When I studied calculus the hardest part was studying calculus, not buying the book. Textbooks were a lot cheaper.
Even cheaper, my math teacher used to organize book-buying from Taiwan.
At that time (1959), there was no copyright agreement between the U.S. and Taiwan (and besides, they were fighting Communism), so it was completely legal.
They cost about a tenth of U.S. prices. The publisher he used had reprints of all the popular math and science books (like Dover, except not limited to to public domain). They had an entire Encyclopedia Britannica for about $25.
Dover of course used to re-publish the out-of-copyright and out-of-print math and science classics. There was a time when a professor could have a rare out-of-print book, that nobody else could get, and teach an entire class out of that book. Dover put an end to that.
Of course the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act put an end to Dover (or at least their reprint business) by extending the copyright to 100 years after the author's death.
So the great classics, like Yakov Perelman's Physics for Entertainment (the world's largest-selling physics textbook), are now out of print, even though Perelman died in the siege of Leningrad.
The other source of cheap textbooks was the Soviet Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow, which translated all the great Soviet science and math textbooks, including Perelman's, into every major language of the world, including English, and sold them cheaply everywhere. They were even cheaper than Dover, $2 apiece. And the Soviets didn't believe in copyright, so Dover or anybody could reprint them. I've heard Indian scientists reminisce about how they grew up reading Perelman as children.
It's too bad the Soviet Union didn't survive until the Internet. They could have put all their scientific, literary and music works online copyright-free.
How is it hard to harass someone on drug charges, if they are not using or possessing drugs at the time of a police stop?
"Can I search your vehicle / bag?"
"Affording my constitutional rights, No."
Now the police either has to show a judge probable cause to get a warrant, or they let you go.
What ivory tower have you been living in for the last 40 years?
If you tell some donut-stuffed cop, "Affording my constitutional rights, No," he's going to say something like, "OK, if you don't give me permission to search your car, I'll call the drug-sniffing dog, and if he wags his tail, we'll take apart your car until we find it." You're liable to wind up with your car unscrewed into a heap of parts on the side of the roadway.
Of course it's illegal, but you'd have to be a lawyer yourself to know how far you can push it (and it varies by state).
And if they want they can always plant it on you. They've been planting evidence on innocent people again in New York City. The Times had a few stories about that recently.
Still further, Colorado is seeing the general effects of people being stoned, such as deaths,
This turns out to be hysterical misinterpretation of the evidence. If you follow that link back to the source, https://www.sciencenews.org/ar... you'll see what they really say is
The results offer just a “snapshot at the time we did the testing,” Thames says. They describe an association, not causation. “The question down the road is, what kind of implications does that have for everyday functioning?”
Scientists have largely failed to turn up compelling evidence that adult pot smokers risk permanent brain problems, Earleywine says. “Being stoned all the time is a strange way to live your life,” he says, but data just aren’t there to argue that a cannabis-fueled lifestyle is permanently harmful to the adult body and brain.
So far nobody has been able to supply any evidence (good enough to be published in a peer-reviewed journal) that marijuana is harmful.
A bigger problem than marijuana is a lack of the public understanding of science. These people don't understand what "evidence" is.
I can't believe anyone can be stupid enough to think cannabis is dangerous enough to merit criminalization.
What you can or cannot believe isn't important, the truth is that canabis can have a devastating effect on the developing teenage mind. Even if you don't consider that enough to warrant criminalization, that does not justify insulting those of us who do.
I wonder how you arrive at that "truth". Even the arch-enemy of cannabis, Nora Volkow, head of NIDA, admits that they can't prove it because association is not causation. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... Or at least that's what she was forced to admit when the reviewers at the New England Journal of Medicine insisted she back everything up with published research.
Actually, pot has more harmful chemicals in the smoke you inhale than cigarettes do. And since the goal of smoking pot is to hold the smoke in for longer, it makes it worse.
"dangerous" isn't the word you wanted to use there.
Citation needed.
You don't realize how dangerous nicotine is. It constricts every blood vessel in the body, which is why smokers have more strokes, heart attacks, non-healing wounds, etc.
Inhaling any smoke into your lungs can cause damage and long term health problems. Chronic cough, emphysema, and even lung cancer are all possible outcomes of smoking pot. it also raises your blood pressure and your heart rate, similar to smoking tobacco.
only the ignorant or misinformed deny it has any ill health effects. its not that different from smoking tobacco.
It is ironic that somebody who posts this much ignorance and misinformation can accuse others of being ignorant and misinformed.
Even Nora Volkow, the head of NIDA, in her review article in the New England Journal of Medicine trying to defend the war on drugs, doesn't go that far. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Just because tobacco causes chronic cough, emphysema, and lung cancer, that doesn't mean that anything you smoke has the same effect. That's like sympathetic magic.
