Everyone needs normal health care, and a few will at some point require catastrophic care for an unusual condition. In the first case, there is no mutual benefit to spreading out the costs; all you've done is add overhead. In the second case, rationally-priced insurance should result in the same average cost for everyone, barring significant individual health risks.
Actually, that's not true. There are many ways of comparing free-market health care with government-provided health care, and in every case free-market health care costs more. One dramatic example is Canada, which spends about half what the U.S. does for about the same outcomes. http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/8/1
Selling health insurance to individuals has enormous administrative costs. If you look up the annual report of a health insurance company, you'll see that they have a "loss ratio" of no more than 85% -- which means they're spending 15 cents of your premium on administrative costs and profits. Your doctor gets the remaining 85 cents, and he has to spend another 15 cents on the administrative costs of dealing with the insurance companies. So your premium dollar only pays for 70 cents' worth of health care. (Actually it's even less.)
For reasons too complicated to go into here, people get worse health care when they have to pay for small medical expenses. "Normal" health care can be a $1,000 biopsy to see whether you have cancer. A lot of people can't afford $1,000. A lot of people can't afford $100 for a mammogram. Look up the Rand Health Insurance Experiment in Wikipedia.
95% of us can afford to pay healthcare, just as we pay for our new cars (times two)(times every five year) == $80,000 per decade. My doctor bills are only ~$2000 per decade in comparison. It is only when things get really bad, like cancer, that we need assistance and that's what catastrophic insurance is for... just like car insurance if we wreck.
We don't need the government to pay our hospital or doctor bills, unless we're so poor we need food stamps to survive. Then and only then should government pay the doctor bill. IMHO.
More like 80% of us can afford to pay for healthcare.
You say your doctor bills are ~$2,000 per decade. You obviously haven't had any expensive diseases. The way health care costs are structured, the costs go up with the incidence of disease. The incidence of disease increases exponentially with age, starting from age 12, and the incidence of fatal disease approaches 100% by about age 100.
So sure, the expenses for most people in their 20s and 30s are pretty low (except for the 1-2% who started out with chronic diseases like type 1 diabetes, or the 1-2% who get relatively rare diseases like leukemia, or the 1-2% who get into expensive accidents). The big expenses come when major illnesses become more common, in the 50s and 60s. In the 70s and 80s, people start to have multiple illnesses. The expenses of these major illnesses are pretty high. Once you get diabetes, the costs of treating the diabetes alone are about $10,000 a year. Multiple sclerosis and lupus, which people develop in their 30s and 40s, can cost $20-30,000 a year, and there are new drugs that cost $100,000 a year. Treating cancer can cost $50-100,000, plus a few thousand dollars a year for followup monitoring. The most common surgery for Medicare is knee replacement, which is about $50,000.
I know people in their 50s who are trying to get health insurance. Because of pre-existing conditions, the insurance companies would charge them $2,000 a month. Even relatively healthy 60-year-olds have a hard time getting insurance -- even if they've been paying insurance all their lives.
We're talking about engineering. Let's suppose you know something about science and engineering. What do they tell you in science? Look at the facts.
Look around the world. There is no other developed country that has a free-market health care system. It just doesn't work. They all have a much larger government involvement and a much smaller private involvement in their health care system than we do. We spend at least twice as much per capita as any other country, and they get the same outcomes or better. The country most like us culturally is Canada, and they spend about half as much as we do per capita.
The government can provide health care (of equal or better quality) for half what it costs you in the free market.
If you could buy health care in the U.S. at Canadian price, quality and service, it would be the most popular health plan in the U.S.
There's a joke about a guy who fell off a 40-story roof, and as he passed by the 20th floor, said, "I'm OK so far." When somebody in his 20s or 30s says his doctor bills are low, that's what he's doing.
Look up the following 2-part article if you get a chance:
Boring From Within the Bourgeois Press, Part 1, A. Kent MacDougall Monthly Review Volume 40, Number 7 (December 1988)
Boring From Within the Bourgeois Press, Part 2, A. Kent MacDougall Monthly Review Volume 40, Number 6 (November 1988)
MacDougal said that he was a socialist, he had no trouble writing for the WSJ if he followed the rules of writing an objective story with every statement backed up by facts, and he never heard of advertiser or political pressure to influence a story.
