That was an outlawing, this article is discussing an excessive consumption tax. If this argument/approach works for food/cigarettes then it will also work for alcohol. ( Alcohol has more societal cost than obesity. )
No, the article doesn't talk about a consumption tax, the first post talks about a consumption tax.
The Arizona plan was to make people on charity health care (Medicaid) pay a $50 penalty for being obese or smoking cigarettes.
As any doctor will tell you, there are no effective treatments for obesity or smoking. Roughly 10% of patients will lose 10% of their weight and keep it off for 1 year, and roughly 10% of patients will stop smoking and not start again after 1 year.
I heard lectures by doctors who said that overweight people want to lose weight and can't; smokers want to stop and can't. it's a disease and we shouldn't humiliate them about it. Governor Brewer wants to humiliate them. She also wants to have an excuse to cut them off of Medicaid.
People would have to see a doctor, who would weigh them and give them a (medically unnecessary) blood test to see whether they were smoking cigarettes. It's not clear how it would work, but either they would have to pay a penalty of $50 for being overweight or smoking cigarettes, or else a doctor could certify that they were in a program to lose weight or stop smoking.
One of the problems is that people on Medicaid are so poor, that they don't have $50 to spare.
Another problem is that nutritious diets are significantly more expensive.
This is a public relations stunt. The purpose is to humiliate people on Medicaid, punish them for medical conditions that are beyond their control, and generally make Medicaid so unpleasant that they won't sign up for it.
It's also racist. A disproportionate number of overweight people are black and hispanic. If you read the Wall Street Journal comments sections, you'd see people openly complaining about black and hispanic people on welfare.
I'm English, we have a ( far from perfect ) National Health System ( NHS ). To me it seems barbaric that a citizen of a society would be seriously ill/die because they don't have money to access available treatments.
Well, yeah. Gov. Brewer is a conservative Republican. They're barbaric. The conservative Democrats are pretty barbaric too.
I've never seen a broadly-accepted definition of junk food. People do use it to mean "food I don't like."
Does the calorie count dwarf other redeeming features for butter? That's a matter of opinion. I think most academic nutritionists would say that a limited amount of butter is healthy. How about nuts?
Marion Nestle said you can't isolate any one food; you can only look at entire diets.
The Atkins diet discourages grains, whole or otherwise, and allows a lot of meat protein and fat. The Atkins diet has been demonstrated effective in randomized, controlled trials published in JAMA.
There are a lot of public health people who think that the transition to agriculture ~10,000 years ago replaced one set of diseases with a different set of diseases.
There's actually very little scientific evidence on what foods are "healthy" compared to others. Using the low-quality suggestive evidence that we have, one diet may be associated with an increase in one disease and a reduction in another disease. There's also not much scientific evidence about what "moderation" is.
Finally, there are a lot of genetic variations among populations. A cardiologist told me that if you don't have a genetic predisposition to blocking of the coronary arteries -- that is, if at the age of 50 your arteries show no signs of blockage -- you can have a cheeseburger, french fries and pie a la mode for dessert, and it wouldn't increase your chances of heart disease.
The free-market economic model misses the point. They're not in the business *just* to make money.
The NYT is run by journalists. They *want* people to read their stories.
Especially when they've worked for months on a big important expose that can demonstrate that they're not (always) craven apologists for power and wealth.
They still take pride in the Pentagon Papers. They went to the fucking Supreme Court with that and won. (Today with the Republican Supreme Court, they probably would have lost.)
Sure, they want to make money. They want to pay for their huge staff of journalists all over the world, they want to pay editors enough to live in Manhattan, they want to hire new people to play with the Internet, they want to be able to pick up and fly to Japan, they want to pay for amazingly expensive bureaus in war zones.
At the executive and star-reporter level, they're also used to a certain luxury that the rest of us may not be that familiar with.
But when you look at the way they've run the newspaper, they haven't maximized their income. The Sulzberger family didn't sell out to Rupert Murdoch for the highest bid the way the Wall Street Journal's Bancroft family did.