Actually, when medical researchers tried to prove that cannabis caused those things, they failed. When you look at people who smoke marijuana, and compare them to people who don't, the marijuana smokers have no more chronic cough, empysema and lung cancer than non-marijuana smokers.
Look at it this way: If I chew tobacco, I'm more likely to get cancer of the jaw. But I can chew all the carrots I want, and I won't be more likely to get cancer. Obviously, there's something in tobacco that isn't found in carrots that causes cancer. And there's something in tobacco that isn't found in marijuana that causes cancer.
Cuba has a relatively low income, and the boycott is responsible for much of that (that was the purpose of the boycott, remember?) That's the result of U.S. policy, not the failure of Cuban socialism. So you cut their food and then blame them for rationing food.
In other low-income countries, especially free-market countries like Guatamala, when people can't afford to buy the food or health care that they need to live, they just die. That even happens in the U.S., where people die from curable diseases all the time because they can't afford to pay for medical care http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
However, unlike most other low-income countries, Cuba has distributed their scarce resources, like milk, to those in greatest need, particularly to pregnant women and children. Prenatal nutrition is a big factor in infant survival. The studies of the Dutch famine during WWII showed that. There are studies of animals. That's established medical science. So doctors would expect Cuban infant survival to be lower because they give pregnant women more food. And it is. Even the CIA agrees. It's not because they define infant mortality differently.
Once again, there are no studies that meet the standards of science (published in peer-reviewed journals, adjusted for any differences in definitions) that say that Cubans have a higher infant mortality than Americans. The "scientists" who made that claim (in the letters section of Science, for example ) can't support it with facts.
Low-income people in Cuba have better health care than low-income people in the U.S. That's the facts.
There are people who form their conclusions based on scientific facts and people who form their conclusions based on ideology. You are free to join whichever group you want.
Bush conquered the entire country, replaced its government, captured its previous leader and handed him over to the new government to be hung by the neck. If that is still "losing", I don't know, what "winning" is...
Winning, as von Clausowitz said, is accomplishing policy. One of the stated purposes of the war was to replace Saddam Hussain with a leader that was more agreeable to us, while converting Iraq into a free market economy (according to what I read on the Wall Street Journal editorial page). Douglas Feith said, it would be like installing a new chip on your motherboard.
Instead, under Bush, they dismissed the army, were unable to create a new one capable of maintaining security and safety, and were unable to maintain the economy. It's a failed state.
Bush had six years to do whatever he wanted. Roosevelt and Truman won World War II in less time. Bush didn't accomplish his goals. He created a mess, and handed it over to Obama. I can't imagine how anyone could restore order to Iraq again. It might take another 10 years, 20 years, 50 years. You can't blame that on Obama.
What did Bush leave Obama? Anarchy, controlled by armed gangs. Now the strongest force is the Islamic State.
Not true at all. Iraq was moving in the right direction, its various groups learning to talk to rather than fight rivals.
Withdrawal was grossly premature. That it was done not as an honest mistake, but for cynical political considerations ("See? I did not close Guantanamo, but I did get us out of Iraq"), makes it all the more disgusting...
That article seems to undercut your own argument.
In August of 2002, as George W. Bush and his allies were building the case for regime change in Iraq, Scowcroft warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that an attack on Iraq “would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken.” Though Scowcroft was confident that the U.S. could succeed in destroying Saddam’s regime, he was also confident that military action would be expensive and bloody, and that it “very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.” As we all know, Scowcroft’s warning went unheeded by the Bush White House.
The war hawks in the Bush Administration, like Douglas Feith, were telling us that we could replace Saddam Hussein with our own dictator, Chalabai, like replacing a chip on a motherboard. The free-market ideologues were telling us that all we had to do was destroy Iraq's government-run industries, and replace them with the free market, and they would flourish.
Instead, the new free-market Iraqi health care system fell apart, the power system failed and couldn't supply electricity to run the air conditioners and sewer pumps, and most of all, neither the U.S. military nor the "free" Iraqi government could maintain security, against the armed sectarian gangs that started killing each other, as that Slate article described. Bush struggled in Iraq for longer than it took to win the entire WWII, and he failed. 600,000 Iraqis died, and 4,000 American troops and contractors.
Bush lost the war. At what point do you face that and cut your losses? Maybe you don't care about the 600,000 Iraqis, but do you want to lose another 4,000 Americans? Did you volunteer? Where did you earn your battle stripes?
Well, Iraq was pushed to collapse. That did not go so well.
What do you mean? The country was then conquered within months by us. Saddam Hussein himself was then captured, tried publicly, and executed deservingly.
