Actually that one was published in, among other places, the Scientific American - a publication normally quite on board with global warming theories, anthropogenic and otherwise.
If fossil fuels continue to be extracted at the same rate over the next 28 years as they were between 1988 and 2017, says the report, global average temperatures would be on course to rise by 4C by the end of the century.
Even if their modelling was dead-on correct:
By at least one model that would last for about 400 years. Then we run out of fossil carbon. Then we crash, not just back down to the reasonably stable temperatures of most of the time from the taming of fire to the start of the industrial revolution, but onto the already-in-progress and accelerating descent into the next ice age, due to orbital forcing, that has been held off for several millennia by people burning stuff to stay warm (possibly even in a feedback process that may have stabilized the planet's temperature - colder winters, more burning, more CO2, ...).
But, as I said: "... IF their modeling was ... correct" and "by ... one model".
There's little reason to believe any of their current predictions, since their previous predictions, where they could be tested, don't seem to have come anywhere close.
This means spending the weekend on serious leisure activities that require the regular refinement of skills: your barbershop-quartet singing, ... You pursue serious leisure with the earnest tenor of a professional, even if the pursuit is amateur.
and even if you're an earnest tenor.
Or perhaps it's a reference to the (massive, extremely strong, near invulnerable, hyper competent, hyper confident, and utterly laid-back) science fiction graphic novel character Buck Godot.
(Who, himself, is a reference to "Waiting For Godot", but a step removed.)
But the silence is wearing thin for victims of the assaults, as a series of escalating attacks using N.S.A. cyberweapons have hit hospitals, a nuclear site and American businesses.
IMHO it's just getting started. The source code to a whole BUNCH of their tools has gotten out - a treasure trove for the bad guys. Now they don't have to design this stuff themselves - it's all there, ready to be customized. We're just seeing the leading edge from the early adopters.
Now there is growing concern that United States intelligence agencies have rushed to create digital weapons that they cannot keep safe from adversaries or disable once they fall into the wrong hands.
Well, DUH! If you've got the source it's anywhere from reasonably easy to trivial to disable or change any kill switch. Changing vulnerable mechanisms key to the operation are more difficult, but still doable. So even if they did spend extra engineer time to build in the equivalent of "gun smart chips" - and they worked - it would, at best, be initially mitigating but ultimately futile.
Back in the '80s or so I tried to pay for a car repair with a perfectly valid credit card and had it declined. A call to the credit card company disclosed the reason:
When the database was offline the authorization servers would approve charges up to $300 (1980ish dollars) and refuse those above that. This kept them from making all their cards stop working, on one hand, limited the losses to savvy crooks, and only inconvenienced those making the relatively rare high-sticker purchases. (Like me, trying to get my car back from the mechanic. He was willing to accept $300 on the card and other payment for the balance, so it worked out.)
Similarly, the bank machines trusted balance on the mag-stripe card if the server was offline. In the Detroit area this was for a couple of shifts over the weekend. This meant that if you re-wrote the card you could pull out more money, or money from a closed account. I heard that when losses were around $10,000 per weekend they just absorbed it as a cost of business. But when the crooks got organized and losses climbed to $100,000 per weekend they added a shift and kept the servers up 24/7.
Nowadays the cards have a secure chip with rewritable memory, so it's possible for the programmers of the machines to put some trust in the card. But it looks like FreedomPay's system was using the older approach - in an environment where its vulnerability was an issue.
I do not think it is run-off-the-mill individuals who are behind an attack of this magnitude.
The magnitude of the attack is not necessarily any more related to the qualifications and sponsorship of the originator than the magnitude of an Influenza epidemic is related to the size of the virus.
It's a self-reproducing, self-propagating system. The magnitude of its spread is an artifact of its own behavior, the distribution of the vulnerabilities it exploits, and the connectivity of the susceptable machines.
Followed immediately by pointing out that men over 45 are virtually guaranteed to have autistic children.
Aspberger's syndrome appears to be a case of defining being a nerd/geek as a mental disorder.
If they're still considering aspberger's to be a subset of autism, "men over 40 have geekier children" implying "men over 40 are virtually guaranteed to have autistic children" is a tautology.
We've seen this sort of article before:
- Say a bunch of stuff "tested positive" for BAD THING.
- Talk about how bad BAD THING is.
- Talk about where the government sets the (generally very bureaucrat-CYA-low) cutoff of what they consider dangerous (or actionable).
- But never mention the level of BAD THING detected, or where it lies on the government's scale of "Oh HORRORS!" vs. "Meh. There's a trace of BAD THING everywhere." scale.
- Foam up a nice head of panic.