And they do a pretty good job, about half the time. Yeah, they bought the whole Iraq war scam (although there were reporters whose stories wound up buried in the middle of the paper who told you what was really going on if you looked for it). Yeah, they grovel before wealth, power and advertisers a lot of the time. But they also exposed the Chinese pharmaceutical industry, a lot of worker safety outrages, the CIA's overthrow of half a dozen democratic governments (usually too late to do anything about it, but whatever). They exposed Giuliani's lies some of the time. They do a pretty good job of covering welfare and education. They gave a good job to a few reporters for a few years who pushed the limits and finally left. Take a look at the NYT reporters and ex-reporters who appear on http://www.democracynow.org./
Anyway, who does a better job?
But the point is that these are people who want people to read their stories, as many people as possible. If they can get more people to read the paper for a little less money, they'll do it. If they can leave a back door open for people to get in around the paywall, it doesn't bother them too much.
"Socially productive" is a decision that everyone has to make for himself.
It's not just me who thinks that this patent troll is socially unproductive. It's the patients with asthma and other diseases that are controlled by colchicine, and the doctors who treat them. The company did no research, but just collected papers of studies that other people had done, years ago, and got a handout from the federal government in the form of the right to charge people 100 times more than they had been paying. Yes, that's socially unproductive. If you think it out, you should come to the same conclusion.
You're trying to substitute the marketplace for the hard work of thinking and deciding whether something is socially productive. The market works some of the time, maybe most of the time, for certain purposes, but it's not identical to what most people would call a social good.
The asbestos companies found out that asbestos was causing lung cancer and other diseases in workers who were exposed to it, and sometimes even innocent bystanders, like children in schools with asbestos insulation. Yet, the asbestos companies concealed this information, and when other people tried to inform the world about it, the asbestos companies denied it and tried to deceptively prove that they were wrong. This went on for years, and they didn't get caught until long after the people originally responsible for it had retired. They were willing to let people die of cancer because selling asbestos was profitable -- on the free market.
So there's a case in which the market mechanism rewards people who are not socially productive.
OK, I accept that, especially the part about working 100 hours a week to help a company raise enough capital to avoid going bankrupt.
However.
It depends on what the company is doing. If they're developing a new drug to alleviate suffering, fine. But if they're patent trolls who are gaming the system to figure out a way to sell needed drugs for 100 times their cost http://www.arthritistoday.org/news/colchicine-gout-drug-price053.php not so fine.
What percentage of the companies financed by Wall Street are actually producing something socially productive, and what percentage are just manipulating the system and grabbing a percentage for themselves? I honestly don't know, but sometimes the percentage of manipulators seems to be awfully high.
And the more you get into financial instruments and stuff, the less I can follow it. I do know about mortgage default swaps. Sometimes it seems that the more socially harmful it is, the more profitable it is.
Put all the little investment projects together and you get a system that may or may not be doing good for society in the long run.
And of course, the industry protects itself from government oversight and regulation, and even criticism, by huge campaign contributions to politicians. Hell, many of them are ex-politicians.
Yeah, I know left-leaning people who work for the military, usually because they wound up there at some point years ago and made a commitment. They thought they could do some good, then George W. Bush got elected.
But. Human beings are evolved to work together in groups to accomplish goals together. They get great satisfaction from doing that. The military does that in a big way.
However, it makes a difference what the goal is. It's one thing to protect your country during WWII. It's something else again to do what Smedley Butler described, which is overthrow elected governments and replace them with dictators in order to let American corporations get rich.
The war in Iraq killed 150,000 (if you believe the New England Journal of Medicine) to 600,000 people (if you believe the Lancet). That's a lot of tragedy. Do you feel sorry for those soldiers coming back crippled from IEDs? There were probably a million Iraqis with similar injuries, who will have to struggle without the benefits of artificial limbs, rehabilitation and disability pay. We destroyed one of the most developed countries in the middle east, and turned it into a battleground for al Qaeda. We attacked Iraq with the excuse of weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be a lie.
You know all of this. You've obviously reconciled yourself to it. I don't tell my friends to quit the military. It's their decision. Military medicine is less directly responsible for the evil ends than other branches, and easier for me to accept.