Yes, and look what took over after Saddam Hussein was gone. What did Bush leave Obama? Anarchy, controlled by armed gangs. Now the strongest force is the Islamic State.
von Clausowitz that the purpose of war is not to destroy the enemy, it's to accomplish policy. (However you spell it.)
Bush is like that guy in Atlas Shrugged who couldn't watch a pot of soup without letting it boil over.
Oh, and that infant mortality statistic is complete B.S. In Cuba, they just let the premature babies die and it never counts as a live birth to mess up the statistics. In the U.S. they bend over backwards to save babies but since they aren't always successful, the statistics get skewed.
Nothing in that article says that Cuba measures its infant mortality differently than the WHO standard, or even mentions Cuba.
So the fact remains that the Cuban infant mortality rate is lower than the U.S., by any standard measurement.
The main reason for that is the lack of access to health care, and health care doesn't do much good without access to nutrition, housing and basic living standards, which the poor don't have in the U.S. That's why we have so many premature infants. True, it's not just Cuba's health care system, it's also their nutrition programs. I concede that the poor in the U.S. have worse nutrition too, which contributes to their higher infant mortality.
Every honest doctor who follows international health statistics knows this, in contrast to guys like Scott Atlas who cherry-picks his statistics and publishes them in the National Review.
Let me know when you find something in a peer-reviewed journal that says Cuba's infant mortality statistics use definitions that distort them to make them better. I'm not holding my breath. There was an exchange of letters about this in Science, and the anti-Castro people couldn't come up with anything, so I don't think you will.
In addition, American doctors toured the Cuban health care system and published their results in the New England Journal of Medicine. Cuba has one of the best medical schools in Latin America. The Swedes helped them set it up. As a result they have a major modern biotechnology industry that discovered and manufactures some vaccines that are used worldwide.
That day, the FDA banned the drug. It cited a study that found that the drug was linked with something bad, I think maybe suicidal thoughts.
But then she found that the study was produced by the company that made the brand name version of the drug, which had competition by generics by that point.
Sounds like or the same as neurontin, used for pain, accused of suicidal thoughts and available still as generic. If not, the same play book was being used to push it off the market. Double check your sources, you may have been lied to (the horror).
It does sound like a garbled version of the Neurontin (gabapentin) story. Gabapentin is still available. It has a lot of problems.
If anecdotal evidence is in order, a friend of mine was taking Neurontin. He got into a fight on the job (the other guy started it, and he fought back) and was fired. I called the FDA and one of their doctors told me that one of the reported side effects of Neurontin was aggression. It's not the kind of drug you'd want people to be buying on the free market.
The FDA doesn't usually "ban" drugs. They usually "request" that the drug manufacturer cease production. If the manufacturer thinks that the drug is still useful, and wants to continue to produce the drug, he can negotiate with the FDA to continue selling it with restrictions.
If it's an effective drug, you might be able to get a supply from Europe or Asia.
Any law made like that could almost certainly be used to ensure that any Patent YOU might ever have could be voided if you weren't making the product the day the patent was issued, and every day thereafter.
"Certainly?"
That law could only be used if I had a patent on a drug that people needed to treat a horrible disease, and I wanted to stop producing the drug so I could force them to buy a more expensive drug, and deliberately protect myself from competition from cheaper drugs.
In other words, that law could only be used against me if I tried to prevent the free market from working.
That's law is not likely to be used against me, because I'm not a multi-millionaire greedhead who wants to make even more millions by exploiting sick people.
(And by the way most of that money -- $3-400 a month -- is paid for by the federal government, through Medicare and Medicaid, after the patients are driven bankrupt by the cost of their disease.)
His recommendation was that the optimum viewing range went from the horizon to 30 degrees below the horizon. Your eyes can move comfortably from about 25 degrees above the horizon to 35 degrees below the horizon.
I used to use them back in the days of India ink and T squares.
If car A makes 1 trip to work and 1 trip back every day, and car B makes 100 trips every day ride sharing, do you think a city or state could reasonably charge car B more to pay for those roads than car A?
Adam Smith's invisible hand didn't build those streets and highways that these cars drive on. They were built by the government with taxes.
If you're driving on a private road, you can ignore the regulations.
If you want to drive on the public roads, you have to follow the government regulations. License and registration fees for private cars are based on typical use. License and registration fees for taxis and limousines are based on heavy, 24 hours a day use, and cost a lot more. They set up regulations because with generations of experience they've seen all the problems that come up and don't want those problems any more. Passengers don't want to get robbed and raped by their drivers. They don't want drivers who are drunk. They don't want to be injured by uninsured drivers. The Uber free market isn't very good at eliminating those risks.
