I do think records sound, in general, a little warmer when I hear them. However, I don't think it has anything to do with the vinyl.
Most older recordings on LP were made using tube amps. Tube amps DO, in general, sound warmer than their modern digital counterparts and there are actual science-y reasons for this. Likewise, most of the time when I hear vinyl, it's being played back on older equipment. Well broken in speakers, old amps (sometimes also tube amps), etc. Not that you NEED a tube amp and $10,000 speakers. My home setup with one of those cheap $30 sonic impact t-amps and a couple of nice homemade full range speakers, and it sounds awesome. Play back a good mp3 of an older recording and it'll sound really, really nice.
I know _nothing_ about how modern recording studios function, but I suspect that the ears of sound engineers have changed as technology has improved, and what you or I consider "warmness" is actually "muddiness" to them. It's analogous to the way 35mm film looks "warmer" than a digital image. The way noise and high/low clipping manifests itself is very different and some people still prefer film to digital even though it's obviously "inferior".
Not that I think fiber isn't the future, but copper prices don't seem to have much to do with it. For in-home wiring, cable runs are short enough that the amount of copper involved is pretty frickin' small, especially compared to the copper in your electric car. Plus, with the housing market cooling off, copper prices are holding fairly steady. If it were really going to be in such hot demand, wouldn't speculators have already driven the price through the roof?
You just described why Mac OS is a better day to day operating system, and Linux is the vasty more configurable one.
I should have to sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg-plow to get a GUI, ya know? Yet, it's nice to know I can if I have to.
I don't think either OS is poaching much from the other's pool of users.
That's funny, because where I work the heavens opened up and the angels sang when they cleared 5%. That was considered insane profitability for a health system. Grocery stores are more profitable. Sure, docs are well paid, and execs make six figures, but they _are_ running a > billion dollar company.
The reason those little outpatient clinics are so cheap is that they're outpatient clinics and don't have the overhead an inpatient hospital does. It costs $1M to $2M to build and equip each and every room with a bed in a hospital. That's not operating costs, staffing, etc. That's what it costs to put the room, bed, equipment and incremental ancillary support (cafeteria, mechanical, etc) there. No ORs or MRI rooms or anything. Just beds. And facilities are only about 10% of the cost of doing business.
I'm left wondering how you can file a series of lawsuits inadvertently
Um, it's easy to understand if you've ever worked for any large organization. Has anyone here had the experience of not knowing what it was that the salespeople were promising the programmers would provide? *raises hand* It's just the nature of large groups of people to do lots of stupid, contradictory things because each sub-group within the organization acts semi-autonomously. Legal departments are _always_ doing counter-productive things, because their mission is to guard the legal interests of the company, which are often directly at odds with what's morally just or what's going to please consumers. IE, suing fan clubs or suing someone for using the word Kleenex.
That said, this is a big enough issue that I don't think people at the top of the corporate food chain are totally ignorant of what is going on.
Possibly because photoshop isn't designed for n00bs, and Picasa is. You could say the same thing about AutoCAD: In microsoft draw, I can do things in 2 seconds that would take me weeks to learn in autocad! You can say the same thing about the UNIX command line vs. windows 98. Or about mapping software like ArcGIS vs. Google Earth. Should I go on? Software designed for professionals to use all day long is rarely suited for casual users, just like a dump truck isn't the best vehicle when I run down to Lowes. It's always going to be hard to use because those complex tools won't be buried twelve menus down where the casual user can ignore them. If you don't know the difference between LAB/RGB/CMYK, etc you probably shouldn't be dropping a grand on this particular software anyway.
The interface DOES suck, but I think that's mostly due to the fact that the photoshop user base might well revolt if the interface changed much all at once. Many of them have been using the same tired old GUI for a long, long time.
No, it cannot gracefully backup to mounted shares (unless they're on another 10.5 machine). Seems like something that apple or a 3rd party will address soon, though...
Time machine really is slick. I hook up to a usb hub and big LCD when I'm at home with my macbook, and it uses that opportunity to back things up to the usb drive I've got sitting on my desk, so there's a nice, seamless backup created every evening at the very least. Whine about how time machine is nothing new, nothing fancy, etc as much as you like. I'd be interested to know how many slashdot types back up their computers every night. I'm guessing the answer is 'not many'. And these are people that know better.