That's interesting. You could be right. Next time I'm in the library, I'll do a search for the 1996 election and see how they covered it. I assume you're referring to the news coverage, not the editorial page.
The reason I read the WSJ for so long is that on the issues I followed, they seemed to do a good job, compared to the other papers. In the 1970s, I used to work for an engineering organization that published auto safety studies. There was a big debate about whether to pass laws that would require auto manufacturers to install seat belts. It was a good test of science policy: there were 50,000 automobile deaths a year, and the evidence was clear from engineering studies that seat belts would have prevented about half those deaths. The automobile industry was also one of the largest newspaper advertisers, and that influenced the coverage in a lot of newspapers, including the New York Times. The WSJ had very good coverage, even though that meant they were often trashing their own advertisers. I had a file of articles from different newspapers, including the WSJ, and the pattern was clear to me. I also did a database search, and the same thing came up.
I've seen that pattern in a lot of other stories. They covered welfare reform right down the middle, and had stories that showed a lot of the conservative policies, like mandatory work requirements, weren't working. They had a lot of stories about people who got life-threatening illnesses and didn't have health insurance, and reported how the hospitals basically left them to die. In their coverage of Israel and the middle east, they reported quite critically on Israeli abuses while still getting praise for their fairness by Arabs and Jews. They had at least one story exposing an airline that the CIA used as a cover. It was textbook journalism, getting both sides.
The reason people read the WSJ was that they could find things in there that other newspapers wouldn't print, for fear of offending advertisers, or because of politics. You just didn't see things like this http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/business/media/14carr.html before Murdoch. I may be missing something, but that's what I saw in my daily reading of the WSJ. It clearly ended with Murdoch. They still have good stories, but I can no longer trust them to tell me everything they know.
If I were teaching a journalism course, I'd assign my students to look up the WSJ coverage on a particular topic in the archives, and see whether they covered it fairly and objectively. My reading was that the news stories were pretty good. If somebody came to a different conclusion, and documented it, I'd like to see it. I'll go with the facts.
The important thing about that story is that the WSJ has a documented history of objectivity and impartiality in its news pages. That's why everybody in power used to read them.
Murdoch and his editors changed several stories to favor the conservative side. That kind of favoritism is unprecedented in the WSJ.
The Republicans are different. They're tearing the country apart. News Corp. played a big destructive role.
He is a manager, and he involves himself deeply in his properties (like the Wall Street Journal). He's responsible for knowing what's going on. I expect him (and his editors) to be saying, "We're really getting these great scoops. I wonder how we're doing it?"
How can a newspaper editor not know that her reporters are illegally hacking phones?
Editors (and their lawyers) have to know where the information is coming from, for many reasons. They can get sued for libel. Their reporters could be making it up.
I don't watch Fox News enough to critique it, but (if you want facts) Murdoch clearly turned the Wall Street Journal from a respected, objective news source into a propaganda vehicle:
This is not a debate where there is some merit to both sides. News Corp. is right-wing propaganda. They're not just a right-wing version of NBC, CBS and the Washington Post.
The only people who defend News Corp. are right-wing wackos who don't know the difference between truth and propaganda.
They're not like other American news organizations. Murdoch orders his editors to distort the news to advance his political goals.
Fox News made "Fair and balanced" a cynical joke. It's like cigarette companies advertising that their cigarettes are healthy and doctors recommend them.
The worst thing Murdoch did is destroy the Wall Street Journal, which used to be the best newspaper in the world, respected by left and right:
A little over a year ago, Robert Thomson, The Journal’s top editor, picked Gerard Baker, a columnist for The Times of London, as his deputy managing editor. Mr. Baker is a former Washington bureau chief of The Financial Times with a great deal of expertise in the Beltway. The two men came of age in the more partisan milieu of British journalism.
According to several former members of the Washington bureau and two current ones, the two men have had a big impact on the paper’s Washington coverage, adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the current administration. And given that the paper’s circulation continues to grow, albeit helped along by some discounts, there’s nothing to suggest that The Journal’s readers don’t approve.
Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits — “health care reform” is a generally forbidden phrase — and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)
The pro-business, antigovernment shift in the news pages has broken into plain view in the last year. On Aug. 12, a fairly straight down the middle front page article on President Obama’s management style ended up with the provocative headline, “A President as Micromanager: How Much Detail Is Enough?” The original article included a contrast between President Jimmy Carter’s tendency to go deep in the weeds of every issue with President George W. Bush’s predilection for minimal involvement, according to someone who saw the draft. By the time the article ran, it included only the swipe at Mr. Carter.
On Aug. 27, a fairly straightforward obituary about Ted Kennedy for the Web site was subjected to a little political re-education on the way to the front page. A new paragraph was added quoting Rush Limbaugh deriding what he called all of the “slobbering media coverage,” and he also accused the recently deceased senator of being the kind of politician who “uses the government to take money from people who work and gives it to people who don’t work.”
On Oct. 31, an article on the front of the B section about estate taxes at the state level used the phrase “death tax” six times, but there were no quotation marks around it. A month later, the newspaper’s Style & Substance blog suggested that the adoption of such a loaded political term was probably not a good idea: “Because opponents of estate taxes have long referred to them as death taxes, the term should be avoided in news stories.”
You put the U.S. into such a panic about falling behind in science and technology that they funded my science education.
I couldn't have done it today. No more free tax-funded education. We have to go out and buy our education the free market. No more free tuition at City College. You have to be rich to study engineering in America now.
P.S. If anyone is following this discussion who is not an asshole, here's an article from the Village Voice about how the Fourth Amendment is routinely violated in New York City. In America, you can get arrested for sitting on your stoop, or stopping to talk to a friend on the sidewalk. (If you're black, anyway.)
Yes, I just included that in case somebody else brought it up. Even if it were a terrorist attack, and even if you ignore the fact that it was outside the U.S., the incidence would still be 1/10 million.
I live in New York City, where the cops have stretched "reasonable grounds for suspicion" to include anyone who is black. Black college students, teachers, other well-dressed professionals and even city council members complain that they are regularly stopped and searched, sometimes every week. I think there were half a million stops last year, most of them black. There are a million black males in NYC.
Of course they can't just say they stopped somebody because he's black, they have to give a reason. The usual reason is "furtive motion" or "suspicous bulge."
Actually, you're the asshole, but you won't know that until a cop slams you against the wall. I advise you to take the plea bargain and plead guilty; otherwise you'll go to jail for a long time. It's your word against the cops, and who's the jury going to believe?
So every time I'm coming back from the grocery store with a bag of Bisquick in open view, my Fourth Amendment right to be free from searches does not apply.
It is true that there have been a handful of cases around the world where somebody discovered dangerous levels of radioactivity because they passed through a geiger counter or other detection device that was designed to detect industrial radioactivity, usually at a nuclear facility. These are pretty well documented because nuclear safety agencies (the guys who actually do know what they're doing) are obsessive about tracking down accidents.
However, these traffic screening devices weren't designed for that. They were designed to catch terrorists, and they are abysmally bad at that. They detect harmlessly small levels of radiation. If they were widely adopted, cops would be stopping thousands of people every day on their way home from the doctor. And they would almost certainly never catch a terrorist.
The cops got their new toy and were detaining people on the Lexington Ave. subway that goes to the big academic medical centers on the upper east side of Manhattan. There were a few newspaper articles about it. Doctors were giving patients letters, etc. Same story. Haven't they learned by now?
"Reasonable Suspicion" would mean the Officer(s) was(were) guessing, but that CT State Cruiser was equipped with a "Radioactivity Scanner".
If ten million people every year get a radioactive isotope medical test capable of setting off that "radioactivity scanner", and none of them are engaging in illegal activity, then that doesn't sound like a reasonable suspicion of a crime.
In some hypothetical examples, it could be a crime, but in reality it has never been a crime. Reasonable?
(BTW, my objection is not on civil libertarian grounds, but on a waste of police resources.)
The only "probability" that must be satisfied is, "could a reasonable person reasonably SUSPECT that a crime may be in progress, may have occurred, or is about to occur." At that level, the police are well within their prerogative to stop you, ask you some questions to determine whether or not there's a "likelihood" a crime is being committed. "80% of people- this likelihood is known as "probable cause," which would give them grounds to arrest you, and charge you with a crime, and as I have said repeatedly, this is a *higher bar* than "reasonable suspicion."