Uber uses Hirease, a private company that says it has an average turnaround time of “less than 36 hours.” Both services do drug and alcohol testing, but neither does fingerprint testing. And they rely primarily on publicly available information.
Although state background checks for taxi drivers vary by jurisdiction, lawmakers say they are generally more rigorous than either of these services. They usually include searches of private databases like F.B.I. records, gaining consent from prospective drivers for those searches,
In California, those drivers must undergo checks by the state’s Justice Department, including fingerprint scanning, drug and alcohol testing, and searches of private databases. A check can take as little as three days, but as long as eight weeks.
(Uber defeated bills to require the same checks, including fingerprints, required for taxi and limousine drivers, in California, Colorado, and Illinois.)
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/n... Risky Ride: Who's Behind the Wheel of Uber Cars? How safe is Uber? The NBC4 ITeam investigates. By Joel Grover and Keith Esparros Friday, May 2, 2014
UberX, where anyone with a car and the inclination can apply to be a driver.
Maps: Uber Regulations in the U.S. | Uber Timeline
That's exactly what Beverly Locke did. Working with the NBC4 I-Team, Locke filled out all the necessary documentation needed to become an Uber driver. She proved she was a licensed driver with a safe car, and agreed to submit to a background check.
Four weeks later, she received an e-mail indicating her background check had cleared.
On her first day "on the job," she received a request from Paolo, a frequent UberX user, who was looking for a ride from his Hollywood apartment. He is an Uber fan.
"I use cabs a lot," said Paolo. "And, it's almost half the fare in Uber than for a taxi driver."
Who's Watching Uber?
His phone lit up with a picture of Locke, and a message that said Beverly will pick him up in three minutes.
What he didn't know is that Beverly was an ex-con with a violent past. Her 20-year rap sheet includes burglary, cocaine possession, and making criminal threats with the intent to cause death or bodily injury.
"I pulled a girl out of a car and almost beat her to death," said Locke, who described herself as a reformed criminal with a good job and a desire to make up for her past. "I do not do criminal things anymore."
NBC4 asked Locke to cancel the ride, so the former convict never actually carried a passenger. But the NBC4 I-Team found several examples in which drivers with a criminal past have picked up Uber passengers.
Tadeusz Szczechowicz drove the streets of Chicago for a year, despite five prior arrests and two convictions for burglary and disorderly conduct.
Syed Muzzafar had a prior conviction for reckless driving, but he cleared the Uber background check and was behind the wheel New Year's Eve when he was arrested for hitting and killing a 6-year-old girl in San Francisco.
And, Jigneshkumar Patel was arrested for battery of an UberX passenger, a charge he said is "rubbish." Still, the UberX driver had a 2012 conviction for DUI.
Uber declined to talk to NBC4 directly, but did send emails describing corporate policy on background checks. A message said Uber "leads the industry" with its "best-in-class background checks for drivers."
Uber also said it has a "zero tolerance" policy for drug and alcohol offenses, and said it carefully screens applicants and immedia
"Hey Ez, where are you going"? "Up to the store". "Mind if I go with you, I need a few things". "Not at all". "Thanks, here's a couple of bucks for gas".
That is ride sharing. Uber, Lyft, and the others are arranging drivers for hire. Just pointing out the obvious here.
You missed some more obvious:
(1) Ez and his ride-sharer knew each other. The ride-sharer doesn't have to worry about Ez robbing him and vice versa.
(2) Ez was going to the store anyway. The purpose of his trip was to go to the store. His purpose wasn't to make money out of the trip.
That's the difference between Uber and Ez.
If that's not obvious to you, it's obvious to Ez' insurance company if he gets into an accident.
One of the ways the tobacco industry censored the truth was through advertising in magazines and newspapers. If you go to the library and look through consumer magazines from the 1970s, you can find magazines where 75% of the ads are for cigarettes.
People have studied the content of the magazines, and for the most part, publications with cigarette advertising never published anything about the harms of smoking. Generally speaking, when a publication runs a story that's unfavorable to a product, they let the advertisers know beforehand, so they don't have their ads appearing in an issue that knocks them.
For example, if they had an article on the dangers of air travel, they wouldn't run airline ads.
Same thing with cigarettes. They'd have to lose a whole issue's cigarette ads. I've looked up articles on smoking and health, and I've almost never found them in magazines that run cigarette ads. They were always in magazines like Readers Digest and Consumer Reports.
Slashdot Mirror
When I studied calculus the hardest part was studying calculus, not buying the book. Textbooks were a lot cheaper.
Even cheaper, my math teacher used to organize book-buying from Taiwan.
At that time (1959), there was no copyright agreement between the U.S. and Taiwan (and besides, they were fighting Communism), so it was completely legal.
