To put some numbers to your post: The UHC countries all spend around 55% per capita on health care, compared to the U.S. Those same countries also have average life expectancies more than two years greater than the U.S.
And you'd be basically wrong about all of that. The biggest funding hole in health care these days in the U.S. is just that healthy 20 and 30 year olds don't get health insurance, don't visit the doctor unless their tit's falling off, and don't go into a hospital without a gunshot would. In other words, the healthy simply don't spend money on medicine or save for rainy (i.e., sick) days. They wait until something goes wrong and pay through the nose at that point.
That's why the life expectancy of the U.S. is two years lower than the rest of the first world. The expense isn't the problem, it's the fact that people who aren't sick right now think they don't need to spend the money. If you turned health care into a simple commodity you'd find less spending on it, not more.
"We were running without a spare router because you turned down the request I made to purchase one. I can forward you and your boss all the documentation on my request, including the cost analysis for suffering an outage like this because we didn't buy the router, if you like."
If it were Canadian, it would have asked permission before installing itself. And then annoyed you by constantly telling you that it's ready to uninstall itself at any time if it's overstayed its welcome.
Part of having a public front is credibility. If a bunch of bloggers said "Hey, we just got this dump of documents that looks like 20 years of diplomatic cables", it wouldn't get nearly as much attention in the media. WL has spent years building up its cred as an outlet of actually leaked documents. If those same bloggers approached Der Spiegel, they might not even get in the door. At this point, Assange can probably get their chief editor on the phone to discuss the next dump (which is apparently from a major American bank).
As a secondary effect, I imagine that the high profile of WL now serves to draw more attention from leakers, rather than less, so a high public profile actually fosters "business" for them. Cryptome has been going for more than a decade, but WL is who Brad Manning approached.
So yes, being this public causes problems, but it also opens up other doors. If Assange is killed tomorrow, everyone will think the U.S. did it. At this point, being visibly public is probably safer for Assange.
Because the point is public release, not invulnerable release.
Moreover, there's a strong Streisand Effect going on here. The more effort everyone puts into blocking the dump and screwing with the site, the more the site, the leaks, and the whole project are kept in the media. It'll be impossible to stomp it all out, but Assange and WL are getting a ton of free publicity for the project out of it.
Do you think any of the diplomats involved were surprised by any of the revelations in the cables?
They were the least surprised of anyone because they're the most aware group of how diplomacy involves saying X while doing Y, of how realpolitik requires certain public stances that are privately contradicted, of how diplomatic maneuvering works. None of them had any blinders on about the people they were talking to or the effect their words were having.
Within the diplomatic corps, this is the equivalent of a bunch of gossip being exposed: some embarassing face-time for some people, but nothing that anyone didn't know was being said about others.
Kurzweil's prediction doesn't sound like "you'll be able to find trivial or niche examples of each of these", it sounds like "this will be common", which none of those things certainly are.
You have half a point, which is that the Soviets were able to withdraw their forces and leave behind a friendly government that was actually in charge.
However, the friendly government needed boatloads of money and support from the Soviet Union (which left behind its tanks, artillery, aircraft and APCs for use by the Afghan government), and immediately faced civil war against the same Mujahadeen that caused the Soviets so much trouble. The Muj continued to fight until the fall in 1992 of the communist government.
Calling that a "win" is relying on technicalities while ignoring that the spirit of the adventure was not obtained. A friendly government isn't a strategically useful outcome when that government requires massive aid to survive, and falls the minute the aid stops.
The first point meant that the invaders faced no real popular resistance to regime change. It also meant that there was no real support for whatever replaced it, and the minute the Coalition governments looked vulnerable to insurgency (pretty much immediately), the population sat back and waited, covering its collective head, for whoever was left standing.
I agree that if Coalition forces had put 1 soldier on the ground for every 20 civilians and actually secured the place, then five years later the people of Iraq and Afghanistan might have looked around and said "yeah, okay, we've got a good government now--lots of roads and schools and hospitals, and no one's blowing anything up, and my vote even seems to make a bit of a difference." Might have, which is to say if no insurgency had taken root, which is highly doubtful even with more troops.
As for your second point, have you even bothered to look at the body count? Or the infrastructure? This was only surgical in the sense that we didn't carpet bomb entire cities.
Well, yes, exactly: In WWII, German and Japanese cities were carpet bombed and reduced to piles of rubble, and millions of civilians were killed, usually in batches of tens of thousands on a single night of bombing. For all that the human cost of Iraq and Afghanistan are horrific, it's much better to be a civilian in those countries than in an Axis country during WWII.