In essence, reasonable suspicion gives the police grounds to investigate out of the ordinary events, which are - by their nature - suspicious. It does not require that "the fact present a 40% probability of not being a crime, and a 60% probability of being a crime."
Number of medical tests every year using enough radioactive tracers to trigger a radiation detector: ~10 million.
Number of terrorist attacks in the world involving radioactive material: ~1*
Given the huge frequency of radioactive medical tests (tens of thousands a day), when the cops get a reading like that, they can be 99.999999999999999% sure it's a medical isotope, and a crime has not been committed.
If Homeland Security tosses money around to buy radioactivity detectors, they can be 99.999999999999999% sure it's useless, it will never detect a terrorist, and it will cause cops to stop thousands of innocent people.
Don't those dicks in Homeland Security know basic physics? They seem to be evaluating their threats by watching Hollywood movies.
Actually, it's not artificial intelligence. It's cheap computers. Peter Norvig said that people were trying to write programs that would understand language, so they could translate it. It didn't work. At Google, they gave up on trying to understand the language, and figured out how to do it with brute-force algorithms. No need to understand what you're translating. http://www.stonetemple.com/search-algorithms-with-google-director-of-research-peter-norvig/
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone needs normal health care, and a few will at some point require catastrophic care for an unusual condition. In the first case, there is no mutual benefit to spreading out the costs; all you've done is add overhead. In the second case, rationally-priced insurance should result in the same average cost for everyone, barring significant individual health risks.
Actually, that's not true. There are many ways of comparing free-market health care with government-provided health care, and in every case free-market health care costs more. One dramatic example is Canada, which spends about half what the U.S. does for about the same outcomes. http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/8/1
Selling health insurance to individuals has enormous administrative costs. If you look up the annual report of a health insurance company, you'll see that they have a "loss ratio" of no more than 85% -- which means they're spending 15 cents of your premium on administrative costs and profits. Your doctor gets the remaining 85 cents, and he has to spend another 15 cents on the administrative costs of dealing with the insurance companies. So your premium dollar only pays for 70 cents' worth of health care. (Actually it's even less.)
For reasons too complicated to go into here, people get worse health care when they have to pay for small medical expenses. "Normal" health care can be a $1,000 biopsy to see whether you have cancer. A lot of people can't afford $1,000. A lot of people can't afford $100 for a mammogram. Look up the Rand Health Insurance Experiment in Wikipedia.
95% of us can afford to pay healthcare, just as we pay for our new cars (times two)(times every five year) == $80,000 per decade. My doctor bills are only ~$2000 per decade in comparison. It is only when things get really bad, like cancer, that we need assistance and that's what catastrophic insurance is for... just like car insurance if we wreck.
We don't need the government to pay our hospital or doctor bills, unless we're so poor we need food stamps to survive. Then and only then should government pay the doctor bill. IMHO.
More like 80% of us can afford to pay for healthcare.
You say your doctor bills are ~$2,000 per decade. You obviously haven't had any expensive diseases. The way health care costs are structured, the costs go up with the incidence of disease. The incidence of disease increases exponentially with age, starting from age 12, and the incidence of fatal disease approaches 100% by about age 100.
So sure, the expenses for most people in their 20s and 30s are pretty low (except for the 1-2% who started out with chronic diseases like type 1 diabetes, or the 1-2% who get relatively rare diseases like leukemia, or the 1-2% who get into expensive accidents). The big expenses come when major illnesses become more common, in the 50s and 60s. In the 70s and 80s, people start to have multiple illnesses. The expenses of these major illnesses are pretty high. Once you get diabetes, the costs of treating the diabetes alone are about $10,000 a year. Multiple sclerosis and lupus, which people develop in their 30s and 40s, can cost $20-30,000 a year, and there are new drugs that cost $100,000 a year. Treating cancer can cost $50-100,000, plus a few thousand dollars a year for followup monitoring. The most common surgery for Medicare is knee replacement, which is about $50,000.
I know people in their 50s who are trying to get health insurance. Because of pre-existing conditions, the insurance companies would charge them $2,000 a month. Even relatively healthy 60-year-olds have a hard time getting insurance -- even if they've been paying insurance all their lives.