I don't think you understand how buildings like this are designed and constructed. Architects on projects like this always, always, always work with qualified structural engineers either on staff or from an outside consulting agency. This _isn't_ a failure of an individual architect. It's a failure of a full-service firm that coordinates activities across the full spectrum, from conceptual stuff to engineering all the way down the line to (presumably) the guys putting in the rivets. An architect can't do all the work, but neither can an engineer or a construction manager.
Challenging buildings like this work out all the time (see Arup) and there's nothing that says you have to have a boring building in order for the roof not to leak. It just costs more. Obviously someone was cutting corners in there somewhere.
I don't that's the only reason government expands. As someone who has worked in a few bureaucracies, here's what I have seen:
Every small group withing a large organization has a budget and an area of responsibility. If that group does its job well AND manages its political capital well, it gets more money next year. Its area of responsibility grows. It branches out in new directions. If it's really successful, in a few years it looks very little like the original group. Multiply this effect by ten thousand and you understand why the federal government continues to grow. Now, in a smaller government (cities, counties, universities, etc) eventually you run into a budget crunch and things get cut back. Corporate intervention isn't necessary for government bloating.
Now, one thing I'd be interested in whether or not our government is really bigger than it was a hundred years ago, as a percent of GDP. I suspect that our federal government doesn't cost all that much more than it did then. In terms of the actual number of individuals responsible for administration of the law (ie, take out medicare/military spending) I bet we're way more efficient now than ever before.
And if you want to talk about how our personal freedom changes over time, you should read your history books. I'd start with the chapters on the various sedition acts. Or maybe the Japanese internment. McCarthyism? Slavery? Sure, this is a dark period, but things _have_ been worse.
My understanding is that the first strike would _not_ wipe out that many hardened missile sites and that the idea of a quick kill is BS. I've read about scenarios that have us engaging an enemy with missile silos and subs in a potentially weeks-long nuclear war, which is for some reason vastly more frightening than a single big boom. The idea is you pack a bunch of silos close together for protection. You need a direct hit to kill the silo. Unfortunately, that explosion throws up so much debris that any ICBMs coming down from the heavens at warp speed get shredded apart. So you have to wait for the dust to clear before you can fire your next shot. In the meantime, the neighboring silos fire their missiles, which can leave the area through the dust cloud because they're traveling so much slower. The back-and-forth goes on until someone decides to stop.
No clue how realistic this scenario is. I read about it on the Internet.
Dunno, in terms of total cost of ownership, the Mac Pro might still be cheaper because of the resale value. A 3 or 4 year old dual-G5 powermac is still worth half(ish) its original value lookin' at ebay. And that's for soon-to-be-obsolete non-Intel stuff.
I think a lot of people just don't want a good all-in-one solution and would rather put something together themselves EVEN IF IT IS NOT AS GOOD AS THE ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTION. For an overly-represented-on-slashdot group of people, the need to screw around with hardware and tweak kernels is just too great. The pleasure of constant tinkering is 90% of the reason they like computers in the first place. Others are just so anti-fashion that a Mac is _NEVER_ going to happen for them..which goes so far off the anti-fashion scale as to circle back around to the fashionista side of things.
Personally, I can't help but view terrorist incidents as being like tantrums thrown by an attention-hungry toddler. It rarely achieves anything in terms of actually affecting how the majority of people live their lives*, but it certainly concentrates the public's attention.
Tell that to the French, or the English, or any one of the other old-world superpowers that got their asses handed to them by what we'd call terrorists in SE Asia, North Africa, etc in the last century. Winning a war against a superpower is all about getting the public's attention and breaking their will to continue to dominate you, and it _has_ worked in the past.
It's virtually impossible to 'defeat' terrorists because you can always shoot down a $100M airplane with a $10,000 missile or blow up a million dollar tank with a bomb made out of scraps found in some abandoned ammo dump, or find a hole in a long enough fence, or sneak past security with forged documents. If a billion dollar company like Apple (ooh, bringing it back to tech!) can't lock down something as simple as a phone, why do we think we can lock down an entire country? I totally agree that this is not where we should be spending our limited resources. I'd much rather have universal healthcare and a 30 hour work week.:)
A 1970 Challenger with almost 400 horsepower was about $25K in today's dollars. $25K today gets you something like a WRX or Mazdaspeed 3, which will absolutely _crush_ that car in anything but a straight line, and on period correct tires will also beat it in a straight line. C'mon, aside from missing that V8 engine noise, we're living in a golden age.
