Stop the hyperbole. Even if someone is dying because they can't pay for treatment, trying to spread the cost among less than 50% of the population (you know, the only people who actually pay taxes) is still not guaranteed to provide good care for everyone.
What's the hyperbole? The National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine said that 45,000 people die every year for lack of medical treatment. That's not in doubt, because there's more evidence than I can fit in a Slashdot post. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06339/743713-84.stm
I was following the healthcare debate during the Nixon Administration. Nixon's Secretary of Health and Human Services was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Moynihan came up with a pretty good health care plan. As Ralph Nader said, on domestic policy, both the Republicans and Democrats are farther to the right than Nixon. For this, Nixon deserves a slightly cooler place in Hell.
I don't know what kind of guarantee you want. If we *don't* pay for health care for such people, they're going to die. If we do pay for their health care, they won't die. Medicaid and Medicare stopped a lot of people from dying.
If it is true that 50% of the population pay taxes, that's because most of them are children, or retired, or disabled. So what?
The people who should pay taxes are the top 40% who make 75% of the income. Seems right to me. If they're making so much from American society, they ought to pay their share of the costs of running American society (As the economist Adam Smith said.)
If Vitaly Borker was calling Ms. Rodriguez repeatedly, especially after 10pm, he was violating New York State laws against telephone harassment.
I had somebody calling me repeatedly late at night. I traced his phone number, complained to the local police station, and two detectives came to his house (several times until he answered the door) and arrested him. He finally left New York City, and stopped bothering me, so I didn't prosecute.
* Threat to Life (yours or someone else's)
* Bomb Threats
* Bodily Harm
* Excessive Obscene or Harassing Calls (The definition of excessive varies by state but generally means more than two to five calls.)
* Kidnapping
Verizon regularly works with Law Enforcement agencies to resolve unlawful call complaints. The Law Enforcement agency investigates all calls involving bodily harm, bomb threats and kidnapping.
Unwanted Calls are usually not against the law and typically include:
I couldn't get it either. Here's the Google cache of today's page. Nothing now about rape. (The Wayback machine doesn't post their archive for 6 months.)
Statement from Director of Prosecution, Ms. Marianne Ny
Today British Police have arrested Mr. Assange. Director of Prosecution Ms. Marianne Ny has issued the European arrest warrant, due to which the arrest was executed. The arrest warrant is based on an order for arrest and detention by the Svea Court of Appeal.
Marianne Ny states: - Apart from the arrest, nothing new has happened in the investigation, but the arrest is a prerequisite for continuing the investigation. I cannot give information on the next step, as the matter at the moment is handled by British authorities.
The prosecutor emphasizes that this matter exclusively concerns Mr. Assange as a private person.
- I would like to clarify that there have by no means been any political pressure on my decision making. I act as a prosecutor due to suspicions of sexual crimes in Sweden in August. Swedish prosecutors are completely independent in their decision making, says Ms. Ny.
I complained to the BBC that Assange was not accused of "rape", and I got the following (reasonable) response from them:
Dear sir, Regarding the allegations facing Julian Assange, the phrase used by the Swedish authorities and widely repeated throughout the Swedish as well as British media is "rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion". According to the Swedish Prosecution Authority website http://www.aklagare.se/In-English/, these are the exact allegations against him.
BBC News Website.
Strangely, I just checked that URL and the page is now blank.
I will leave it to other Slashdotters to look it up on the Google cache or the Wayback machine.
When I was in high school, my math teachers sucked, so I knocked off the high school and college textbooks up to calculus and differential equations and learned quite a bit more on my own.
I ran into problems. An autodidact has no way of evaluating his own knowledge. How do you know you're as smart as you think you are? You have no teacher to tell you whether you understand it, whether you've studied enough of it, or whether you're misunderstanding it.
You're rowing hard, but you have no compass. An autodidact has no way of knowing what's important to learn. He has no way of knowing what direction to move in. I spent lots of time trying to understand math textbooks that I couldn't get through, sometimes because (I found out later) that it would have been impossible to understand them without certain prior background. Some books on analytics that I found in the library were very important for very specialized engineering applications, but if you weren't, say, designing industrial turbines (interesting though that might be), you wouldn't have any use for it and you could have spent the time on something more useful.