They cost about a tenth of U.S. prices. The publisher he used had reprints of all the popular math and science books (like Dover, except not limited to to public domain). They had an entire Encyclopedia Britannica for about $25.
Dover of course used to re-publish the out-of-copyright and out-of-print math and science classics. There was a time when a professor could have a rare out-of-print book, that nobody else could get, and teach an entire class out of that book. Dover put an end to that.
Of course the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act put an end to Dover (or at least their reprint business) by extending the copyright to 100 years after the author's death.
So the great classics, like Yakov Perelman's Physics for Entertainment (the world's largest-selling physics textbook), are now out of print, even though Perelman died in the siege of Leningrad.
The other source of cheap textbooks was the Soviet Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow, which translated all the great Soviet science and math textbooks, including Perelman's, into every major language of the world, including English, and sold them cheaply everywhere. They were even cheaper than Dover, $2 apiece. And the Soviets didn't believe in copyright, so Dover or anybody could reprint them. I've heard Indian scientists reminisce about how they grew up reading Perelman as children.
It's too bad the Soviet Union didn't survive until the Internet. They could have put all their scientific, literary and music works online copyright-free.
How is it hard to harass someone on drug charges, if they are not using or possessing drugs at the time of a police stop?
"Can I search your vehicle / bag?"
"Affording my constitutional rights, No."
Now the police either has to show a judge probable cause to get a warrant, or they let you go.
What ivory tower have you been living in for the last 40 years?
If you tell some donut-stuffed cop, "Affording my constitutional rights, No," he's going to say something like, "OK, if you don't give me permission to search your car, I'll call the drug-sniffing dog, and if he wags his tail, we'll take apart your car until we find it." You're liable to wind up with your car unscrewed into a heap of parts on the side of the roadway.
Of course it's illegal, but you'd have to be a lawyer yourself to know how far you can push it (and it varies by state).
And if they want they can always plant it on you. They've been planting evidence on innocent people again in New York City. The Times had a few stories about that recently.
Still further, Colorado is seeing the general effects of people being stoned, such as deaths,
This turns out to be hysterical misinterpretation of the evidence. If you follow that link back to the source, https://www.sciencenews.org/ar... you'll see what they really say is
The results offer just a “snapshot at the time we did the testing,” Thames says. They describe an association, not causation. “The question down the road is, what kind of implications does that have for everyday functioning?”
Scientists have largely failed to turn up compelling evidence that adult pot smokers risk permanent brain problems, Earleywine says. “Being stoned all the time is a strange way to live your life,” he says, but data just aren’t there to argue that a cannabis-fueled lifestyle is permanently harmful to the adult body and brain.
So far nobody has been able to supply any evidence (good enough to be published in a peer-reviewed journal) that marijuana is harmful.
A bigger problem than marijuana is a lack of the public understanding of science. These people don't understand what "evidence" is.
I can't believe anyone can be stupid enough to think cannabis is dangerous enough to merit criminalization.
What you can or cannot believe isn't important, the truth is that canabis can have a devastating effect on the developing teenage mind. Even if you don't consider that enough to warrant criminalization, that does not justify insulting those of us who do.
I wonder how you arrive at that "truth". Even the arch-enemy of cannabis, Nora Volkow, head of NIDA, admits that they can't prove it because association is not causation. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... Or at least that's what she was forced to admit when the reviewers at the New England Journal of Medicine insisted she back everything up with published research.
Actually, pot has more harmful chemicals in the smoke you inhale than cigarettes do. And since the goal of smoking pot is to hold the smoke in for longer, it makes it worse.
"dangerous" isn't the word you wanted to use there.
Citation needed.
You don't realize how dangerous nicotine is. It constricts every blood vessel in the body, which is why smokers have more strokes, heart attacks, non-healing wounds, etc.
Despite being called a boner, the penis has no bones or joints.
Only in humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And don't get me started on ducks.
Inhaling any smoke into your lungs can cause damage and long term health problems. Chronic cough, emphysema, and even lung cancer are all possible outcomes of smoking pot. it also raises your blood pressure and your heart rate, similar to smoking tobacco.
only the ignorant or misinformed deny it has any ill health effects.
its not that different from smoking tobacco.
It is ironic that somebody who posts this much ignorance and misinformation can accuse others of being ignorant and misinformed.
Even Nora Volkow, the head of NIDA, in her review article in the New England Journal of Medicine trying to defend the war on drugs, doesn't go that far. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Just because tobacco causes chronic cough, emphysema, and lung cancer, that doesn't mean that anything you smoke has the same effect. That's like sympathetic magic.