But I wouldn't want to support these political ends of the military myself. And I wouldn't like to see my friends do that either.
The Bush Administration was unusually aggressive in politically-motivated prosecutions, and the clearest example was the prosecution of Don Siegelman, the former Democratic Alabama governor. The prosecution of Eliot Spitzer, the former Democratic New York governor, was another example of selective prosecution by Republican prosecutors.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't rattle off the details, but Glen Greenwald is, and he's described the reasons why the people responsible for the savings and loan crisis were guilty of fraud and other criminal activity, and they weren't prosecuted.
The simplest example I know of selective prosecution under the Bush Administration was the Abu Grarib prosecutions, http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/11/military_prosecution_in_abu_ghraib_scandal_ends/ where they prosecuted the lower-ranking soldiers who followed orders, but didn't prosecute the officers responsible. Graner wanted to testify that officers had ordered him to do everything he was charged with, and they knew about it, but the judge wouldn't permit it and the prosecutors ignored it.
The Obama Administration continued to refuse to investigate or prosecute these felonies.
An inclined plane is a pretty good way to slow things down. If you need to rewind it, put the ball on top of the inclined plane again.
There's a major benefit of an actual ball and inclined plane over a video of it.
You *know* the ball is going to follow the laws of physics, whatever they are.
When you watch a simulation, you don't know whether the simulation is right or not. You're not learning from the real world any more, you're learning from models and calculations. You're like the anti-vivisectionist girl who wanted to dissect a computer model of a frog, rather than a real frog.
BTW, one of the things I learned about science teaching is that young kids can't understand abstract ideas that well. They can understand things that they do hands-on, but when you send data into a computer and bring it out again, it's just a black box.
Even younger high school kids don't understand the concept of molecules. You can teach them about hydrogen and oxygen, but they're just learning by rote.
If you want to teach them about hydrogen, fill up a balloon and touch a match to it. Show me a video that can make an impression like that.
If you want an introduction to mechanics and astronomy, to the scientific method, and the experimental method, the 16th century, with 16th century techniques, is a pretty good place to start.
Objects were falling too fast for Galileo to measure the speed, so he rolled them down an inclined plane to slow them down. Genius.
The Shiites can't live in the Suni neighborhoods, and vice versa. If they don't leave, they get killed (that's why so many of the doctors left for Syria).
So people can't live in their own homes because they're the wrong religion, and they have to leave or the militia will kill them.
That's your idea of freedom.
Did it ever occur to you that some people might not want to be driven out of their homes under threat of death?
Where did you read that? Read it more carefully. "Citizens" can be almost anybody. Ghadaffi is also a citizen, and so are the people who are supporting him.
Gaddafi is a big enough problem that I think a blind reroll of the dice would give good odds for the next government even if it doesn't turn out to be secular.
Ah, yes, the argument from ignorance. We don't know what's going to happen, so let's do it.
Putting aside the 150,000 to 600,000 Iraqis killed, do you think anyone is better off as a result of the Iraq invasion?
The Iraqis are.
Iraq had the best health care system in the middle east. Saddam, for all his faults, sent doctors to study in England and elsewhere, and people came from around the Arab world to be treated. That's all gone now. Doctors and their families were getting kidnapped, so they left.
According to the Washington Post, the Bush Administration appointed a free-market campaign contributor from the right-to-life movement to run the health care system (replacing an administrator who had actually managed war zone hospitals for the U.N.). Bush's appointee replaced the pharmaceutical delivery system with a market-based approach. Result: The hospitals couldn't get drugs any more.
You think the Iraqis are better off without health care?
(1) The FT article is behind a paywall, and I don't subscribe to the FT.
(2) The Andrew Sullivan blog you linked to doesn't tell who the rebels are either, it just links to another blog, which links to a PDF study. After 10 minutes of following that link, it seems that the authors suggest that the rebels are allies of al Qaeda. That doesn't sound like it would serve the interests of the U.S. to support them.
But generally, I'm not a foreign policy wonk, and I don't spend my time googling every issue. I just asked a reasonable question, and I was hoping for a reasonable answer, which you didn't give.