- Sell a lot of papers/eyeball views/whatever if you're a media outlet. Get a bunch more donations for your "good work" to fight poisoning people with BAD THING if you're an advocacy group (as in this case).
- PROFIT!
"Tested Positive" says there's enough to detect. As the tests get better the level of detectability gets vanishingly small. This not only gives more opportunities to pull this stunt as time goes on, but it also enables the use of an apples-orange comparison with the less sensitive tests of the past to make up a fake-news item about how "this many decades ago only THIS LOWER PERCENTAGE of things tested for BAD THING tested positive."
I looked through the whole article for any statement of what level of lead was detected, but didn't find it. Did I miss something? Or was this yet another bogus scare story by an organization with an axe to grind (and/or being removed from the government funding teat and trying to fill in with extra donations).
Some are, some aren't. (Elemental tritium, for instance, is a VERY light gas.)
They nearly always change what atom they are when they decay. (Exception being those, such as tecnetium-99m, where the nucleus is in an excited state and decays to a non-excited state by emitting a gamma - though it then becomes tecnetium-99 which eventually decays further.)
Some decay processes make heavy atoms lighter - e.g. by emitting alpha particles or by spontaneous fission.
Let me know when Kansas can supply 100% of it's electrical needs through renewables when the electricity is actually needed...
That really doesn't matter. Both home and industrial scale energy storage with days of full-load capacity are already here and affordable. They're also improving rapidly, both in capability and cost. Solar generation, even with old-school energy storage, has already crossed price break-even for much of the continental US.
Also: Solar + wind does a very good job of tracking the variable part of the load, leaving a modest fraction that's almost constant and easy to predict for the storage to cover.
... they forget the much worse stuff, mercury, lead, cadmium and other neurotoxic stuff. Especially mercury.
Also: Radioactives are temporary (on geologic, and mostly on historic or shorter, timescales.) Heavy metals are forever.
(Or at least until the planet falls into a sun or black hole, or perhaps near the heat-death if it turns out protons DO decay. By which point, of course, it won't matter that it wasn't really forever.)
"TTF" (tumor treating fields) are varying electrical fields that disrupt cell reproduction by interfering with gene segregation during mitosis.
They can be produced, in turn, by varying magnetic fields. This allows treatments to be done with magnetic coils, rather than electrodes.
While they are used for cancer treatment, they work by killing ALL cells that attempt division while exposed to the fields.
This is very handy for treating, say, glioblastoma (an aggressive brain tumor), because cells that are NOT trying to divide are apparently unaffected, and non-cancer cell division in the brain is very rare.
(This might be why epidemiological studies of cellphone use versus brain cancer incidence has indicated a slight REDUCTION in brain cancer risk.)
In other tissues (like the hand, for instance), I'd expect such fields to be more problematic. If they kill off, say, the stem cells needed for wound repair, there might be substantial damage or eventual destruction of the hand - but nothing would be noticeable for perhaps years.
You're gonna have to explain that a little better. Netscape hasn't existed as an independent company for years ...
Sorry, meant Firefox. (Had "Netscape" on the brain because I'm an old fart who predates the split.)
I see lots of complaints. But no suggestions for alternatives.
(Example of a bad alternative: Google Hangouts. Some of my correspondents don't have skype and set up a business conference on that. Turns out Netscape removed the feature it depended on (as a glaring security tarpit) back in March, and Google has yet to come up with an alternative so I had to install a variant that could still run it - miss the first about eight minutes of the meeting when it didn't join correctly - and later unscrew my browser history after it made itself the default - for a total loss of several hours of work time. Also: It assumes video is almost always wanted (a bandwidth disaster) and makes it nearly impossible to do voice-only without an initial video connection.)
So:
* What are good alternatives?
* Are there any good open source alternatives?
I"m wondering...is this legal?
Are they also making the service available to all election challengers, at both the primary and general election levels? If so, are they advertising this availability and addressing as broadly for challengers as they are for incumbents?
If not, they may find the service's entire cost treated as campaign contributions by the Federal Election Commission.
"If you go through a legal name change you may run into issues with not being able to switch your name to something that amounts to a title of nobility..."
Well then, best to start off with the Title then:
Barron Trump
Are you saying that Trump's 11 year old offspring was originally named something other than "Baron" and had his name changed? B-)
As I understand it, registering a name on a birth certificate is merely recording the name of the child, which was selected and applied by the parent(s), not the state granting a name TO a child.
(That's also why things like immigration historic stripping "von"s and the like was a high-handed misapplication of law by low-ranking bureaucrats.)
But IANAL If you're really interested in this, it might be worth the bux to consult one.
So, you couldn't change your name to "Prince", for example?