A PhD adviser warned his students that one way to fail out of grad school is to read things because they're interesting. You have to read things because they're going to help you in your research.
Even seeing an adviser once a week, or once a month, can make all the difference in the world. You're seeing things close up. A good adviser sees the whole world that you're boring through, and sees where you're going (or not going).
Of course, if you're like those Russians who are studying mathematics purely out of intellectual curiosity, and can be happy being a well-educated cab driver, you can just follow your curiosity. But in my experience, following your curiosity is great for a year or two, but then you wind up in the middle of a maze and no place to go.
The Coalition Forces haven't removed the Taliban in 9 years, and show no signs of doing so.
In Iraq, I still don't know what the original goal was, but we replaced a brutal, efficient dictator with even more brutal, inefficient mob rule, reduced one of the most developed economies in the middle east to a third world country, and turned an enemy of Al Qaeda into a recruiting ground for Al Qaeda. Heckuva job, Bushie.
There may be some limited circumstances when military violence is effective in achieving a legitimate government goal, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the times in which the U.S. was involved in such a situation in the last 100 years, and in some of those situations, the U.S. was on the wrong side.
GP was explaining that, if the US hadn't decided to politicise medical assistance, there wouldn't have been this story in the first place.
That's right. The Taliban could have taken their commander to a Doctors Without Borders clinic, who would have treated him without regard to his politics, just as they treat everybody else.
That's right. The ICRC is an international humanitarian organization, which has a policy of neutrality. Their only goal is to save lives, without regard to political affiliation. They provide medical assistance to both the Afghan government and the Taliban. NATO accepts that.
The ICRC comes in pretty handy when the NATO governments have to deal with the Taliban, for example in prisoner exchanges, locating kidnap victims, or in their eventual peace negotiations.
Here's a link to a story about a wounded Taliban commander. The Taliban kidnapped a civilian doctor from a hospital and demanded he treat their man at gunpoint. What does that say about your mythical Taliban medics and "both sides" violating some sort of made-up restrictions?
They didn't have to kidnap doctors. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) was serving in Afghanistan for 30 years. They provided care from their clinics to everyone in need, without regard to political affiliations. They were scrupulously neutral and refused to align themselves with either side. They contacted the village elders and other local contacts in the communities they worked in, and through those local contacts they arranged permission from the Taliban and other parties to the combat.
MSF did have one rule: no weapons on their premises. Everybody seems to have abided by that rule.
MSF and the other non-aligned aid workers did have a problem after the U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan. The U.S. forces brought their own military-affiliated aid workers, and used them as part of their propaganda campaign. They dropped leaflets telling the local people that if they turned in the Taliban, the U.S. forces would give them medical treatment and other assistance. Colin Powell referred to aid workers as "force extenders." That was the opposite of medical neutrality (and in the U.S. would be a violation of medical ethics).
As a result, the unaffiliated aid workers like MSF and Oxfam got confused with the U.S.-sponsored aid workers, and several of their workers got killed. They had to leave Afghanistan because it was too dangerous.
According to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, MSF and Oxfam finally reached an understanding with the Taliban and have returned.
The U.S.-sponsored aid workers were going around wearing body armor and using contractors for protection. The Afghan government kicked out the contractors, so the aid workers refused to operate there any more.
The moral: If you go into a conflict to deliver medical care and other aid, with no ulterior motive, the people there will appreciate you and the forces on all sides will tolerate you.
If you politicize medical care and aid, and try to use it to bribe people away from the opposing forces, the opposing forces will correctly see you as the enemy and try to kill you.
(After all, in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, the U.S. supported insurgents who killed medical workers in Sandinista clinics.)
A military doctor told me what the problem was in Iraq. They tended to get injuries two or three at a time. The marines would go across a mine field, hit a mine, and get a leg blown off. They would call "Medic," and the medic would run up to them -- and get a leg blown off. Then another medic would try to rescue them, and also get a leg blown off. It sounded pretty difficult to rescue a soldier from a mine field.
Maybe that's what they were thinking of with these robots.