You don't have any respect for me, I don't have any respect for you. We're even.
Do you really think that Obama sends messages to everyone of the thousands of federal judges -- many of whom were appointed by Bush, and all of whom have lifetime jobs -- about every case that they hear?
No, I think Obama sends messages to federal prosecutors, who are appointed, and who decide whether to prosecute.
Federal judges don't have anything to do with the initial decision to prosecute.
Those are the total contributions by people who listed the U.S. Army or the Department of Defense as their employers. Soldiers have a right to contribute to political candidates.
making everyone supporting a political cause with money suspect.
I suspect that some people support political candidates as a quid pro quo for government favors in return. In some cases, like military contractors, it seems obvious. Their PAC contributes to the Democratic candidate, and to the Republican running against him. What's their motivation? Once in the while politicians go to jail when they get caught on tape admitting it.
But putting straightforward quid pro quo aside, the problem is with the system that requires politicians to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, from the very people they're supposed to regulate, before they can even run for office. Obama raised $1 billion, overwhelmingly from big business PACS and millionaires -- mostly from the same campaign contributors who fund the Republicans, who were hedging their bets.
If you want to run for president on policies that are popular with the voters, and you can't raise $1 billion for a campaign, as Obama did, then you can't get elected.
Of course you could be of the opinion that supporting a political cause with money is a bad thing for exactly that reason, but believing that would stop everyone from doing it would be no less naïve...
Yes, I believe that having elections in which candidates must raise hundreds of millions of dollars is a bad thing. I realize that under the Republican Supreme Court, we're unlikely to stop it.
Gaddafi has set the bar so very low here. I doubt myself that any democracy would result, it'd probably be some sort of reshuffling of power with other clans than the two that Gaddafi favors or perhaps even a balkanization of Libya.
So we've gone from "almost certainly" to doubtful that a democracy will result.
What reason do we have to think that a reshuffling of the clans would be any better for the people of Libyia, either for the people of Libya itself, or for our interests?
Gaddafi was at least secular. How do you know that he won't be replaced by an Islamist, which is what happened in Iraq?
How do you know that al-Qaeda won't move in, which is what happened in Iraq?
How do you know that they won't have anarchy, with warring tribes of different sects exterminating each other's sect, which is what happened in Iraq?
Putting aside the 150,000 to 600,000 Iraqis killed, do you think anyone is better off as a result of the Iraq invasion?
People who want military assistance from other countries are adept at telling those countries what they want to hear. (Sometimes they hire Western PR firms to prime them on what to say, as the Kuwatis did in the runup to the first Iraq war.)
If western countries want to hear that rebels are fighting for "democracy," then the rebels will say they're fighting for democracy.
That doesn't mean that they really are fighting for democracy, or that they even know what democracy is. They're just telling you what you want to hear, like any salesman.
But I didn't even see a rebel quoted in the newspapers saying he *wants* democracy. I can't find any issues.
You still haven't answered my question. Once again, who are these rebels, and what reason do you have to think they won't be as brutal as Ghadaffi?
When the hell did the left pick up this crazy interventionism?
If you consider Obama to be on the "left," then you don't have any idea of what the left is about in this country.
Or if you consider Kennedy and Johnson, who got us bogged down in the Vietnam war, to be on the "left," then you don't have any idea of what the left was about for the last 50 years.
Slashdot Mirror
That was an outlawing, this article is discussing an excessive consumption tax. If this argument/approach works for food/cigarettes then it will also work for alcohol. ( Alcohol has more societal cost than obesity. )
No, the article doesn't talk about a consumption tax, the first post talks about a consumption tax.
The Arizona plan was to make people on charity health care (Medicaid) pay a $50 penalty for being obese or smoking cigarettes.
As any doctor will tell you, there are no effective treatments for obesity or smoking. Roughly 10% of patients will lose 10% of their weight and keep it off for 1 year, and roughly 10% of patients will stop smoking and not start again after 1 year.
I heard lectures by doctors who said that overweight people want to lose weight and can't; smokers want to stop and can't. it's a disease and we shouldn't humiliate them about it. Governor Brewer wants to humiliate them. She also wants to have an excuse to cut them off of Medicaid.