We're talking about engineering. Let's suppose you know something about science and engineering. What do they tell you in science? Look at the facts.
Look around the world. There is no other developed country that has a free-market health care system. It just doesn't work. They all have a much larger government involvement and a much smaller private involvement in their health care system than we do. We spend at least twice as much per capita as any other country, and they get the same outcomes or better. The country most like us culturally is Canada, and they spend about half as much as we do per capita.
The government can provide health care (of equal or better quality) for half what it costs you in the free market.
If you could buy health care in the U.S. at Canadian price, quality and service, it would be the most popular health plan in the U.S.
There's a joke about a guy who fell off a 40-story roof, and as he passed by the 20th floor, said, "I'm OK so far." When somebody in his 20s or 30s says his doctor bills are low, that's what he's doing.
Look up the following 2-part article if you get a chance:
Boring From Within the Bourgeois Press, Part 1, A. Kent MacDougall
Monthly Review Volume 40, Number 7 (December 1988)
Boring From Within the Bourgeois Press, Part 2, A. Kent MacDougall
Monthly Review Volume 40, Number 6 (November 1988)
MacDougal said that he was a socialist, he had no trouble writing for the WSJ if he followed the rules of writing an objective story with every statement backed up by facts, and he never heard of advertiser or political pressure to influence a story.
That's interesting. You could be right. Next time I'm in the library, I'll do a search for the 1996 election and see how they covered it. I assume you're referring to the news coverage, not the editorial page.
The reason I read the WSJ for so long is that on the issues I followed, they seemed to do a good job, compared to the other papers. In the 1970s, I used to work for an engineering organization that published auto safety studies. There was a big debate about whether to pass laws that would require auto manufacturers to install seat belts. It was a good test of science policy: there were 50,000 automobile deaths a year, and the evidence was clear from engineering studies that seat belts would have prevented about half those deaths. The automobile industry was also one of the largest newspaper advertisers, and that influenced the coverage in a lot of newspapers, including the New York Times. The WSJ had very good coverage, even though that meant they were often trashing their own advertisers. I had a file of articles from different newspapers, including the WSJ, and the pattern was clear to me. I also did a database search, and the same thing came up.
I've seen that pattern in a lot of other stories. They covered welfare reform right down the middle, and had stories that showed a lot of the conservative policies, like mandatory work requirements, weren't working. They had a lot of stories about people who got life-threatening illnesses and didn't have health insurance, and reported how the hospitals basically left them to die. In their coverage of Israel and the middle east, they reported quite critically on Israeli abuses while still getting praise for their fairness by Arabs and Jews. They had at least one story exposing an airline that the CIA used as a cover. It was textbook journalism, getting both sides.
The reason people read the WSJ was that they could find things in there that other newspapers wouldn't print, for fear of offending advertisers, or because of politics. You just didn't see things like this http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/business/media/14carr.html before Murdoch. I may be missing something, but that's what I saw in my daily reading of the WSJ. It clearly ended with Murdoch. They still have good stories, but I can no longer trust them to tell me everything they know.
If I were teaching a journalism course, I'd assign my students to look up the WSJ coverage on a particular topic in the archives, and see whether they covered it fairly and objectively. My reading was that the news stories were pretty good. If somebody came to a different conclusion, and documented it, I'd like to see it. I'll go with the facts.
pot>kettle=You're all black
A common fallacy.
Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten."
http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3079:goodbye-to-all-that-reflections-of-a-gop-operative-who-left-the-cult
The important thing about that story is that the WSJ has a documented history of objectivity and impartiality in its news pages. That's why everybody in power used to read them.
Murdoch and his editors changed several stories to favor the conservative side. That kind of favoritism is unprecedented in the WSJ.
The Republicans are different. They're tearing the country apart. News Corp. played a big destructive role.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html
Barbara Stanwyck: “We’re both rotten!”
Fred MacMurray: “Yeah — only you’re a little more rotten.”
— “Double Indemnity” (1944)
http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3079:goodbye-to-all-that-reflections-of-a-gop-operative-who-left-the-cult
He is a manager, and he involves himself deeply in his properties (like the Wall Street Journal). He's responsible for knowing what's going on. I expect him (and his editors) to be saying, "We're really getting these great scoops. I wonder how we're doing it?"