The whole design-build-promote process created something that a lot of people really, really want. Design goals achieved. Raw functionality is kind of moot in a product that exists solely for our amusement (plus the occasional phone call). The only thing that matters is whether or not the thing delivers $300 worth of happiness to its owners. iPods/iPhones have never been practical devices--they're electronics as jewelry. That was immediately apparent the second I picked up my first iPod. There was this "holy shit, I've never seen electronics this beautiful before" moment. It ain't about what it actually _does_. This is why no one is talking about the iPhone as a blackberry replacement.
I love my apple laptops but don't particularly lust after a lot of their products. That doesn't mean that from a Good Design = Happy Users For Whatever Reason standpoint, almost all their products are major successes.
I've read the UN reports, and to me it's clear there's NOT scientific consensus on the _cause_ of global warming or what's going to happen 50 years from now.
My problem with Al Gore and the rest of the Chicken Littles is the way they frame the argument. It's a lot of "everyone agrees that we're most definitely causing the end of the world and we have to act this very second" as opposed to the truth. The truth is really pretty simple: Things are warming up. That warming is correlated to human activities. It seems likely that we're causing the warming, but because we're not doing a nice controlled experiment, there's no easy way to determine causality.
Science doesn't speak in absolute truths. Talking heads trying to scare people into action via sound bites do.
IMO the doomsday scenario arguments are poorly framed, and have enough holes that industry shills can obfuscate the issue so much that nothing gets done. As surprisingly few people have suggested, a lack of strong evidence for direct causality doesn't mean we shouldn't act immediately. Sure, it'll cost billions or even trillions of dollars to convert to alternative fuels. But even if there were only a 10% chance that anthropogenic global warming is real, it's worth the investment. Switching to clean energy has tons of side benefits, too, given that we'd be jump starting a whole new industry, diversifying our energy supply, lowering asthma rates in places with a lot of exhaust pollution, etc.
That just seems harder to argue with than scare tactics based on misinterpretation of science.
Every organization has a culture. From Wikipedia: "Organizational culture, or corporate culture, comprises the attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values of an organization. It has been defined as "the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization"
I think it's pretty easy to suss out some common attitudes, beliefs and values of the law enforcement community. Most cops I've known have watched too many movies. They usually believe that they're somehow sacrificing a lot to be cops...doing a dangerous, thankless job. They frickin' revel in that idea and don't want to admit that they get more out of it (power, prestige, job security, self-righteousness, etc) than they put in...why else would they keep doing it? They believe in some sort of brotherhood of law enforcement. They're trained to see the world in black and white terms (although the good ones see through that BS). They think they're the only thing between good people and chaos. Even bad, lazy cops think these things. 'cause (duh) it's part of the culture of law enforcement.
Cops ARE just regular people. They don't like to admit mistakes or be proven wrong. They've got problems with tunnel vision and group-think. Same as every group. Within their culture, you've got lazy donut eaters and go-getters. Just like within ANY culture you've got donut eaters and go-getters.
The problem is, when say, Nabisco, starts having problems with group-think or can't admit mistakes, what's the worst that happens? You wind up with some bad Wheat Thins and consumers stop buying their crackers. When law enforcement has the same problem they start rounding up all the Japanese and putting them internment camps.
So the continent takes millions of years to go a couple of miles and you can't wait until you're back in the lab to figure out where it's going next? Sheesh.
If it's true, this shouldn't come as some huge surprise. MOST drugs people use recreationally have some sort of valid pharmacological use. Alcohol for your vascular system, pot for your glaucoma/cancer pain/whatever, heroin for the crushing sadness in your heart, coke for staying awake and alert during 12 hour stints at the wheel of your 18-wheeler, etc.
You're living in a crazy reality if you think that there's a way to separate privacy rights from technology. This is precisely the sort of story that I'd expect slashdotters to offer some insight into.
Simple. Every business has slow periods and busy periods. You try to even that out as much as possible, but it's a fact of life. So, either the company can have massive excess capacity, which means a lot of bored, probably underpaid people and wasted profit; or it can run a little bit understaffed for those busy periods, but consequently pay people better and/or make more profit.
