The problem with your "common-sense" categorization of who does and doesn't deserve health care is the same as the problem you have now. An army of pen pushers is needed to run each patient through your moral checklists and hoops to look for any reason they can think of to exclude them.
Here in Australia we have a bipartisan UNIVERAL system that costs 1.5% of your taxable income and is supported by 80+% of the population. If someone needs a tripple bypass because they have sat on their arse for a few decades smoking and stuffing their face with pizza and coke they get one. If they go to the UK or any other country with a reciprocal arrangement and have a heart attack, they are also treated for "free". But guess what, my 1.5% not only pays for much better medical outcomes than the US but also pays for preventative programs to educate these slobs and a prescription benifits scheme that means NOBODY pays more than $1200/yr for medicines.
Add it up, compare 1.5% of your taxable income to how much would it cost you to insure a single income family of four (or even just a single person) to such a level, is it even possible to buy insurance with no loop holes for the insurance company to renege? When you figure that out and find out just how much you are being ripped-off you may want to look into who is pocketing your hard earned cash.
Please note I have not claimed the Aussie system is perfect, far from it. My point is that the irrational belief that UHC somehow equates to rabid socialisim that showers the "irresponsible" with money has lead the US down the path of an ever more complex system of self-delusional, penny-pinching accounting that seems designed to enrich those who prey on the weak and send seriously ill people bankrupt or worse. In other words the fear of being ripped off is the very thing that enables your current system to rip you off.
"That period includes The Little Ice Age, which, among other things, froze out the Viking colony on the West Coast of Greenland as well making it impossible to grow grapes for wine in England. If you're basing your post on the Hockey Stick Graph, you need to be told that it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be an artifact of badly handled data, and thoroughly debunked."
The hockey stick has not been debunked, in fact it has been made more robust by a recent follow up paper. If you are genuinely interested in the science as opposed to the politics then I urge you to re-read your own wikipedia link, particularly the first paragraph in the "updates" section.
"Generally the Co2 levels trail the temperature shifts, Global warming and Climate change seem to say they are now forcing it."
Yes, CO2 does rise with temprature however this is a deliberate misunderstanding of cherry-picked facts by the person who popularised this peculiar fiction.
The ice core data does indeed support the half-truth you state but the reason for the initial temprature rise at the end of an ice age is clearly related to the Earth's orbit. When this causes the ice to receed the permafrost melts releasing large amounts methane and CO2 which then ADD to the warming (ie a feedback). In the current situation humans are the ones who are adding CO2, which then causes the globe to warm, the ice to melt, and more CO2 and methane released from the permafrost.
We have had many exchanges in the past and I recognise you have the right to ignore the prefered cap and trade solution and rant against a tax solution in order to misinform and push your own politicaly inspired anti-science agenda.
That 50's book would have required you to add caustic soda (old fashioned drain cleaner). This is indeed a NEW method that relies on a specific structure built with aluminium atoms alone, I agree it's a long, long, way from a clean and commercially usefull method but that is besides the point.
I beg to differ, when I was a kid the siren went off at 11am every Saturday as a test. If at any other time the siren sounded EVERYONE in town knew there was a fire, not just the members of the fire brigade, I agree it was not designed as a public warning system but that is irrelevant to the people who used it as such.
In this fire mobile phones did not work because many towers were destroyed or disabled from thick smoke that plays havoc with the equipment, Churchill in particular was affected in this way. For many people in the fire zone the only way of knowing where the fire was located was to listen to ABC-774 via battery operated AM radios.
"If the property is 10 acres then four acres divided up as a strip around the perimeter is perfectly reasonable."
The operative word there is "if", why do you make such an uniformed assumptions when there are plenty of pictures of his property that clearly show that was not the case. The pictures I might add were taken from such an angle as to portray his property in the best light possible.
I'm glad the guys house didn't burn down and can fully understand he "feels vindicated" but in his particular case I do not believe the ends justify the means. The council minutes clearly state they were willing to settle the matter for $2500 in costs plus revegetation, he accepted that deal and then reneged after the court action was dropped. His pigheaded attitude over the next 2 years resulted in a court case that ended up costing him $100K, had he been fined the maximum amount it would have cost him $300K. I understand he is now campaigning to have his conviction overturned, lots of luck with that one!