Actually, when medical researchers tried to prove that cannabis caused those things, they failed. When you look at people who smoke marijuana, and compare them to people who don't, the marijuana smokers have no more chronic cough, empysema and lung cancer than non-marijuana smokers.
Look at it this way: If I chew tobacco, I'm more likely to get cancer of the jaw. But I can chew all the carrots I want, and I won't be more likely to get cancer. Obviously, there's something in tobacco that isn't found in carrots that causes cancer. And there's something in tobacco that isn't found in marijuana that causes cancer.
What a great euphemism for rationing.
Cuba has a relatively low income, and the boycott is responsible for much of that (that was the purpose of the boycott, remember?) That's the result of U.S. policy, not the failure of Cuban socialism. So you cut their food and then blame them for rationing food.
In other low-income countries, especially free-market countries like Guatamala, when people can't afford to buy the food or health care that they need to live, they just die. That even happens in the U.S., where people die from curable diseases all the time because they can't afford to pay for medical care http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
However, unlike most other low-income countries, Cuba has distributed their scarce resources, like milk, to those in greatest need, particularly to pregnant women and children. Prenatal nutrition is a big factor in infant survival. The studies of the Dutch famine during WWII showed that. There are studies of animals. That's established medical science. So doctors would expect Cuban infant survival to be lower because they give pregnant women more food. And it is. Even the CIA agrees. It's not because they define infant mortality differently.
Once again, there are no studies that meet the standards of science (published in peer-reviewed journals, adjusted for any differences in definitions) that say that Cubans have a higher infant mortality than Americans. The "scientists" who made that claim (in the letters section of Science, for example ) can't support it with facts.
Low-income people in Cuba have better health care than low-income people in the U.S. That's the facts.
There are people who form their conclusions based on scientific facts and people who form their conclusions based on ideology. You are free to join whichever group you want.
Bush conquered the entire country, replaced its government, captured its previous leader and handed him over to the new government to be hung by the neck. If that is still "losing", I don't know, what "winning" is...
Winning, as von Clausowitz said, is accomplishing policy. One of the stated purposes of the war was to replace Saddam Hussain with a leader that was more agreeable to us, while converting Iraq into a free market economy (according to what I read on the Wall Street Journal editorial page). Douglas Feith said, it would be like installing a new chip on your motherboard.
Instead, under Bush, they dismissed the army, were unable to create a new one capable of maintaining security and safety, and were unable to maintain the economy. It's a failed state.
Bush had six years to do whatever he wanted. Roosevelt and Truman won World War II in less time. Bush didn't accomplish his goals. He created a mess, and handed it over to Obama. I can't imagine how anyone could restore order to Iraq again. It might take another 10 years, 20 years, 50 years. You can't blame that on Obama.
Not true at all. Iraq was moving in the right direction, its various groups learning to talk to rather than fight rivals.
Withdrawal was grossly premature. That it was done not as an honest mistake, but for cynical political considerations ("See? I did not close Guantanamo, but I did get us out of Iraq"), makes it all the more disgusting...
That article seems to undercut your own argument.
The war hawks in the Bush Administration, like Douglas Feith, were telling us that we could replace Saddam Hussein with our own dictator, Chalabai, like replacing a chip on a motherboard. The free-market ideologues were telling us that all we had to do was destroy Iraq's government-run industries, and replace them with the free market, and they would flourish.
Instead, the new free-market Iraqi health care system fell apart, the power system failed and couldn't supply electricity to run the air conditioners and sewer pumps, and most of all, neither the U.S. military nor the "free" Iraqi government could maintain security, against the armed sectarian gangs that started killing each other, as that Slate article described. Bush struggled in Iraq for longer than it took to win the entire WWII, and he failed. 600,000 Iraqis died, and 4,000 American troops and contractors.
Bush lost the war. At what point do you face that and cut your losses? Maybe you don't care about the 600,000 Iraqis, but do you want to lose another 4,000 Americans? Did you volunteer? Where did you earn your battle stripes?
What do you mean? The country was then conquered within months by us. Saddam Hussein himself was then captured, tried publicly, and executed deservingly.
Yes, and look what took over after Saddam Hussein was gone. What did Bush leave Obama? Anarchy, controlled by armed gangs. Now the strongest force is the Islamic State.
von Clausowitz that the purpose of war is not to destroy the enemy, it's to accomplish policy. (However you spell it.)
Bush is like that guy in Atlas Shrugged who couldn't watch a pot of soup without letting it boil over.
Oh, and that infant mortality statistic is complete B.S. In Cuba, they just let the premature babies die and it never counts as a live birth to mess up the statistics. In the U.S. they bend over backwards to save babies but since they aren't always successful, the statistics get skewed.
Proof: http://www.nationalreview.com/...