In my experience, universities & government tends towards the former and most private companies tend towards the latter.
I think you're missing the point. Access to individual resources is not what's important here. The careful management of a very limited public good is what's important. In Canada they have a healthcare system and not a weird mishmash of independent healthcare providers wasting/duplicating resources in order to compete in profitable markets, while unprofitable (but potentially more important/better bang for the buck) markets go unserved.
Of _course_ you're going to wait longer for care when you're sick with a non-life threatening disease. There are a limited number of MRI machines (and in fact, even in our 'free market' our government limits how many of them get put into use) and their use has to be prioritized. Some rich guy is supposed to get instant access to an MRI to check out his knee while the middle class woman with brain cancer waits for him? You're living in a sick, warped reality if you think so.
So yeah, in limited areas the US healthcare market works better. However, the simple fact remains that Canucks live longer and spend less on healthcare, and that doesn't even begin to take into account the massive positive impact a healthy workforce has on the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
I do think records sound, in general, a little warmer when I hear them. However, I don't think it has anything to do with the vinyl.
Most older recordings on LP were made using tube amps. Tube amps DO, in general, sound warmer than their modern digital counterparts and there are actual science-y reasons for this. Likewise, most of the time when I hear vinyl, it's being played back on older equipment. Well broken in speakers, old amps (sometimes also tube amps), etc. Not that you NEED a tube amp and $10,000 speakers. My home setup with one of those cheap $30 sonic impact t-amps and a couple of nice homemade full range speakers, and it sounds awesome. Play back a good mp3 of an older recording and it'll sound really, really nice.
I know _nothing_ about how modern recording studios function, but I suspect that the ears of sound engineers have changed as technology has improved, and what you or I consider "warmness" is actually "muddiness" to them. It's analogous to the way 35mm film looks "warmer" than a digital image. The way noise and high/low clipping manifests itself is very different and some people still prefer film to digital even though it's obviously "inferior".
Not that I think fiber isn't the future, but copper prices don't seem to have much to do with it. For in-home wiring, cable runs are short enough that the amount of copper involved is pretty frickin' small, especially compared to the copper in your electric car. Plus, with the housing market cooling off, copper prices are holding fairly steady. If it were really going to be in such hot demand, wouldn't speculators have already driven the price through the roof?
You just described why Mac OS is a better day to day operating system, and Linux is the vasty more configurable one.
I should have to sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg-plow to get a GUI, ya know? Yet, it's nice to know I can if I have to.
I don't think either OS is poaching much from the other's pool of users.
That's funny, because where I work the heavens opened up and the angels sang when they cleared 5%. That was considered insane profitability for a health system. Grocery stores are more profitable. Sure, docs are well paid, and execs make six figures, but they _are_ running a > billion dollar company.
The reason those little outpatient clinics are so cheap is that they're outpatient clinics and don't have the overhead an inpatient hospital does. It costs $1M to $2M to build and equip each and every room with a bed in a hospital. That's not operating costs, staffing, etc. That's what it costs to put the room, bed, equipment and incremental ancillary support (cafeteria, mechanical, etc) there. No ORs or MRI rooms or anything. Just beds. And facilities are only about 10% of the cost of doing business.
I'm left wondering how you can file a series of lawsuits inadvertently
Um, it's easy to understand if you've ever worked for any large organization. Has anyone here had the experience of not knowing what it was that the salespeople were promising the programmers would provide? *raises hand* It's just the nature of large groups of people to do lots of stupid, contradictory things because each sub-group within the organization acts semi-autonomously. Legal departments are _always_ doing counter-productive things, because their mission is to guard the legal interests of the company, which are often directly at odds with what's morally just or what's going to please consumers. IE, suing fan clubs or suing someone for using the word Kleenex.
That said, this is a big enough issue that I don't think people at the top of the corporate food chain are totally ignorant of what is going on.
Possibly because photoshop isn't designed for n00bs, and Picasa is. You could say the same thing about AutoCAD: In microsoft draw, I can do things in 2 seconds that would take me weeks to learn in autocad! You can say the same thing about the UNIX command line vs. windows 98. Or about mapping software like ArcGIS vs. Google Earth. Should I go on? Software designed for professionals to use all day long is rarely suited for casual users, just like a dump truck isn't the best vehicle when I run down to Lowes. It's always going to be hard to use because those complex tools won't be buried twelve menus down where the casual user can ignore them. If you don't know the difference between LAB/RGB/CMYK, etc you probably shouldn't be dropping a grand on this particular software anyway.