I wholeheartedly agree with the council where it states in it's minutes that "there are no winners in a case like this", except perhaps Mr Shehan's lawyers. If he was anything close to a "reasonable" man worried about bushfires he would not have chosen to build in a forest with the intention of illegaly clearing it.
From what I have read the fire front in Kinglake and Marysville was strong enough to kill at a range of 200 meters and was moving at up to 125kmh. This made the usual safe haven at the center of the town footy oval a death trap and if not for the actions of a few firefighters a large number of people would have died in Marysville doing exacly what they do in any other fire.
The type of bunker I am thinking of is cut into a slope and has a heavy wooden door set back from the entrance, more like a small cave than a building, you could easily build one by burrying a large diamater (say 4 foot) concrete pipe. I don't know if this would or wouldn't do the job but I think it's worth looking into.
"1939 was exactly the same as this one there was also 1908, 1895, 1911 and 1921 . The only difference was there was no where near as many people living up in the forests and the mountains."
Here is a database of observed climate change impacts. Your facts are fundementally correct but your conclusion is not, nobody is arguing climate change was the sole cause and it is disingenous to accuse the GP of doing so.
As for the observed temprature change being too small to affect large scale environmental change this is a silly argument that is easily debunked by observing Artic sea ice, it's like saying a teaspoon of sugar in your tank can't possibly do any harm to your engine. The amount of energy required to lift the global temprature even one degree is staggering yet the main cause of that increase is an increase in CO2 mesured in parts per million. That trapped energy must go somewhere and it does so mainly in the form of kinetic energy (below a 5km ceiling).
The government may or may not be incompetent but you are ignoring the facts in my summary and you are also ignoring the fact that most of the state has already been (naturally) burnt in recent years, particulaly in the summer of 2006-2007.
1. This is simple high school science. Water vapour in the atmosphere is at it's "satuartion point" and is totally dependent on pressure and temprature, this is why you get dew drops forming in the desert overnight. Any amount of water vapour you pump into the atmosphere will fall out as liquid within days.
2. Coal is the biggest contributor to GHG, the carbon locked up in coal, oil, etc was never present in the atmosphere all at the same time (unless you want to go back before multi-cellular life appeared).
3. Opinion that is not supported by fact or mathematics.
4. The term "climate change" was introduced by skeptics who pointed out that the term "global warming" could be construed as biased.
If you would like to post a link that backs you up we would all be interested, as it stands you are simply trolling by parroting psuedo-skeptical talking points.
That lesson was learnt many decades ago (at least in victoria) and there are few (zero?) aboriginals who live anything like their ancestors in this state. The DSE have been critsized for not doing enough and they have also been critsized when controlled burns have escaped and caused material damage. I have not heard of the power company story and would be interested to find out more, do you have a link?
Yes, the building code could certainly do with an upgrade. When I was growing up many people had small fire bunkers dug into the ground and every local fire-brigade had a air-raid style siren. Neither are common today.
"As for vegetation around houses home owners have been blaming local council regulations which prevent them from cutting down trees. One family were fined for removing a tree and later credited that act with saving their house."
You may be interested in the councils side of that story, the minutes can be found here (pdf warning). I don't know what happend to the four acres of trees Mr Shehan cut down but from my days working on an old growth sawmill a back of the envelope calculation says that many trees would have yeilded ~5000 tons of processed timber and several thousand tons of woodchips.
"the vegetation left over from the wetter period before global warming will result in some spectacular fires"
Much of the bush in the area (indeed the entire state) has been burnt several times since our last "wet period" over a decade ago. In the summer of 2006-2007 Melbourne was blanketed in smoke for two months where as the normal situation might see smoke for a week or two.
This is incorrect, fire is normal but this one was not (regardless of the death and destruction). There is a metric called the Fire Danger Index that is used to issue warnings and declare total fire ban days, it is calibrated on the 1939 fires having an index of 100, IIRC the ash wednesday fires that I also witnessed had an index of 70-120. The abnormal conditions for this fire saw the index in the unheard of range of 150-200.
"No, that's shortsighted. There are criteria used to evaluate success that aren't technical [snip] I find that disturbing. I don't know exactly why I do, but it's something that I feel disquiet about."