People would have to see a doctor, who would weigh them and give them a (medically unnecessary) blood test to see whether they were smoking cigarettes. It's not clear how it would work, but either they would have to pay a penalty of $50 for being overweight or smoking cigarettes, or else a doctor could certify that they were in a program to lose weight or stop smoking.
One of the problems is that people on Medicaid are so poor, that they don't have $50 to spare.
Another problem is that nutritious diets are significantly more expensive.
This is a public relations stunt. The purpose is to humiliate people on Medicaid, punish them for medical conditions that are beyond their control, and generally make Medicaid so unpleasant that they won't sign up for it.
It's also racist. A disproportionate number of overweight people are black and hispanic. If you read the Wall Street Journal comments sections, you'd see people openly complaining about black and hispanic people on welfare.
I'm English, we have a ( far from perfect ) National Health System ( NHS ). To me it seems barbaric that a citizen of a society would be seriously ill/die because they don't have money to access available treatments.
Well, yeah. Gov. Brewer is a conservative Republican. They're barbaric. The conservative Democrats are pretty barbaric too.
I've never seen a broadly-accepted definition of junk food. People do use it to mean "food I don't like."
Does the calorie count dwarf other redeeming features for butter? That's a matter of opinion. I think most academic nutritionists would say that a limited amount of butter is healthy. How about nuts?
Marion Nestle said you can't isolate any one food; you can only look at entire diets.
Not true.
The Atkins diet discourages grains, whole or otherwise, and allows a lot of meat protein and fat. The Atkins diet has been demonstrated effective in randomized, controlled trials published in JAMA.
There are a lot of public health people who think that the transition to agriculture ~10,000 years ago replaced one set of diseases with a different set of diseases.
There's actually very little scientific evidence on what foods are "healthy" compared to others. Using the low-quality suggestive evidence that we have, one diet may be associated with an increase in one disease and a reduction in another disease. There's also not much scientific evidence about what "moderation" is.
Finally, there are a lot of genetic variations among populations. A cardiologist told me that if you don't have a genetic predisposition to blocking of the coronary arteries -- that is, if at the age of 50 your arteries show no signs of blockage -- you can have a cheeseburger, french fries and pie a la mode for dessert, and it wouldn't increase your chances of heart disease.
In fact, Larry once sued his own mother, no really: http://www.slate.com/id/2317/
That's an informative story. The guy's completely crazy. No one would take him seriously.
Uh, except maybe Fox News.
I realize it's hard to tell, but it is on Freedom Watch's web site.
http://www.freedomwatchusa.org/
It's a strange-looking filing.
http://www.freedomwatchusa.org/pdf/110331-Fbook-Complaint.pdf
It doesn't have a stamp from the court, it doesn't have a filing number, and it doesn't cite any statutes or court cases. He says he's filing pro se.
Doesn't look very serious.
The free-market economic model misses the point. They're not in the business *just* to make money.
The NYT is run by journalists. They *want* people to read their stories.
Especially when they've worked for months on a big important expose that can demonstrate that they're not (always) craven apologists for power and wealth.
They still take pride in the Pentagon Papers. They went to the fucking Supreme Court with that and won. (Today with the Republican Supreme Court, they probably would have lost.)
Sure, they want to make money. They want to pay for their huge staff of journalists all over the world, they want to pay editors enough to live in Manhattan, they want to hire new people to play with the Internet, they want to be able to pick up and fly to Japan, they want to pay for amazingly expensive bureaus in war zones.
At the executive and star-reporter level, they're also used to a certain luxury that the rest of us may not be that familiar with.
But when you look at the way they've run the newspaper, they haven't maximized their income. The Sulzberger family didn't sell out to Rupert Murdoch for the highest bid the way the Wall Street Journal's Bancroft family did.