Regime change worked in Japan and Germany because the people perceived themselves to be beaten. They'd fought with everything and lost, and had nothing left. In Iraq and Afghanistan, they had plenty left to fight with, as the Taliban and Moqtada al-Sadr kept demonstrating.
I've seen interesting comparisons between Germany/Japan and Afghanistan/Iraq by historians, and they make the point a little more bluntly than you do: Germany and Japan were beaten in war, which is to say the entire country went to war and lost, so the victor rebuilding the country in a friendly fashion was, not a right so much as about what a defeated enemy expected. The population absorbed the psychic shock of losing, of being on the wrong side, and so were receptive to pretty much whatever happened afterwards.
Not so in Afghanistan and Iraq, where 1) there was little popular identification with the regime in charge, and 2) individuals felt little personal loss when Coalition forces toppled the government in a surgical way. The populace never felt beaten. They never felt like they simply had to accept the replacement government, and judged it in the same way they judged the previous regime: Something outside their personal lives that had to be dealt with, either with acquiescence or insurgency or some straddling of the two options.
The upshot of this analysis is that it simply wasn't possible to execute "regime change" in Iraq and Afghanistan because the population was never going to be receptive to an American government. Government-by-forceful-imposition is doomed to fail.
If your definition of "winning" is "the other guy is dead", then yes, bombing them back to the Stone Age would work.
However, leaving aside the moral dimension, that's rarely a useful outcome. Bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age wouldn't serve as a deterrent to other nations like Saudi Arabia that actually provided the 9/11 terrorists, so you'd have to kill them too (if you need an example of this, notice how many bloodbaths the Soviet Union perpetrated, such as Hungary or Czechoslovakia, and how they had little effect on later uprisings in Poland and Romania). After you've killed everyone, what then?
The whole point of going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq was to replace their governments with friendly ones. Whether or not that's a militarily achievable outcome (I highly doubt that it is), that was the point, so winning means 1) leaving someone behind with a reasonable facsimile of a civil society and 2) that civil society being generally well-disposed to us. Otherwise, it's a waste of blood and treasure.
Explain the Soviet Union's sojourn in the deserts of Afghanistan, then. They didn't seem to have a problem with civilian casualties.
The answer to the grandparent is that military force can't create a particular civil society. It can sure as fuck destroy a particular civil society, but getting the populace to actually vote the way you want them to isn't easily done by bayonet, unless the bayonet is right there, pointing at them.
Or you could have waited a year or two to play Unreal if it wasn't timed well with your upgrade cycle. Didn't you ever give a theater-release a miss and plan to rent it on DVD?
PC gamers play up the hardships of frequent upgrades, but they're only necessary to play the latest-and-greatest games at max settings immediately upon release. Relax any of those requirements and a more sane upgrade schedule is within easy reach.
There was never a need a for yearly upgrades. Current games have always been comfortably playable at less-than-max settings for PCs two or three years behind the latest-and-greatest. It's gamer dick-swinging that led the misguided to constantly chase the "current" hardware--the producers of PC games always allowed for older machines.
Also, it periodically runs a system-wide poll to separate and form its own machine that stays in the same case, draws from the same power supply, and uses all the same resources:)
Nope, you're not a troll. I have the exact same complaint about Linux desktops (and OSX): Windows just seems slightly but noticeably snappier for keyboard and mouse events. I just thought that someone at MS realized that this was an important area to get right, while Linux and OSX struggled against a cap dictated by other design decisions (such as Apple's Quartz library being strongly based in NextStep's display PostScript origins).
It was never a huge deal to me because so many other considerations are also important, but it's always noticeable.
You have no right to force the rest of us to accommodate your irrational, pants-shitting, reason-crippling terror of statistically irrelevant outcomes, especially when the mechanisms you would adopt do nothing to actually prevent those outcomes.
One of the pleasant surprises was Richard Hatch (Apollo in the original) coming back and doing an excellent job of playing a villain (Tom Zarek) in the new series--and then giving that villain a very deep portrayal that made him one of the most interesting characters in the series.
In comparison, Dirk Benedict whined about he didn't get to come back as a hotshot viper pilot.
Slashdot Mirror
To put some numbers to your post: The UHC countries all spend around 55% per capita on health care, compared to the U.S. Those same countries also have average life expectancies more than two years greater than the U.S.
There have been other rulings in other states that the mandate is constitutional (Michigan for one), so this is basically going all the way to SCOTUS.