There doesn't seem to be any practical way to protect a soldier's foot from a mine. You can't have protective soles or anything. The physics makes it impossible.
It seemed to work for a while. Then the hawk attacked some lady's chihuahua, and they discontinued the experiment.
I don't think it would have worked anyway, since the hawk was trained to just scare the pigeons and chase them away.
If they had a hawk really hunting and eating the pigeons, that might have done it. Personally, I would have favored that solution, since the pigeons have made it impossible to sit comfortably on the library steps any more.
It's too bad about the chihuahua but you have to make choices.
*Recently renamed the Schwarzman Building after the billionaire who gave the library $100 million.
I would suggest that, since they're heading toward "universal" security measures, we take a cue from the Old West and require that everyone carry a sidearm.
You believe that urban myth that everybody carried guns in the Old West? http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/dodge.htm "Dodge City, 1878. The sign warns visitors to check their guns."
Trains? Didn't you watch old cartoons as a kid? When we want to derail them, we don't need to be on them, and if we are, we have wasted some kamikaze brothers who could have better employed elsewhere.
I'm old enough to have met people who fought in the resistance against the Nazis in WWII.
One of their favorite targets was troop trains. The Germans had a great railroad system.
All they had to do was remove the spikes, and the train would be derailed. On a winding mountain road, it might go tumbling off the cliff.
One guy said that they would remove the spikes, fill the hole with gasoline, and replace the spikes, so that it would explode when the train rolled over it. I couldn't figure out how that would work, but he killed 600 Nazis.
I'm glad the war is over, and the Germans have returned to sensible things, like solar power and molecular biology.
I'm economically conservative and a free marketer, but I have to disagree about health care. There is no free market solution that can work. Health care is fundamentally different than any other service, because 1) your life depends on it, and thus cost decisions are secondary (are you going to shop for the cheapest heart surgeon?), and 2) the concept of insurance removes the visibility of pricing and cost decisions (medical savings accounts are too weak of a concept).
Seymour Simon http://www.seymoursimon.com/ is the Isaac Asimov of preschool and young children's science books. Children's librarians love him. You can find his books in every public library.
His hands-on preschool books are *very* good. He had one that showed kids how to build bridges out of different materials that you'd have around the house, like paper, blocks and clay, that taught some fundamental ideas of engineering.
The downside is that for younger kids especially, you can't just give the kids a book and expect them to follow instructions. You have to read the books with them and show them how to do things, which isn't a downside if you like to do things like build bridges out of clay, which I do.
You're a good example of someone who didn't get a good liberal arts education.
In humanities 101, I learned to state my opinion and support it with evidence.
All you're doing is expressing your opinion. You don't support your opinion with evidence. You don't know what evidence is. You don't understand why it's important to support an opinion like that with scientific evidence.
For example, you want to destroy the public schools and replace them with vouchers (and charter schools, presumably). There is actual research that shows charter (private) schools are no better than public schools, and sometimes worse:
Slashdot Mirror
Stop the hyperbole. Even if someone is dying because they can't pay for treatment, trying to spread the cost among less than 50% of the population (you know, the only people who actually pay taxes) is still not guaranteed to provide good care for everyone.
What's the hyperbole? The National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine said that 45,000 people die every year for lack of medical treatment. That's not in doubt, because there's more evidence than I can fit in a Slashdot post. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06339/743713-84.stm
I was following the healthcare debate during the Nixon Administration. Nixon's Secretary of Health and Human Services was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Moynihan came up with a pretty good health care plan. As Ralph Nader said, on domestic policy, both the Republicans and Democrats are farther to the right than Nixon. For this, Nixon deserves a slightly cooler place in Hell.
I don't know what kind of guarantee you want. If we *don't* pay for health care for such people, they're going to die. If we do pay for their health care, they won't die. Medicaid and Medicare stopped a lot of people from dying.
If it is true that 50% of the population pay taxes, that's because most of them are children, or retired, or disabled. So what?
The people who should pay taxes are the top 40% who make 75% of the income. Seems right to me. If they're making so much from American society, they ought to pay their share of the costs of running American society (As the economist Adam Smith said.)