How can a newspaper editor not know that her reporters are illegally hacking phones?
Editors (and their lawyers) have to know where the information is coming from, for many reasons. They can get sued for libel. Their reporters could be making it up.
I don't watch Fox News enough to critique it, but (if you want facts) Murdoch clearly turned the Wall Street Journal from a respected, objective news source into a propaganda vehicle:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/edward_m_kennedy/index.html?inline=nyt-per
This is not a debate where there is some merit to both sides. News Corp. is right-wing propaganda. They're not just a right-wing version of NBC, CBS and the Washington Post.
The only people who defend News Corp. are right-wing wackos who don't know the difference between truth and propaganda.
They're not like other American news organizations. Murdoch orders his editors to distort the news to advance his political goals.
Fox News made "Fair and balanced" a cynical joke. It's like cigarette companies advertising that their cigarettes are healthy and doctors recommend them.
The worst thing Murdoch did is destroy the Wall Street Journal, which used to be the best newspaper in the world, respected by left and right:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/business/media/14carr.html
Under Murdoch, Tilting Rightward at The Journal
By DAVID CARR
December 13, 2009
A little over a year ago, Robert Thomson, The Journal’s top editor, picked Gerard Baker, a columnist for The Times of London, as his deputy managing editor. Mr. Baker is a former Washington bureau chief of The Financial Times with a great deal of expertise in the Beltway. The two men came of age in the more partisan milieu of British journalism.
According to several former members of the Washington bureau and two current ones, the two men have had a big impact on the paper’s Washington coverage, adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the current administration. And given that the paper’s circulation continues to grow, albeit helped along by some discounts, there’s nothing to suggest that The Journal’s readers don’t approve.
Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits — “health care reform” is a generally forbidden phrase — and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)
The pro-business, antigovernment shift in the news pages has broken into plain view in the last year. On Aug. 12, a fairly straight down the middle front page article on President Obama’s management style ended up with the provocative headline, “A President as Micromanager: How Much Detail Is Enough?” The original article included a contrast between President Jimmy Carter’s tendency to go deep in the weeds of every issue with President George W. Bush’s predilection for minimal involvement, according to someone who saw the draft. By the time the article ran, it included only the swipe at Mr. Carter.
On Aug. 27, a fairly straightforward obituary about Ted Kennedy for the Web site was subjected to a little political re-education on the way to the front page. A new paragraph was added quoting Rush Limbaugh deriding what he called all of the “slobbering media coverage,” and he also accused the recently deceased senator of being the kind of politician who “uses the government to take money from people who work and gives it to people who don’t work.”
On Oct. 31, an article on the front of the B section about estate taxes at the state level used the phrase “death tax” six times, but there were no quotation marks around it. A month later, the newspaper’s Style & Substance blog suggested that the adoption of such a loaded political term was probably not a good idea: “Because opponents of estate taxes have long referred to them as death taxes, the term should be avoided in news stories.”
That's true too. I just mentioned it in case somebody said, "What about Litvinenko?"
In the US, the people elect the government.
Only the people with lots of money.
Thank you for Sputnik and Vostok.
You put the U.S. into such a panic about falling behind in science and technology that they funded my science education.
I couldn't have done it today. No more free tax-funded education. We have to go out and buy our education the free market. No more free tuition at City College. You have to be rich to study engineering in America now.
P.S. If anyone is following this discussion who is not an asshole, here's an article from the Village Voice about how the Fourth Amendment is routinely violated in New York City. In America, you can get arrested for sitting on your stoop, or stopping to talk to a friend on the sidewalk. (If you're black, anyway.)
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/1808402/
The NYPD Tapes, Part 2
Bed-Stuy street cops ordered: Turn this place into a ghost town
By Graham Rayman
published: May 11, 2010
Yes, I just included that in case somebody else brought it up. Even if it were a terrorist attack, and even if you ignore the fact that it was outside the U.S., the incidence would still be 1/10 million.
I live in New York City, where the cops have stretched "reasonable grounds for suspicion" to include anyone who is black. Black college students, teachers, other well-dressed professionals and even city council members complain that they are regularly stopped and searched, sometimes every week. I think there were half a million stops last year, most of them black. There are a million black males in NYC.