The interface DOES suck, but I think that's mostly due to the fact that the photoshop user base might well revolt if the interface changed much all at once. Many of them have been using the same tired old GUI for a long, long time.
Yeah, but you need a two button mouse for that.
No, it cannot gracefully backup to mounted shares (unless they're on another 10.5 machine). Seems like something that apple or a 3rd party will address soon, though...
Time machine really is slick. I hook up to a usb hub and big LCD when I'm at home with my macbook, and it uses that opportunity to back things up to the usb drive I've got sitting on my desk, so there's a nice, seamless backup created every evening at the very least. Whine about how time machine is nothing new, nothing fancy, etc as much as you like. I'd be interested to know how many slashdot types back up their computers every night. I'm guessing the answer is 'not many'. And these are people that know better.
Except Skanska was the GC.
I don't think you understand how buildings like this are designed and constructed. Architects on projects like this always, always, always work with qualified structural engineers either on staff or from an outside consulting agency. This _isn't_ a failure of an individual architect. It's a failure of a full-service firm that coordinates activities across the full spectrum, from conceptual stuff to engineering all the way down the line to (presumably) the guys putting in the rivets. An architect can't do all the work, but neither can an engineer or a construction manager.
Challenging buildings like this work out all the time (see Arup) and there's nothing that says you have to have a boring building in order for the roof not to leak. It just costs more. Obviously someone was cutting corners in there somewhere.
I don't that's the only reason government expands. As someone who has worked in a few bureaucracies, here's what I have seen:
Every small group withing a large organization has a budget and an area of responsibility. If that group does its job well AND manages its political capital well, it gets more money next year. Its area of responsibility grows. It branches out in new directions. If it's really successful, in a few years it looks very little like the original group. Multiply this effect by ten thousand and you understand why the federal government continues to grow. Now, in a smaller government (cities, counties, universities, etc) eventually you run into a budget crunch and things get cut back. Corporate intervention isn't necessary for government bloating.
Now, one thing I'd be interested in whether or not our government is really bigger than it was a hundred years ago, as a percent of GDP. I suspect that our federal government doesn't cost all that much more than it did then. In terms of the actual number of individuals responsible for administration of the law (ie, take out medicare/military spending) I bet we're way more efficient now than ever before.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdoc.cfm?index=3521&type=0 says Gov't/GDP only went up 3% from 1950 to 2000.
And if you want to talk about how our personal freedom changes over time, you should read your history books. I'd start with the chapters on the various sedition acts. Or maybe the Japanese internment. McCarthyism? Slavery? Sure, this is a dark period, but things _have_ been worse.
No clue how realistic this scenario is. I read about it on the Internet.
I think a lot of people just don't want a good all-in-one solution and would rather put something together themselves EVEN IF IT IS NOT AS GOOD AS THE ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTION. For an overly-represented-on-slashdot group of people, the need to screw around with hardware and tweak kernels is just too great. The pleasure of constant tinkering is 90% of the reason they like computers in the first place. Others are just so anti-fashion that a Mac is _NEVER_ going to happen for them..which goes so far off the anti-fashion scale as to circle back around to the fashionista side of things.
Tell that to the French, or the English, or any one of the other old-world superpowers that got their asses handed to them by what we'd call terrorists in SE Asia, North Africa, etc in the last century. Winning a war against a superpower is all about getting the public's attention and breaking their will to continue to dominate you, and it _has_ worked in the past.
It's virtually impossible to 'defeat' terrorists because you can always shoot down a $100M airplane with a $10,000 missile or blow up a million dollar tank with a bomb made out of scraps found in some abandoned ammo dump, or find a hole in a long enough fence, or sneak past security with forged documents. If a billion dollar company like Apple (ooh, bringing it back to tech!) can't lock down something as simple as a phone, why do we think we can lock down an entire country? I totally agree that this is not where we should be spending our limited resources. I'd much rather have universal healthcare and a 30 hour work week. :)
A 1970 Challenger with almost 400 horsepower was about $25K in today's dollars. $25K today gets you something like a WRX or Mazdaspeed 3, which will absolutely _crush_ that car in anything but a straight line, and on period correct tires will also beat it in a straight line. C'mon, aside from missing that V8 engine noise, we're living in a golden age.