If Vitaly Borker was calling Ms. Rodriguez repeatedly, especially after 10pm, he was violating New York State laws against telephone harassment.
I had somebody calling me repeatedly late at night. I traced his phone number, complained to the local police station, and two detectives came to his house (several times until he answered the door) and arrested him. He finally left New York City, and stopped bothering me, so I didn't prosecute.
You can get more information about handling these calls at The Verizon Unlawful Call Center http://www22.verizon.com/residentialhelp/phone/general+support/support+tools/general/95622.htm
Examples of unlawful calls:
* Threat to Life (yours or someone else's)
* Bomb Threats
* Bodily Harm
* Excessive Obscene or Harassing Calls (The definition of excessive varies by state but generally means more than two to five calls.)
* Kidnapping
Verizon regularly works with Law Enforcement agencies to resolve unlawful call complaints. The Law Enforcement agency investigates all calls involving bodily harm, bomb threats and kidnapping.
Unwanted Calls are usually not against the law and typically include:
* Fax calls
* Hang-up calls
* Computer calls
* Solicitation calls
* Telemarketing calls
* Debt collection calls
* Obscene or Harassing Calls*
*If calls of this nature are deemed excessive, and you are willing to prosecute, we will handle as an unlawful call.
I couldn't get it either. Here's the Google cache of today's page. Nothing now about rape. (The Wayback machine doesn't post their archive for 6 months.)
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:r4aH7lgv3p8J:www.aklagare.se/In-English/+http://www.aklagare.se/In-English/,&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&lr=lang_en|lang_de
This is Google's cache of http://www.aklagare.se/In-English/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Dec 7, 2010 17:21:50 GMT.
Statement from Director of Prosecution, Ms. Marianne Ny
Today British Police have arrested Mr. Assange. Director of Prosecution Ms. Marianne Ny has issued the European arrest warrant, due to which the arrest was executed. The arrest warrant is based on an order for arrest and detention by the Svea Court of Appeal.
Marianne Ny states:
- Apart from the arrest, nothing new has happened in the investigation, but the arrest is a prerequisite for continuing the investigation. I cannot give information on the next step, as the matter at the moment is handled by British authorities.
The prosecutor emphasizes that this matter exclusively concerns Mr. Assange as a private person.
- I would like to clarify that there have by no means been any political pressure on my decision making. I act as a prosecutor due to suspicions of sexual crimes in Sweden in August. Swedish prosecutors are completely independent in their decision making, says Ms. Ny.
Director of Prosecution
Marianne Ny
+46 31 739 41 04
I complained to the BBC that Assange was not accused of "rape", and I got the following (reasonable) response from them:
Dear sir,
Regarding the allegations facing Julian Assange, the phrase used by the
Swedish authorities and widely repeated throughout the Swedish as well
as British media is "rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion".
According to the Swedish Prosecution Authority website
http://www.aklagare.se/In-English/, these are the exact allegations against him.
BBC News Website.
Strangely, I just checked that URL and the page is now blank.
I will leave it to other Slashdotters to look it up on the Google cache or the Wayback machine.
When I was in high school, my math teachers sucked, so I knocked off the high school and college textbooks up to calculus and differential equations and learned quite a bit more on my own.
I ran into problems. An autodidact has no way of evaluating his own knowledge. How do you know you're as smart as you think you are? You have no teacher to tell you whether you understand it, whether you've studied enough of it, or whether you're misunderstanding it.
You're rowing hard, but you have no compass. An autodidact has no way of knowing what's important to learn. He has no way of knowing what direction to move in. I spent lots of time trying to understand math textbooks that I couldn't get through, sometimes because (I found out later) that it would have been impossible to understand them without certain prior background. Some books on analytics that I found in the library were very important for very specialized engineering applications, but if you weren't, say, designing industrial turbines (interesting though that might be), you wouldn't have any use for it and you could have spent the time on something more useful.
A PhD adviser warned his students that one way to fail out of grad school is to read things because they're interesting. You have to read things because they're going to help you in your research.
Even seeing an adviser once a week, or once a month, can make all the difference in the world. You're seeing things close up. A good adviser sees the whole world that you're boring through, and sees where you're going (or not going).