Nothing in that article says that Cuba measures its infant mortality differently than the WHO standard, or even mentions Cuba.
So the fact remains that the Cuban infant mortality rate is lower than the U.S., by any standard measurement.
The main reason for that is the lack of access to health care, and health care doesn't do much good without access to nutrition, housing and basic living standards, which the poor don't have in the U.S. That's why we have so many premature infants. True, it's not just Cuba's health care system, it's also their nutrition programs. I concede that the poor in the U.S. have worse nutrition too, which contributes to their higher infant mortality.
Every honest doctor who follows international health statistics knows this, in contrast to guys like Scott Atlas who cherry-picks his statistics and publishes them in the National Review.
Let me know when you find something in a peer-reviewed journal that says Cuba's infant mortality statistics use definitions that distort them to make them better. I'm not holding my breath. There was an exchange of letters about this in Science, and the anti-Castro people couldn't come up with anything, so I don't think you will.
In addition, American doctors toured the Cuban health care system and published their results in the New England Journal of Medicine. Cuba has one of the best medical schools in Latin America. The Swedes helped them set it up. As a result they have a major modern biotechnology industry that discovered and manufactures some vaccines that are used worldwide.
In the Benghazi incident only three Americans died
The 9/11 event, over 3,000 perished
The war in Iraq, 650,000 Iraqis perished.
Oops. You only care about dead Americans. Well, 4,000 Americans died in GWB's war. Tell me again why we invaded?
That day, the FDA banned the drug. It cited a study that found that the drug was linked with something bad, I think maybe suicidal thoughts.
But then she found that the study was produced by the company that made the brand name version of the drug, which had competition by generics by that point.
Sounds like or the same as neurontin, used for pain, accused of suicidal thoughts and available still as generic. If not, the same play book was being used to push it off the market. Double check your sources, you may have been lied to (the horror).
It does sound like a garbled version of the Neurontin (gabapentin) story. Gabapentin is still available. It has a lot of problems.
If anecdotal evidence is in order, a friend of mine was taking Neurontin. He got into a fight on the job (the other guy started it, and he fought back) and was fired. I called the FDA and one of their doctors told me that one of the reported side effects of Neurontin was aggression. It's not the kind of drug you'd want people to be buying on the free market.
I'd like to know what the name of the drug is.
The FDA doesn't usually "ban" drugs. They usually "request" that the drug manufacturer cease production. If the manufacturer thinks that the drug is still useful, and wants to continue to produce the drug, he can negotiate with the FDA to continue selling it with restrictions.
If it's an effective drug, you might be able to get a supply from Europe or Asia.
Any law made like that could almost certainly be used to ensure that any Patent YOU might ever have could be voided if you weren't making the product the day the patent was issued, and every day thereafter.
"Certainly?"
That law could only be used if I had a patent on a drug that people needed to treat a horrible disease, and I wanted to stop producing the drug so I could force them to buy a more expensive drug, and deliberately protect myself from competition from cheaper drugs.
In other words, that law could only be used against me if I tried to prevent the free market from working.
That's law is not likely to be used against me, because I'm not a multi-millionaire greedhead who wants to make even more millions by exploiting sick people.
(And by the way most of that money -- $3-400 a month -- is paid for by the federal government, through Medicare and Medicaid, after the patients are driven bankrupt by the cost of their disease.)
Anatomy, anthropometry, physiology and cognitive psychology aren't science?
Ergonomics was around when HR was still referred to as "the personnel department".
And experimental mockups with tables and chairs of different dimensions, and visual displays at different heights, are also science.
Yes, Henry Dreyfuss figured that out. A lot of aircraft cockpits and control panels look like his templates.
http://www.learneasy.info/MDME...
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Hl9...
His recommendation was that the optimum viewing range went from the horizon to 30 degrees below the horizon. Your eyes can move comfortably from about 25 degrees above the horizon to 35 degrees below the horizon.
I used to use them back in the days of India ink and T squares.
If car A makes 1 trip to work and 1 trip back every day, and car B makes 100 trips every day ride sharing, do you think a city or state could reasonably charge car B more to pay for those roads than car A?
Adam Smith's invisible hand didn't build those streets and highways that these cars drive on. They were built by the government with taxes.
If you're driving on a private road, you can ignore the regulations.
If you want to drive on the public roads, you have to follow the government regulations. License and registration fees for private cars are based on typical use. License and registration fees for taxis and limousines are based on heavy, 24 hours a day use, and cost a lot more. They set up regulations because with generations of experience they've seen all the problems that come up and don't want those problems any more. Passengers don't want to get robbed and raped by their drivers. They don't want drivers who are drunk. They don't want to be injured by uninsured drivers. The Uber free market isn't very good at eliminating those risks.