Of course they can't just say they stopped somebody because he's black, they have to give a reason. The usual reason is "furtive motion" or "suspicous bulge."
Actually, you're the asshole, but you won't know that until a cop slams you against the wall. I advise you to take the plea bargain and plead guilty; otherwise you'll go to jail for a long time. It's your word against the cops, and who's the jury going to believe?
So every time I'm coming back from the grocery store with a bag of Bisquick in open view, my Fourth Amendment right to be free from searches does not apply.
It is true that there have been a handful of cases around the world where somebody discovered dangerous levels of radioactivity because they passed through a geiger counter or other detection device that was designed to detect industrial radioactivity, usually at a nuclear facility. These are pretty well documented because nuclear safety agencies (the guys who actually do know what they're doing) are obsessive about tracking down accidents.
However, these traffic screening devices weren't designed for that. They were designed to catch terrorists, and they are abysmally bad at that. They detect harmlessly small levels of radiation. If they were widely adopted, cops would be stopping thousands of people every day on their way home from the doctor. And they would almost certainly never catch a terrorist.
They were doing it in New York several years ago.
The cops got their new toy and were detaining people on the Lexington Ave. subway that goes to the big academic medical centers on the upper east side of Manhattan. There were a few newspaper articles about it. Doctors were giving patients letters, etc. Same story. Haven't they learned by now?
The colossal waste of money is
(1) not just the radiation detectors, but the equally stupid things Homeland (cost is no object) Security is paying for
(2) The irrational approach that Homeland Security is taking to security, which means that they're not even protecting us from terrorism
"Reasonable Suspicion" would mean the Officer(s) was(were) guessing, but that CT State Cruiser was equipped with a "Radioactivity Scanner".
If ten million people every year get a radioactive isotope medical test capable of setting off that "radioactivity scanner", and none of them are engaging in illegal activity, then that doesn't sound like a reasonable suspicion of a crime.
In some hypothetical examples, it could be a crime, but in reality it has never been a crime. Reasonable?
(BTW, my objection is not on civil libertarian grounds, but on a waste of police resources.)
The only "probability" that must be satisfied is, "could a reasonable person reasonably SUSPECT that a crime may be in progress, may have occurred, or is about to occur." At that level, the police are well within their prerogative to stop you, ask you some questions to determine whether or not there's a "likelihood" a crime is being committed. "80% of people- this likelihood is known as "probable cause," which would give them grounds to arrest you, and charge you with a crime, and as I have said repeatedly, this is a *higher bar* than "reasonable suspicion."
In essence, reasonable suspicion gives the police grounds to investigate out of the ordinary events, which are - by their nature - suspicious. It does not require that "the fact present a 40% probability of not being a crime, and a 60% probability of being a crime."
Number of medical tests every year using enough radioactive tracers to trigger a radiation detector: ~10 million.
Number of terrorist attacks in the world involving radioactive material: ~1*
You think 1/10 million is a reasonable suspicion?
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko
Since most people transporting radioactive materials do so in properly shielded, marked, and placarded vehicles,
Millions of people every year get medical tests with radioactive tracers and don't transport themselves with shielded, marked or placarded vehicles.
Given the huge frequency of radioactive medical tests (tens of thousands a day), when the cops get a reading like that, they can be 99.999999999999999% sure it's a medical isotope, and a crime has not been committed.
If Homeland Security tosses money around to buy radioactivity detectors, they can be 99.999999999999999% sure it's useless, it will never detect a terrorist, and it will cause cops to stop thousands of innocent people.
Don't those dicks in Homeland Security know basic physics? They seem to be evaluating their threats by watching Hollywood movies.
So you think it would be a good police procedure to detain everyone carrying a bag of white powder?
Actually, it's not artificial intelligence. It's cheap computers. Peter Norvig said that people were trying to write programs that would understand language, so they could translate it. It didn't work. At Google, they gave up on trying to understand the language, and figured out how to do it with brute-force algorithms. No need to understand what you're translating. http://www.stonetemple.com/search-algorithms-with-google-director-of-research-peter-norvig/
Most of what you read is nonsense anyway. http://norvig.com/reporters-and-parrots.html