And yet the point you are arguing against was "[Not liking googles identifier] is a personal foible, not a problem with the technology" - now take out your government issued drivers license and examine it closely. If you have a problem with unwanted marketing do as I do and dump it in the recycling bin on the way back from the letterbox and don't register on facebook, reunion.com, etc, when they send you an email saying your childhood sweetheart has registered you as a friend.
"The nice thing about new techniques like this is that it points out that we are always missing something. It's like the basic flaw in Fermi's paradox..."
There is no "flaw" in Fermi's paradox, it's an observation of an inconsistency designed to make one think about what we are missing.
I don't see any mention of "wise architects" or "lowly developers" in my post and I'm sorry you interpret it that way, but since you asked...
The point of my sig is that we all live in ideological, intellectual, and emotional cages of one kind or another, recgonition of that allows one to cautiously venture outside their cage and draw insight from other peoples POV. In the case of software development I have spent the last 20yrs in the developers cage flinging the occasional turd at architects, testers, sysadmins, users and people with bow ties. When I venture outside my developers cage all these people (except those with bow-ties), offer ideas and experience that I can use in my own cage. In other words I interpret the 'war' as a the war of ideas.
I believe but cannot prove the song itself is about marriage/relationships, my own 20yr marriage ended in bitterness over a decade ago when it was fashionable for women to leave hubby and kids in order to "find themselves". The "wish you were here" part is a lament for something long gone, ie: two people who enter a long term relationship are never the same people when it ends.
Yes, total freedom to mix and match is great from the developer's POV but in an enterprise setting application developers rarely get to see the full system, even something seemingly inoccuous such as changing an error/log message can have upstream consequences that exceed the cost of development by more that an order of magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your "common-sense" categorization of who does and doesn't deserve health care is the same as the problem you have now. An army of pen pushers is needed to run each patient through your moral checklists and hoops to look for any reason they can think of to exclude them.
Here in Australia we have a bipartisan UNIVERAL system that costs 1.5% of your taxable income and is supported by 80+% of the population. If someone needs a tripple bypass because they have sat on their arse for a few decades smoking and stuffing their face with pizza and coke they get one. If they go to the UK or any other country with a reciprocal arrangement and have a heart attack, they are also treated for "free". But guess what, my 1.5% not only pays for much better medical outcomes than the US but also pays for preventative programs to educate these slobs and a prescription benifits scheme that means NOBODY pays more than $1200/yr for medicines.
Add it up, compare 1.5% of your taxable income to how much would it cost you to insure a single income family of four (or even just a single person) to such a level, is it even possible to buy insurance with no loop holes for the insurance company to renege? When you figure that out and find out just how much you are being ripped-off you may want to look into who is pocketing your hard earned cash.
Please note I have not claimed the Aussie system is perfect, far from it. My point is that the irrational belief that UHC somehow equates to rabid socialisim that showers the "irresponsible" with money has lead the US down the path of an ever more complex system of self-delusional, penny-pinching accounting that seems designed to enrich those who prey on the weak and send seriously ill people bankrupt or worse. In other words the fear of being ripped off is the very thing that enables your current system to rip you off.
I'm so sorry, did I bust your myth?
Yes I know, it's what's called an original source.
"That period includes The Little Ice Age, which, among other things, froze out the Viking colony on the West Coast of Greenland as well making it impossible to grow grapes for wine in England. If you're basing your post on the Hockey Stick Graph, you need to be told that it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be an artifact of badly handled data, and thoroughly debunked."
The hockey stick has not been debunked, in fact it has been made more robust by a recent follow up paper. If you are genuinely interested in the science as opposed to the politics then I urge you to re-read your own wikipedia link, particularly the first paragraph in the "updates" section.
"Generally the Co2 levels trail the temperature shifts, Global warming and Climate change seem to say they are now forcing it."
Yes, CO2 does rise with temprature however this is a deliberate misunderstanding of cherry-picked facts by the person who popularised this peculiar fiction.
The ice core data does indeed support the half-truth you state but the reason for the initial temprature rise at the end of an ice age is clearly related to the Earth's orbit. When this causes the ice to receed the permafrost melts releasing large amounts methane and CO2 which then ADD to the warming (ie a feedback). In the current situation humans are the ones who are adding CO2, which then causes the globe to warm, the ice to melt, and more CO2 and methane released from the permafrost.