Of course, if you're like those Russians who are studying mathematics purely out of intellectual curiosity, and can be happy being a well-educated cab driver, you can just follow your curiosity. But in my experience, following your curiosity is great for a year or two, but then you wind up in the middle of a maze and no place to go.
"Retarded" seems to be rightwingspeak for "I don't agree with what you're saying, I can't respond with facts or logic, so I'll just insult you."
The Coalition Forces haven't removed the Taliban in 9 years, and show no signs of doing so.
In Iraq, I still don't know what the original goal was, but we replaced a brutal, efficient dictator with even more brutal, inefficient mob rule, reduced one of the most developed economies in the middle east to a third world country, and turned an enemy of Al Qaeda into a recruiting ground for Al Qaeda. Heckuva job, Bushie.
There may be some limited circumstances when military violence is effective in achieving a legitimate government goal, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the times in which the U.S. was involved in such a situation in the last 100 years, and in some of those situations, the U.S. was on the wrong side.
GP was explaining that, if the US hadn't decided to politicise medical assistance, there wouldn't have been this story in the first place.
That's right. The Taliban could have taken their commander to a Doctors Without Borders clinic, who would have treated him without regard to his politics, just as they treat everybody else.
It seems the Red Cross are training Taliban. *awkward cough* *tumbleweed*
That's right. The ICRC is an international humanitarian organization, which has a policy of neutrality. Their only goal is to save lives, without regard to political affiliation. They provide medical assistance to both the Afghan government and the Taliban. NATO accepts that.
The ICRC comes in pretty handy when the NATO governments have to deal with the Taliban, for example in prisoner exchanges, locating kidnap victims, or in their eventual peace negotiations.
Here's a link to a story about a wounded Taliban commander. The Taliban kidnapped a civilian doctor from a hospital and demanded he treat their man at gunpoint. What does that say about your mythical Taliban medics and "both sides" violating some sort of made-up restrictions?
They didn't have to kidnap doctors. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) was serving in Afghanistan for 30 years. They provided care from their clinics to everyone in need, without regard to political affiliations. They were scrupulously neutral and refused to align themselves with either side. They contacted the village elders and other local contacts in the communities they worked in, and through those local contacts they arranged permission from the Taliban and other parties to the combat.
MSF did have one rule: no weapons on their premises. Everybody seems to have abided by that rule.
MSF and the other non-aligned aid workers did have a problem after the U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan. The U.S. forces brought their own military-affiliated aid workers, and used them as part of their propaganda campaign. They dropped leaflets telling the local people that if they turned in the Taliban, the U.S. forces would give them medical treatment and other assistance. Colin Powell referred to aid workers as "force extenders." That was the opposite of medical neutrality (and in the U.S. would be a violation of medical ethics).
As a result, the unaffiliated aid workers like MSF and Oxfam got confused with the U.S.-sponsored aid workers, and several of their workers got killed. They had to leave Afghanistan because it was too dangerous.
According to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, MSF and Oxfam finally reached an understanding with the Taliban and have returned.
The U.S.-sponsored aid workers were going around wearing body armor and using contractors for protection. The Afghan government kicked out the contractors, so the aid workers refused to operate there any more.
The moral: If you go into a conflict to deliver medical care and other aid, with no ulterior motive, the people there will appreciate you and the forces on all sides will tolerate you.
If you politicize medical care and aid, and try to use it to bribe people away from the opposing forces, the opposing forces will correctly see you as the enemy and try to kill you.
(After all, in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, the U.S. supported insurgents who killed medical workers in Sandinista clinics.)
Nonviolence works better than guns.
A military doctor told me what the problem was in Iraq. They tended to get injuries two or three at a time. The marines would go across a mine field, hit a mine, and get a leg blown off. They would call "Medic," and the medic would run up to them -- and get a leg blown off. Then another medic would try to rescue them, and also get a leg blown off. It sounded pretty difficult to rescue a soldier from a mine field.
Maybe that's what they were thinking of with these robots.
There doesn't seem to be any practical way to protect a soldier's foot from a mine. You can't have protective soles or anything. The physics makes it impossible.
I for one welcome our new peregrine falcon overlords.