And you'd be basically wrong about all of that. The biggest funding hole in health care these days in the U.S. is just that healthy 20 and 30 year olds don't get health insurance, don't visit the doctor unless their tit's falling off, and don't go into a hospital without a gunshot would. In other words, the healthy simply don't spend money on medicine or save for rainy (i.e., sick) days. They wait until something goes wrong and pay through the nose at that point.
That's why the life expectancy of the U.S. is two years lower than the rest of the first world. The expense isn't the problem, it's the fact that people who aren't sick right now think they don't need to spend the money. If you turned health care into a simple commodity you'd find less spending on it, not more.
"How did this happen?"
"We were running without a spare router because you turned down the request I made to purchase one. I can forward you and your boss all the documentation on my request, including the cost analysis for suffering an outage like this because we didn't buy the router, if you like."
If it were Canadian, it would have asked permission before installing itself. And then annoyed you by constantly telling you that it's ready to uninstall itself at any time if it's overstayed its welcome.
Part of having a public front is credibility. If a bunch of bloggers said "Hey, we just got this dump of documents that looks like 20 years of diplomatic cables", it wouldn't get nearly as much attention in the media. WL has spent years building up its cred as an outlet of actually leaked documents. If those same bloggers approached Der Spiegel, they might not even get in the door. At this point, Assange can probably get their chief editor on the phone to discuss the next dump (which is apparently from a major American bank).
As a secondary effect, I imagine that the high profile of WL now serves to draw more attention from leakers, rather than less, so a high public profile actually fosters "business" for them. Cryptome has been going for more than a decade, but WL is who Brad Manning approached.
So yes, being this public causes problems, but it also opens up other doors. If Assange is killed tomorrow, everyone will think the U.S. did it. At this point, being visibly public is probably safer for Assange.
Because the point is public release, not invulnerable release.
Moreover, there's a strong Streisand Effect going on here. The more effort everyone puts into blocking the dump and screwing with the site, the more the site, the leaks, and the whole project are kept in the media. It'll be impossible to stomp it all out, but Assange and WL are getting a ton of free publicity for the project out of it.
http://post.cloudfront.goodinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/oadqwwrabm98xg3mzqg8jbv2o1_500.jpg
Avoiding a dodgy rape charge started by a woman with connections to the C.I.A. isn't about hiding anything. There's no privacy issue there.
I don't think Assange is a hero, but your analogy-fu is terrible.
Do you think any of the diplomats involved were surprised by any of the revelations in the cables?
They were the least surprised of anyone because they're the most aware group of how diplomacy involves saying X while doing Y, of how realpolitik requires certain public stances that are privately contradicted, of how diplomatic maneuvering works. None of them had any blinders on about the people they were talking to or the effect their words were having.
Within the diplomatic corps, this is the equivalent of a bunch of gossip being exposed: some embarassing face-time for some people, but nothing that anyone didn't know was being said about others.
Kurzweil's prediction doesn't sound like "you'll be able to find trivial or niche examples of each of these", it sounds like "this will be common", which none of those things certainly are.
You have half a point, which is that the Soviets were able to withdraw their forces and leave behind a friendly government that was actually in charge.
However, the friendly government needed boatloads of money and support from the Soviet Union (which left behind its tanks, artillery, aircraft and APCs for use by the Afghan government), and immediately faced civil war against the same Mujahadeen that caused the Soviets so much trouble. The Muj continued to fight until the fall in 1992 of the communist government.
Calling that a "win" is relying on technicalities while ignoring that the spirit of the adventure was not obtained. A friendly government isn't a strategically useful outcome when that government requires massive aid to survive, and falls the minute the aid stops.
Absolutely correct, and another reason that U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan were doomed from the start.
The first point meant that the invaders faced no real popular resistance to regime change. It also meant that there was no real support for whatever replaced it, and the minute the Coalition governments looked vulnerable to insurgency (pretty much immediately), the population sat back and waited, covering its collective head, for whoever was left standing.
I agree that if Coalition forces had put 1 soldier on the ground for every 20 civilians and actually secured the place, then five years later the people of Iraq and Afghanistan might have looked around and said "yeah, okay, we've got a good government now--lots of roads and schools and hospitals, and no one's blowing anything up, and my vote even seems to make a bit of a difference." Might have, which is to say if no insurgency had taken root, which is highly doubtful even with more troops.