We have had many exchanges in the past and I recognise you have the right to ignore the prefered cap and trade solution and rant against a tax solution in order to misinform and push your own politicaly inspired anti-science agenda.
That 50's book would have required you to add caustic soda (old fashioned drain cleaner). This is indeed a NEW method that relies on a specific structure built with aluminium atoms alone, I agree it's a long, long, way from a clean and commercially usefull method but that is besides the point.
I beg to differ, when I was a kid the siren went off at 11am every Saturday as a test. If at any other time the siren sounded EVERYONE in town knew there was a fire, not just the members of the fire brigade, I agree it was not designed as a public warning system but that is irrelevant to the people who used it as such.
In this fire mobile phones did not work because many towers were destroyed or disabled from thick smoke that plays havoc with the equipment, Churchill in particular was affected in this way. For many people in the fire zone the only way of knowing where the fire was located was to listen to ABC-774 via battery operated AM radios.
"If the property is 10 acres then four acres divided up as a strip around the perimeter is perfectly reasonable."
The operative word there is "if", why do you make such an uniformed assumptions when there are plenty of pictures of his property that clearly show that was not the case. The pictures I might add were taken from such an angle as to portray his property in the best light possible.
I'm glad the guys house didn't burn down and can fully understand he "feels vindicated" but in his particular case I do not believe the ends justify the means. The council minutes clearly state they were willing to settle the matter for $2500 in costs plus revegetation, he accepted that deal and then reneged after the court action was dropped. His pigheaded attitude over the next 2 years resulted in a court case that ended up costing him $100K, had he been fined the maximum amount it would have cost him $300K. I understand he is now campaigning to have his conviction overturned, lots of luck with that one!
I wholeheartedly agree with the council where it states in it's minutes that "there are no winners in a case like this", except perhaps Mr Shehan's lawyers. If he was anything close to a "reasonable" man worried about bushfires he would not have chosen to build in a forest with the intention of illegaly clearing it.
From what I have read the fire front in Kinglake and Marysville was strong enough to kill at a range of 200 meters and was moving at up to 125kmh. This made the usual safe haven at the center of the town footy oval a death trap and if not for the actions of a few firefighters a large number of people would have died in Marysville doing exacly what they do in any other fire.
The type of bunker I am thinking of is cut into a slope and has a heavy wooden door set back from the entrance, more like a small cave than a building, you could easily build one by burrying a large diamater (say 4 foot) concrete pipe. I don't know if this would or wouldn't do the job but I think it's worth looking into.
"1939 was exactly the same as this one there was also 1908, 1895, 1911 and 1921 . The only difference was there was no where near as many people living up in the forests and the mountains."
That is a popular meme right now, unfortunately it is not correct.
Ahhh, NT, yes they have been justifyably critisized for their ignorance, however the bush in NT is vastly different to the forrests found in Victoria.
Here is a database of observed climate change impacts. Your facts are fundementally correct but your conclusion is not, nobody is arguing climate change was the sole cause and it is disingenous to accuse the GP of doing so.
As for the observed temprature change being too small to affect large scale environmental change this is a silly argument that is easily debunked by observing Artic sea ice, it's like saying a teaspoon of sugar in your tank can't possibly do any harm to your engine. The amount of energy required to lift the global temprature even one degree is staggering yet the main cause of that increase is an increase in CO2 mesured in parts per million. That trapped energy must go somewhere and it does so mainly in the form of kinetic energy (below a 5km ceiling).
The government may or may not be incompetent but you are ignoring the facts in my summary and you are also ignoring the fact that most of the state has already been (naturally) burnt in recent years, particulaly in the summer of 2006-2007.
You have been misinformed:
1. This is simple high school science. Water vapour in the atmosphere is at it's "satuartion point" and is totally dependent on pressure and temprature, this is why you get dew drops forming in the desert overnight. Any amount of water vapour you pump into the atmosphere will fall out as liquid within days.
2. Coal is the biggest contributor to GHG, the carbon locked up in coal, oil, etc was never present in the atmosphere all at the same time (unless you want to go back before multi-cellular life appeared).