The "title of nobility' prohibition is on the Federal government. (I'm not sure whether it has been "incorporated" against the States.) Legal name changes are a state issue, and interpreting the law in the absence of binding precedent is a judge's call, which may result in far more than fifty different venues to shop. So your mileage may vary.
As a non-native English speaker, I ask: is this an actual, socially acceptable name in English-speaking countries?
Unlike, say, French, American English does not have a ruling body. It's whatever the speakers of it chose to say.
That includes names. You can call your child or yourself anything you chose - as long as you do not do so to defraud.
(My wife's career was blighted by an abusive father - a professor - who solicited name suggestions from his students. Though she is native born and a native speaker of American English, she missed out on a lot of job interviews because HR droids thought, from the name he hung on her, that she was a new immigrant who would have communication problems.)
If you go through a legal name change you may run into issues with not being able to switch your name to something that amounts to a title of nobility (due to article 1 section 9 paragraph 8: No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: ..."). Immigration had a history of misapplying that to strip things like "von" from immigrants' names as they filled out their paperwork.
As for "socially acceptable", that depends on the prejudices of the particular social subgroups in question. Regardless of what they might think of neologisms labeling a person, any name from any established cultural group anywhere in the world is necessarily acceptable.
If Frank Zappa can name his son "Dweezil" and his daughter "Moon Unit", it's easy to see that anything goes. B-)
A subgroup of students made their own private group to share raunchy stuff, and to get in they decided you had to post rude crap in the official group.
Harvard had nothing to do with the second group, or it's rules about what you had to post..
Thanks. I misread TFA.
"students were required to post provocative memes in the bigger group before being allowed into the smaller one"
That sounds like entrapment.
Also like an assignment to post memes which would produce a reaction in the viewer ("provocative") but with which the students themselves didn't necessary agree.
The most provocative memes entering freshmen (with little social experience in the adult society) might be familiar with would be those that were offensive - perhaps even to themselves.
For one part of the school to demand they produce something like this, then another to use it to eject them as unsuitable for enrollment in the school, certainly looks like a sucker punch.
Perhaps Harvard wants only students who would rather fail an assignment than even mention a politically incorrect idea. If that's the case, then this action WOULD be legitimate.
But it should also be informative to anyone who would, from now on, consider hiring their graduates.
Because the US is a third world country.
Sorry, the US is still a first-world (NATO-aligned) country (although Trump might have changed that if the threat of the US dropping out hadn't caused the deadbeat members to start paying toward their share of the costs.)
Of course if you're using the evolved meaning of "poor, economically peripheral" or "mass of underpaid or unemployed serfs under the domination of a Fearless Leader and/or an elite", the US is on the track to that, by replacing the lower class workers with cheap, illegal, immigrant labor and the middle class workers with H1-B effectively indentured servants.
The modern countries on this planet provide health care instead of selling it.
Actually, obtaining necessities via a market incentivizing their production and competition creating redundancy and driving down prices IS the "modern country" approach, dating from "Adam Smith" a couple centuries back.
Having it provided to the serfs by the rulers is a legacy of noblesse oblige, where the royalty of Europe (and their predecessors), having confiscated all the wealth and productivity of the serfs, were obliged to provide them with enough health care to keep them healthy enough to keep producing more wealth. Just enough more to keep the nobles living "like kings" and able to hold off takeover of their serfs by their neighbors, of course. Not enough fo the serfs to live comfortably.
How can cities be a week from starvation when the human body can go for 3 weeks without food?
That's a different definition of "starvation" than I was using:
One week to the start of starvation (having no food avilable, the ongoing process). Four weeks to death by starvation.
Not that it matters all that much. With the power out the pumping and purification of water will also be interrupted. Death by thirst is much faster, and death by contaminated water (e.g. cholera) is not that much more prolonged.
Whenever the media pompously mention "capable of reaching the U.S.", what they mean is the Guam base.
ORLY?
I recall news items a year or more ago. As I recall their ICBMs were estimated at being able to hit the western 2/3s of the continental US, but hitting the east coast or Florida was a stretch. If they've improved the range (loaded with a nuke), or lightened the nuke, even moderately, look out DC.
From what I see now they're working (successfully) on reliability and accuracy.
Further: since they've gotten (at least) two payloads into low Earth orbit, they've go the whole globe underfoot.
And that's more of a worry for me (AND for the DOD). LEO is ideal for an enhanced EMP attack, using a small bomb optimized for gamma output (to smack the electrons in the upper atmosphere down a bunch, converting the bulk of the earthward-directed energy of the bomb into low frequency radio energy).
An EMP attack, with the current state of the power grid, could depower the east coast for a year or more. With the cities just a week or so from starvation without constant food shipments that could lead to a substantially more-than-half casualty rate.
Fixed it further.