Well, yes, exactly: In WWII, German and Japanese cities were carpet bombed and reduced to piles of rubble, and millions of civilians were killed, usually in batches of tens of thousands on a single night of bombing. For all that the human cost of Iraq and Afghanistan are horrific, it's much better to be a civilian in those countries than in an Axis country during WWII.
Regime change worked in Japan and Germany because the people perceived themselves to be beaten. They'd fought with everything and lost, and had nothing left. In Iraq and Afghanistan, they had plenty left to fight with, as the Taliban and Moqtada al-Sadr kept demonstrating.
I've seen interesting comparisons between Germany/Japan and Afghanistan/Iraq by historians, and they make the point a little more bluntly than you do: Germany and Japan were beaten in war, which is to say the entire country went to war and lost, so the victor rebuilding the country in a friendly fashion was, not a right so much as about what a defeated enemy expected. The population absorbed the psychic shock of losing, of being on the wrong side, and so were receptive to pretty much whatever happened afterwards.
Not so in Afghanistan and Iraq, where 1) there was little popular identification with the regime in charge, and 2) individuals felt little personal loss when Coalition forces toppled the government in a surgical way. The populace never felt beaten. They never felt like they simply had to accept the replacement government, and judged it in the same way they judged the previous regime: Something outside their personal lives that had to be dealt with, either with acquiescence or insurgency or some straddling of the two options.
The upshot of this analysis is that it simply wasn't possible to execute "regime change" in Iraq and Afghanistan because the population was never going to be receptive to an American government. Government-by-forceful-imposition is doomed to fail.
If your definition of "winning" is "the other guy is dead", then yes, bombing them back to the Stone Age would work.
However, leaving aside the moral dimension, that's rarely a useful outcome. Bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age wouldn't serve as a deterrent to other nations like Saudi Arabia that actually provided the 9/11 terrorists, so you'd have to kill them too (if you need an example of this, notice how many bloodbaths the Soviet Union perpetrated, such as Hungary or Czechoslovakia, and how they had little effect on later uprisings in Poland and Romania). After you've killed everyone, what then?
The whole point of going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq was to replace their governments with friendly ones. Whether or not that's a militarily achievable outcome (I highly doubt that it is), that was the point, so winning means 1) leaving someone behind with a reasonable facsimile of a civil society and 2) that civil society being generally well-disposed to us. Otherwise, it's a waste of blood and treasure.
Explain the Soviet Union's sojourn in the deserts of Afghanistan, then. They didn't seem to have a problem with civilian casualties.
The answer to the grandparent is that military force can't create a particular civil society. It can sure as fuck destroy a particular civil society, but getting the populace to actually vote the way you want them to isn't easily done by bayonet, unless the bayonet is right there, pointing at them.
Or you could have waited a year or two to play Unreal if it wasn't timed well with your upgrade cycle. Didn't you ever give a theater-release a miss and plan to rent it on DVD?
PC gamers play up the hardships of frequent upgrades, but they're only necessary to play the latest-and-greatest games at max settings immediately upon release. Relax any of those requirements and a more sane upgrade schedule is within easy reach.
*ahem* It's "for all intents and purposes", not "intensive purposes".
You're welcome.
There was never a need a for yearly upgrades. Current games have always been comfortably playable at less-than-max settings for PCs two or three years behind the latest-and-greatest. It's gamer dick-swinging that led the misguided to constantly chase the "current" hardware--the producers of PC games always allowed for older machines.
Also, it periodically runs a system-wide poll to separate and form its own machine that stays in the same case, draws from the same power supply, and uses all the same resources :)
Nope, you're not a troll. I have the exact same complaint about Linux desktops (and OSX): Windows just seems slightly but noticeably snappier for keyboard and mouse events. I just thought that someone at MS realized that this was an important area to get right, while Linux and OSX struggled against a cap dictated by other design decisions (such as Apple's Quartz library being strongly based in NextStep's display PostScript origins).
It was never a huge deal to me because so many other considerations are also important, but it's always noticeable.
If the airlines approached Congress and said "The TSA is killing the airline industry", you can bet there'd be quick action.
You have no right to force the rest of us to accommodate your irrational, pants-shitting, reason-crippling terror of statistically irrelevant outcomes, especially when the mechanisms you would adopt do nothing to actually prevent those outcomes.
One of the pleasant surprises was Richard Hatch (Apollo in the original) coming back and doing an excellent job of playing a villain (Tom Zarek) in the new series--and then giving that villain a very deep portrayal that made him one of the most interesting characters in the series.
In comparison, Dirk Benedict whined about he didn't get to come back as a hotshot viper pilot.