3. Opinion that is not supported by fact or mathematics.
4. The term "climate change" was introduced by skeptics who pointed out that the term "global warming" could be construed as biased.
If you would like to post a link that backs you up we would all be interested, as it stands you are simply trolling by parroting psuedo-skeptical talking points.
That lesson was learnt many decades ago (at least in victoria) and there are few (zero?) aboriginals who live anything like their ancestors in this state. The DSE have been critsized for not doing enough and they have also been critsized when controlled burns have escaped and caused material damage. I have not heard of the power company story and would be interested to find out more, do you have a link?
"David Packham is our foremost expert in this area, he "wrote the book"."
So why is he peddling disinformation on the BBC and why is it that I could not find a description of his position at Monash?
"It has a lot to do with the fact that the Government departments failed to conduct the necessary backburning."
Please re-read the summary and look at the reference.
Yes, the building code could certainly do with an upgrade. When I was growing up many people had small fire bunkers dug into the ground and every local fire-brigade had a air-raid style siren. Neither are common today.
"As for vegetation around houses home owners have been blaming local council regulations which prevent them from cutting down trees. One family were fined for removing a tree and later credited that act with saving their house."
You may be interested in the councils side of that story, the minutes can be found here (pdf warning). I don't know what happend to the four acres of trees Mr Shehan cut down but from my days working on an old growth sawmill a back of the envelope calculation says that many trees would have yeilded ~5000 tons of processed timber and several thousand tons of woodchips.
"the vegetation left over from the wetter period before global warming will result in some spectacular fires"
Much of the bush in the area (indeed the entire state) has been burnt several times since our last "wet period" over a decade ago. In the summer of 2006-2007 Melbourne was blanketed in smoke for two months where as the normal situation might see smoke for a week or two.
"Fires like this are normal."
This is incorrect, fire is normal but this one was not (regardless of the death and destruction). There is a metric called the Fire Danger Index that is used to issue warnings and declare total fire ban days, it is calibrated on the 1939 fires having an index of 100, IIRC the ash wednesday fires that I also witnessed had an index of 70-120. The abnormal conditions for this fire saw the index in the unheard of range of 150-200.
Thank-you, uninformed comments about sentmental environmentalists and evolution are arguing in a factual vacum.
Fractal compression would do the job if it were not encumbered with a pile of patents issued a couple of decades ago.
"No, that's shortsighted. There are criteria used to evaluate success that aren't technical [snip] I find that disturbing. I don't know exactly why I do, but it's something that I feel disquiet about."
And yet the point you are arguing against was "[Not liking googles identifier] is a personal foible, not a problem with the technology" - now take out your government issued drivers license and examine it closely. If you have a problem with unwanted marketing do as I do and dump it in the recycling bin on the way back from the letterbox and don't register on facebook, reunion.com, etc, when they send you an email saying your childhood sweetheart has registered you as a friend.
"The nice thing about new techniques like this is that it points out that we are always missing something. It's like the basic flaw in Fermi's paradox..."
There is no "flaw" in Fermi's paradox, it's an observation of an inconsistency designed to make one think about what we are missing.
...'nuff said.
I don't see any mention of "wise architects" or "lowly developers" in my post and I'm sorry you interpret it that way, but since you asked...
The point of my sig is that we all live in ideological, intellectual, and emotional cages of one kind or another, recgonition of that allows one to cautiously venture outside their cage and draw insight from other peoples POV. In the case of software development I have spent the last 20yrs in the developers cage flinging the occasional turd at architects, testers, sysadmins, users and people with bow ties. When I venture outside my developers cage all these people (except those with bow-ties), offer ideas and experience that I can use in my own cage. In other words I interpret the 'war' as a the war of ideas.
I believe but cannot prove the song itself is about marriage/relationships, my own 20yr marriage ended in bitterness over a decade ago when it was fashionable for women to leave hubby and kids in order to "find themselves". The "wish you were here" part is a lament for something long gone, ie: two people who enter a long term relationship are never the same people when it ends.
Yes, total freedom to mix and match is great from the developer's POV but in an enterprise setting application developers rarely get to see the full system, even something seemingly inoccuous such as changing an error/log message can have upstream consequences that exceed the cost of development by more that an order of magnitude.