We also have (too many) Canadian geese, if that will attract them.
When was it renamed ??
As soon as the check cleared.
http://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman
In the minds of many New Yorkers, including me, it will always be the New York Public Library, one block from 6th Ave.
In New York City, we have a bad pigeon problem around the New York Public Library* building on 42nd St. and 5th Ave. and the neighboring Bryant Park.
A falconer convinced the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation to let him try a hawk. http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3004&page=1
It seemed to work for a while. Then the hawk attacked some lady's chihuahua, and they discontinued the experiment.
I don't think it would have worked anyway, since the hawk was trained to just scare the pigeons and chase them away.
If they had a hawk really hunting and eating the pigeons, that might have done it. Personally, I would have favored that solution, since the pigeons have made it impossible to sit comfortably on the library steps any more.
It's too bad about the chihuahua but you have to make choices.
*Recently renamed the Schwarzman Building after the billionaire who gave the library $100 million.
Yes, as I pointed out above, the resistance during WWII used to remove the spikes to derail the German troop trains.
In the mountains, the whole train would go tumbling off the edge of a cliff.
I would suggest that, since they're heading toward "universal" security measures, we take a cue from the Old West and require that everyone carry a sidearm.
You believe that urban myth that everybody carried guns in the Old West?
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/dodge.htm
"Dodge City, 1878. The sign warns visitors to check their guns."
Trains? Didn't you watch old cartoons as a kid? When we want to derail them, we don't need to be on them, and if we are, we have wasted some kamikaze brothers who could have better employed elsewhere.
I'm old enough to have met people who fought in the resistance against the Nazis in WWII.
One of their favorite targets was troop trains. The Germans had a great railroad system.
All they had to do was remove the spikes, and the train would be derailed. On a winding mountain road, it might go tumbling off the cliff.
One guy said that they would remove the spikes, fill the hole with gasoline, and replace the spikes, so that it would explode when the train rolled over it. I couldn't figure out how that would work, but he killed 600 Nazis.
I'm glad the war is over, and the Germans have returned to sensible things, like solar power and molecular biology.
I hope we (and the Arabs) can join them soon.
Henry Kissinger.
I'm economically conservative and a free marketer, but I have to disagree about health care. There is no free market solution that can work. Health care is fundamentally different than any other service, because 1) your life depends on it, and thus cost decisions are secondary (are you going to shop for the cheapest heart surgeon?), and 2) the concept of insurance removes the visibility of pricing and cost decisions (medical savings accounts are too weak of a concept).
Exceptions to the free market:
1. Inadequate purchasing information.
It's also not a downside if you like spending time with your children.
Oh, yeah. That's a better way to put it.
Seymour Simon http://www.seymoursimon.com/ is the Isaac Asimov of preschool and young children's science books. Children's librarians love him. You can find his books in every public library.
His hands-on preschool books are *very* good. He had one that showed kids how to build bridges out of different materials that you'd have around the house, like paper, blocks and clay, that taught some fundamental ideas of engineering.
The downside is that for younger kids especially, you can't just give the kids a book and expect them to follow instructions. You have to read the books with them and show them how to do things, which isn't a downside if you like to do things like build bridges out of clay, which I do.
OK, I admit it. Carly Fiorina just didn't work out.
You're a good example of someone who didn't get a good liberal arts education.
In humanities 101, I learned to state my opinion and support it with evidence.
All you're doing is expressing your opinion. You don't support your opinion with evidence. You don't know what evidence is. You don't understand why it's important to support an opinion like that with scientific evidence.
For example, you want to destroy the public schools and replace them with vouchers (and charter schools, presumably). There is actual research that shows charter (private) schools are no better than public schools, and sometimes worse:
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/education/charterschools.asp
We found that, on average, charter schools had no significant impacts on student achievement in math and reading.
Gerard Piel, the founding editor of the modern Scientific American, was a history major.
If we followed your advice (I mean the idea behind your sarcastic advice), we would have lived in a world without Scientific American.
And we wouldn't know how to think about anything except narrowly-defined technical problems.
That's what the Republicans want. Just build the weapons. Don't question the war.
Oh God! A Republican.