Not just India. Do a Google search for "uber driver criminal"
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...
Uber’s System for Screening Drivers Draws Scrutiny
By MIKE ISAAC
DEC. 9, 2014
Uber uses Hirease, a private company that says it has an average turnaround time of “less than 36 hours.”
Both services do drug and alcohol testing, but neither does fingerprint testing. And they rely primarily on publicly available information.
Although state background checks for taxi drivers vary by jurisdiction, lawmakers say they are generally more rigorous than either of these services. They usually include searches of private databases like F.B.I. records, gaining consent from prospective drivers for those searches,
In California, those drivers must undergo checks by the state’s Justice Department, including fingerprint scanning, drug and alcohol testing, and searches of private databases. A check can take as little as three days, but as long as eight weeks.
(Uber defeated bills to require the same checks, including fingerprints, required for taxi and limousine drivers, in California, Colorado, and Illinois.)
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/n...
Risky Ride: Who's Behind the Wheel of Uber Cars?
How safe is Uber? The NBC4 ITeam investigates.
By Joel Grover and Keith Esparros
Friday, May 2, 2014
UberX, where anyone with a car and the inclination can apply to be a driver.
Maps: Uber Regulations in the U.S. | Uber Timeline
That's exactly what Beverly Locke did. Working with the NBC4 I-Team, Locke filled out all the necessary documentation needed to become an Uber driver. She proved she was a licensed driver with a safe car, and agreed to submit to a background check.
Four weeks later, she received an e-mail indicating her background check had cleared.
On her first day "on the job," she received a request from Paolo, a frequent UberX user, who was looking for a ride from his Hollywood apartment. He is an Uber fan.
"I use cabs a lot," said Paolo. "And, it's almost half the fare in Uber than for a taxi driver."
Who's Watching Uber?
His phone lit up with a picture of Locke, and a message that said Beverly will pick him up in three minutes.
What he didn't know is that Beverly was an ex-con with a violent past. Her 20-year rap sheet includes burglary, cocaine possession, and making criminal threats with the intent to cause death or bodily injury.
"I pulled a girl out of a car and almost beat her to death," said Locke, who described herself as a reformed criminal with a good job and a desire to make up for her past. "I do not do criminal things anymore."
NBC4 asked Locke to cancel the ride, so the former convict never actually carried a passenger. But the NBC4 I-Team found several examples in which drivers with a criminal past have picked up Uber passengers.
Tadeusz Szczechowicz drove the streets of Chicago for a year, despite five prior arrests and two convictions for burglary and disorderly conduct.
Syed Muzzafar had a prior conviction for reckless driving, but he cleared the Uber background check and was behind the wheel New Year's Eve when he was arrested for hitting and killing a 6-year-old girl in San Francisco.
And, Jigneshkumar Patel was arrested for battery of an UberX passenger, a charge he said is "rubbish." Still, the UberX driver had a 2012 conviction for DUI.
Uber declined to talk to NBC4 directly, but did send emails describing corporate policy on background checks. A message said Uber "leads the industry" with its "best-in-class background checks for drivers."
Uber also said it has a "zero tolerance" policy for drug and alcohol offenses, and said it carefully screens applicants and immedia
"Hey Ez, where are you going"?
"Up to the store".
"Mind if I go with you, I need a few things".
"Not at all".
"Thanks, here's a couple of bucks for gas".
That is ride sharing. Uber, Lyft, and the others are arranging drivers for hire. Just pointing out the obvious here.
You missed some more obvious:
(1) Ez and his ride-sharer knew each other. The ride-sharer doesn't have to worry about Ez robbing him and vice versa.
(2) Ez was going to the store anyway. The purpose of his trip was to go to the store. His purpose wasn't to make money out of the trip.
That's the difference between Uber and Ez.
If that's not obvious to you, it's obvious to Ez' insurance company if he gets into an accident.
Your choice. You can stay and fight, or leave.
I don't know where you go if you leave.
One of the ways the tobacco industry censored the truth was through advertising in magazines and newspapers. If you go to the library and look through consumer magazines from the 1970s, you can find magazines where 75% of the ads are for cigarettes.
People have studied the content of the magazines, and for the most part, publications with cigarette advertising never published anything about the harms of smoking. Generally speaking, when a publication runs a story that's unfavorable to a product, they let the advertisers know beforehand, so they don't have their ads appearing in an issue that knocks them.
For example, if they had an article on the dangers of air travel, they wouldn't run airline ads.
Same thing with cigarettes. They'd have to lose a whole issue's cigarette ads. I've looked up articles on smoking and health, and I've almost never found them in magazines that run cigarette ads. They were always in magazines like Readers Digest and Consumer Reports.