I love my apple laptops but don't particularly lust after a lot of their products. That doesn't mean that from a Good Design = Happy Users For Whatever Reason standpoint, almost all their products are major successes.
I've read the UN reports, and to me it's clear there's NOT scientific consensus on the _cause_ of global warming or what's going to happen 50 years from now.
My problem with Al Gore and the rest of the Chicken Littles is the way they frame the argument. It's a lot of "everyone agrees that we're most definitely causing the end of the world and we have to act this very second" as opposed to the truth. The truth is really pretty simple: Things are warming up. That warming is correlated to human activities. It seems likely that we're causing the warming, but because we're not doing a nice controlled experiment, there's no easy way to determine causality.
Science doesn't speak in absolute truths. Talking heads trying to scare people into action via sound bites do.
IMO the doomsday scenario arguments are poorly framed, and have enough holes that industry shills can obfuscate the issue so much that nothing gets done. As surprisingly few people have suggested, a lack of strong evidence for direct causality doesn't mean we shouldn't act immediately. Sure, it'll cost billions or even trillions of dollars to convert to alternative fuels. But even if there were only a 10% chance that anthropogenic global warming is real, it's worth the investment. Switching to clean energy has tons of side benefits, too, given that we'd be jump starting a whole new industry, diversifying our energy supply, lowering asthma rates in places with a lot of exhaust pollution, etc.
That just seems harder to argue with than scare tactics based on misinterpretation of science.
After paying that much, people expect NOT to be told where they can use it and with what services.
So true. And that's why nobody buys iPods.
p.s. Pardon the bad grammar. Singular vs. Plural nouns and all that. Long day.
Every organization has a culture. From Wikipedia: "Organizational culture, or corporate culture, comprises the attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values of an organization. It has been defined as "the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization"
I think it's pretty easy to suss out some common attitudes, beliefs and values of the law enforcement community. Most cops I've known have watched too many movies. They usually believe that they're somehow sacrificing a lot to be cops...doing a dangerous, thankless job. They frickin' revel in that idea and don't want to admit that they get more out of it (power, prestige, job security, self-righteousness, etc) than they put in...why else would they keep doing it? They believe in some sort of brotherhood of law enforcement. They're trained to see the world in black and white terms (although the good ones see through that BS). They think they're the only thing between good people and chaos. Even bad, lazy cops think these things. 'cause (duh) it's part of the culture of law enforcement.
Cops ARE just regular people. They don't like to admit mistakes or be proven wrong. They've got problems with tunnel vision and group-think. Same as every group. Within their culture, you've got lazy donut eaters and go-getters. Just like within ANY culture you've got donut eaters and go-getters.
The problem is, when say, Nabisco, starts having problems with group-think or can't admit mistakes, what's the worst that happens? You wind up with some bad Wheat Thins and consumers stop buying their crackers. When law enforcement has the same problem they start rounding up all the Japanese and putting them internment camps.
So the continent takes millions of years to go a couple of miles and you can't wait until you're back in the lab to figure out where it's going next? Sheesh.
If it's true, this shouldn't come as some huge surprise. MOST drugs people use recreationally have some sort of valid pharmacological use. Alcohol for your vascular system, pot for your glaucoma/cancer pain/whatever, heroin for the crushing sadness in your heart, coke for staying awake and alert during 12 hour stints at the wheel of your 18-wheeler, etc.
You're living in a crazy reality if you think that there's a way to separate privacy rights from technology. This is precisely the sort of story that I'd expect slashdotters to offer some insight into.
In my experience, universities & government tends towards the former and most private companies tend towards the latter.
Of _course_ you're going to wait longer for care when you're sick with a non-life threatening disease. There are a limited number of MRI machines (and in fact, even in our 'free market' our government limits how many of them get put into use) and their use has to be prioritized. Some rich guy is supposed to get instant access to an MRI to check out his knee while the middle class woman with brain cancer waits for him? You're living in a sick, warped reality if you think so.
So yeah, in limited areas the US healthcare market works better. However, the simple fact remains that Canucks live longer and spend less on healthcare, and that doesn't even begin to take into account the massive positive impact a healthy workforce has on the economy.