And they do a pretty good job, about half the time. Yeah, they bought the whole Iraq war scam (although there were reporters whose stories wound up buried in the middle of the paper who told you what was really going on if you looked for it). Yeah, they grovel before wealth, power and advertisers a lot of the time. But they also exposed the Chinese pharmaceutical industry, a lot of worker safety outrages, the CIA's overthrow of half a dozen democratic governments (usually too late to do anything about it, but whatever). They exposed Giuliani's lies some of the time. They do a pretty good job of covering welfare and education. They gave a good job to a few reporters for a few years who pushed the limits and finally left. Take a look at the NYT reporters and ex-reporters who appear on http://www.democracynow.org./
Anyway, who does a better job?
But the point is that these are people who want people to read their stories, as many people as possible. If they can get more people to read the paper for a little less money, they'll do it. If they can leave a back door open for people to get in around the paywall, it doesn't bother them too much.
"Socially productive" is a decision that everyone has to make for himself.
It's not just me who thinks that this patent troll is socially unproductive. It's the patients with asthma and other diseases that are controlled by colchicine, and the doctors who treat them. The company did no research, but just collected papers of studies that other people had done, years ago, and got a handout from the federal government in the form of the right to charge people 100 times more than they had been paying. Yes, that's socially unproductive. If you think it out, you should come to the same conclusion.
You're trying to substitute the marketplace for the hard work of thinking and deciding whether something is socially productive. The market works some of the time, maybe most of the time, for certain purposes, but it's not identical to what most people would call a social good.
The asbestos companies found out that asbestos was causing lung cancer and other diseases in workers who were exposed to it, and sometimes even innocent bystanders, like children in schools with asbestos insulation. Yet, the asbestos companies concealed this information, and when other people tried to inform the world about it, the asbestos companies denied it and tried to deceptively prove that they were wrong. This went on for years, and they didn't get caught until long after the people originally responsible for it had retired. They were willing to let people die of cancer because selling asbestos was profitable -- on the free market.
So there's a case in which the market mechanism rewards people who are not socially productive.
OK, I accept that, especially the part about working 100 hours a week to help a company raise enough capital to avoid going bankrupt.
However.
It depends on what the company is doing. If they're developing a new drug to alleviate suffering, fine. But if they're patent trolls who are gaming the system to figure out a way to sell needed drugs for 100 times their cost http://www.arthritistoday.org/news/colchicine-gout-drug-price053.php not so fine.
What percentage of the companies financed by Wall Street are actually producing something socially productive, and what percentage are just manipulating the system and grabbing a percentage for themselves? I honestly don't know, but sometimes the percentage of manipulators seems to be awfully high.
And the more you get into financial instruments and stuff, the less I can follow it. I do know about mortgage default swaps. Sometimes it seems that the more socially harmful it is, the more profitable it is.
Put all the little investment projects together and you get a system that may or may not be doing good for society in the long run.
And of course, the industry protects itself from government oversight and regulation, and even criticism, by huge campaign contributions to politicians. Hell, many of them are ex-politicians.
Yeah, I know left-leaning people who work for the military, usually because they wound up there at some point years ago and made a commitment. They thought they could do some good, then George W. Bush got elected.
But. Human beings are evolved to work together in groups to accomplish goals together. They get great satisfaction from doing that. The military does that in a big way.
However, it makes a difference what the goal is. It's one thing to protect your country during WWII. It's something else again to do what Smedley Butler described, which is overthrow elected governments and replace them with dictators in order to let American corporations get rich.
The war in Iraq killed 150,000 (if you believe the New England Journal of Medicine) to 600,000 people (if you believe the Lancet). That's a lot of tragedy. Do you feel sorry for those soldiers coming back crippled from IEDs? There were probably a million Iraqis with similar injuries, who will have to struggle without the benefits of artificial limbs, rehabilitation and disability pay. We destroyed one of the most developed countries in the middle east, and turned it into a battleground for al Qaeda. We attacked Iraq with the excuse of weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be a lie.
You know all of this. You've obviously reconciled yourself to it. I don't tell my friends to quit the military. It's their decision. Military medicine is less directly responsible for the evil ends than other branches, and easier for me to accept.
But I wouldn't want to support these political ends of the military myself. And I wouldn't like to see my friends do that either.
The Bush Administration was unusually aggressive in politically-motivated prosecutions, and the clearest example was the prosecution of Don Siegelman, the former Democratic Alabama governor. The prosecution of Eliot Spitzer, the former Democratic New York governor, was another example of selective prosecution by Republican prosecutors.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't rattle off the details, but Glen Greenwald is, and he's described the reasons why the people responsible for the savings and loan crisis were guilty of fraud and other criminal activity, and they weren't prosecuted.
The simplest example I know of selective prosecution under the Bush Administration was the Abu Grarib prosecutions, http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/11/military_prosecution_in_abu_ghraib_scandal_ends/ where they prosecuted the lower-ranking soldiers who followed orders, but didn't prosecute the officers responsible. Graner wanted to testify that officers had ordered him to do everything he was charged with, and they knew about it, but the judge wouldn't permit it and the prosecutors ignored it.
The Obama Administration continued to refuse to investigate or prosecute these felonies.
An inclined plane is a pretty good way to slow things down. If you need to rewind it, put the ball on top of the inclined plane again.
There's a major benefit of an actual ball and inclined plane over a video of it.
You *know* the ball is going to follow the laws of physics, whatever they are.
When you watch a simulation, you don't know whether the simulation is right or not. You're not learning from the real world any more, you're learning from models and calculations. You're like the anti-vivisectionist girl who wanted to dissect a computer model of a frog, rather than a real frog.
BTW, one of the things I learned about science teaching is that young kids can't understand abstract ideas that well. They can understand things that they do hands-on, but when you send data into a computer and bring it out again, it's just a black box.
Even younger high school kids don't understand the concept of molecules. You can teach them about hydrogen and oxygen, but they're just learning by rote.
If you want to teach them about hydrogen, fill up a balloon and touch a match to it. Show me a video that can make an impression like that.
If you want an introduction to mechanics and astronomy, to the scientific method, and the experimental method, the 16th century, with 16th century techniques, is a pretty good place to start.
Objects were falling too fast for Galileo to measure the speed, so he rolled them down an inclined plane to slow them down. Genius.
And he did it all without even an 8086 chip.
Build a gravity accelerated race track, film the cars, and analyze using free video analysis software.
Galileo did it with inclined planes, without video, and without video analysis software. How does the video and software make it any better?
The Shiites can't live in the Suni neighborhoods, and vice versa. If they don't leave, they get killed (that's why so many of the doctors left for Syria).
So people can't live in their own homes because they're the wrong religion, and they have to leave or the militia will kill them.
That's your idea of freedom.
Did it ever occur to you that some people might not want to be driven out of their homes under threat of death?
Where did you read that? Read it more carefully. "Citizens" can be almost anybody. Ghadaffi is also a citizen, and so are the people who are supporting him.
This article argues that the rebels are supporters of Al Qaeda. http://www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony/pdf/CTCForeignFighter.19.Dec07.pdf Is that true?
Are we just setting up al Quaeda in Libya, just as we set up the Taliban in Afghanistan?
Gaddafi is a big enough problem that I think a blind reroll of the dice would give good odds for the next government even if it doesn't turn out to be secular.
Ah, yes, the argument from ignorance. We don't know what's going to happen, so let's do it.
Putting aside the 150,000 to 600,000 Iraqis killed, do you think anyone is better off as a result of the Iraq invasion?
The Iraqis are.
Iraq had the best health care system in the middle east. Saddam, for all his faults, sent doctors to study in England and elsewhere, and people came from around the Arab world to be treated. That's all gone now. Doctors and their families were getting kidnapped, so they left.
According to the Washington Post, the Bush Administration appointed a free-market campaign contributor from the right-to-life movement to run the health care system (replacing an administrator who had actually managed war zone hospitals for the U.N.). Bush's appointee replaced the pharmaceutical delivery system with a market-based approach. Result: The hospitals couldn't get drugs any more.
You think the Iraqis are better off without health care?
(1) The FT article is behind a paywall, and I don't subscribe to the FT.
(2) The Andrew Sullivan blog you linked to doesn't tell who the rebels are either, it just links to another blog, which links to a PDF study. After 10 minutes of following that link, it seems that the authors suggest that the rebels are allies of al Qaeda. That doesn't sound like it would serve the interests of the U.S. to support them.
But generally, I'm not a foreign policy wonk, and I don't spend my time googling every issue. I just asked a reasonable question, and I was hoping for a reasonable answer, which you didn't give.
You don't have any respect for me, I don't have any respect for you. We're even.
Nonsense!
Do you really think that Obama sends messages to everyone of the thousands of federal judges -- many of whom were appointed by Bush, and all of whom have lifetime jobs -- about every case that they hear?
No, I think Obama sends messages to federal prosecutors, who are appointed, and who decide whether to prosecute.
Federal judges don't have anything to do with the initial decision to prosecute.
Those are the total contributions by people who listed the U.S. Army or the Department of Defense as their employers. Soldiers have a right to contribute to political candidates.
making everyone supporting a political cause with money suspect.
I suspect that some people support political candidates as a quid pro quo for government favors in return. In some cases, like military contractors, it seems obvious. Their PAC contributes to the Democratic candidate, and to the Republican running against him. What's their motivation? Once in the while politicians go to jail when they get caught on tape admitting it.
But putting straightforward quid pro quo aside, the problem is with the system that requires politicians to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, from the very people they're supposed to regulate, before they can even run for office. Obama raised $1 billion, overwhelmingly from big business PACS and millionaires -- mostly from the same campaign contributors who fund the Republicans, who were hedging their bets.
If you want to run for president on policies that are popular with the voters, and you can't raise $1 billion for a campaign, as Obama did, then you can't get elected.
Of course you could be of the opinion that supporting a political cause with money is a bad thing for exactly that reason, but believing that would stop everyone from doing it would be no less naïve...
Yes, I believe that having elections in which candidates must raise hundreds of millions of dollars is a bad thing. I realize that under the Republican Supreme Court, we're unlikely to stop it.
Nobody's boss said "Here's a $1000, donate it to Obama and say it came from you".
Nobody's boss was stupid enough to say it.
I've been reading the New York Times and Wall Street Journal carefully to try to figure out who the rebels are, and I can't find it.
So what? Even if you were telling the truth here, you would look elsewhere for this information.
This gratuitous insult leads me to believe that you can't make a case based on facts and logic, so you're using personal attacks instead. Case closed.
Gaddafi has set the bar so very low here. I doubt myself that any democracy would result, it'd probably be some sort of reshuffling of power with other clans than the two that Gaddafi favors or perhaps even a balkanization of Libya.
So we've gone from "almost certainly" to doubtful that a democracy will result.
What reason do we have to think that a reshuffling of the clans would be any better for the people of Libyia, either for the people of Libya itself, or for our interests?
Gaddafi was at least secular. How do you know that he won't be replaced by an Islamist, which is what happened in Iraq?
How do you know that al-Qaeda won't move in, which is what happened in Iraq?
How do you know that they won't have anarchy, with warring tribes of different sects exterminating each other's sect, which is what happened in Iraq?
Putting aside the 150,000 to 600,000 Iraqis killed, do you think anyone is better off as a result of the Iraq invasion?
People who want military assistance from other countries are adept at telling those countries what they want to hear. (Sometimes they hire Western PR firms to prime them on what to say, as the Kuwatis did in the runup to the first Iraq war.)
If western countries want to hear that rebels are fighting for "democracy," then the rebels will say they're fighting for democracy.
That doesn't mean that they really are fighting for democracy, or that they even know what democracy is. They're just telling you what you want to hear, like any salesman.
But I didn't even see a rebel quoted in the newspapers saying he *wants* democracy. I can't find any issues.
You still haven't answered my question. Once again, who are these rebels, and what reason do you have to think they won't be as brutal as Ghadaffi?
When the hell did the left pick up this crazy interventionism?
If you consider Obama to be on the "left," then you don't have any idea of what the left is about in this country.
Or if you consider Kennedy and Johnson, who got us bogged down in the Vietnam war, to be on the "left," then you don't have any idea of what the left was about for the last 50 years.