You know, interestingly enough, one of the recent advances in Japan's nuclear fuel reprocessing program is the ability to lace the fuel with mercury during production, and then recover it as platinum during the reprocessing stage. And guess what we need more of to commoditize fuel cells? Supposedly, the value of the recovered platinum would completely cover the cost of the reprocessing. The recovered fuel and the lack of waste to dispose of would just be a bonus. It's a bit off-topic I suppose, but still cool.
And yet there's still 5% that has to be dealt with somehow, over a very, very long time frame.
Actually, the 5% that's left is very low-level waste. Any material that is radioactive is -- almost by definition -- a potential power source. That's the whole point of reprocessing. All the hard stuff is still a potential power source if you put it in the right kind of reactor. The low-level stuff can be disposed of in landfills, and will be indistinguishable from the low-level radiation that is present in all landfills anyway.
You're missing my point. The parent was saying nuclear is 100% clean. My point is that there are indeed pollutants from nuclear power. That is all. There was no statement about it's relative cleanliness to other power generation methods.
In that sense, "100% clean" is always a bit of a misleading statement. Even if you walk to work instead of driving, you're producing CO2, methane, sulfur dioxide, methyl mercaptan, and a host of other toxic gases. Only slightly more than if you'd sat on your ass... but still.
Solar panels need to be produced using either semiconductor fabrication (highly polluting) -- or with more cutting-edge designs, organic synthesis (mildly to moderately polluting depending on the techniques).
Wind turbines need to be made from metals that have to be mined, smelted, forged, etc. They also require electromagnets, which usually entails the refinement of lanthanides from metal ores to get the neodymium -- and those enormous multi-stage-metal-extraction operations do produce nasty byproducts.
Hydroelectric plants damage the upstream ecosystems (although there are ways around that), flood valleys, and can actually produce quite a bit of methane gas under certain circumstances.
Etcetera.
But nuclear is so much cleaner than fossil fuel power sources that it's not even in the same league as far as pollution. Nuclear plants pollute on the scale that "green" power sources do.
For hydrogen to replace gasoline/petrodiesel, we'll need some significant advances in fuel cell technology (to commoditize them), as well as replace virtually all of our current fuel distribution system.
Actually, the nice thing with hydrogen is that there can be a smooth, continuous changeover. There are fuel cell designs that extract hydrogen directly from hydrocarbons -- like natural gas, which can already be distributed efficiently. That's not as silly as it sounds. Fuel cells aren't heat engines, so they aren't limited by the Carnot cycle and can be vastly more efficient than internal combustion engines. So converting natural gas to hydrogen and putting it through a fuel cell can be more efficient than just burning the gas directly.
Or stations could produce their hydrogen on-site using cheap electricity produced using nuclear power, allowing individual communities to invest in hydrogen technology at their liesure. Early adopters would probably include transit services and the like, since they could afford their own hydrogen production equipment. Hydrogen is awesome that way -- we wouldn't need any of this centralized bullshit; anywhere that there's electricity, people could make hydrogen. And since it doesn't need to be centralized, it doesn't require everyone to convert all at once.
1. Plants absorb CO2 from atmosphere.
2. Plants get turned into ethanol.
3. The ethanol get burned.
4. The CO2 (which came from the atmosphere in the first place) returns to atmosphere, resulting in no net-change in CO2 levels.
5. GOTO 1.
Notice how the CO2 keeps getting recycled? The carbon sinks are the plants themselves. You can't release more CO2 from a plant than it absorbed in the first place (in actuality, you release less, since plants lose a portion of their biomass during development, and they produce quite a bit of underground biomass in the form of mycorrhiza and deep root systems that don't get recovered during harvesting). Every plant you grow only ever releases as much CO2 as it absorbed in the first place -- that's the neutral part.
Let's compare that to petroleum:
1. Petroleum is pumped from underground.
2. Petroleum gets burned, releasing sequestered CO2. CO2 levels increase.
3. GOTO 1.
Notice the difference?
The point here is that plants already absorb and release carbon dioxide (not to mention a huge amount of energy) in a natural cycle -- but bacteria and fungus harvest most of the energy stored in the plants, rather than us. Converting some of that biomass into ethanol lets US use it rather than them. When you convert plants to ethanol and burn it, the CO2 that is being released CAME FROM THE ATMOSPHERE IN THE FIRST PLACE. CO2 released from petroleum was sequestered hundreds of millions of years ago, and is no longer part of the carbon cycle.
Now, one can certainly have an interesting discussion about overly intensive farming, but that still doesn't change the fact that it's impossible for a plant to release more CO2 when burnt than it absorbed in the first place. There's no particular need to harm forests to make farms - although taking deadwood from forests is a perfectly good source of biomass. There is a lot of research going on to determine better ways to farm intensively without doing so much damage to the land; genetic engineering is already producing plants that require less fertilizer, fewer pesticides, and which are more nutritious.
Of course, many of the plants that are useful for producing ethanol just happen to grow wonderfully with virtually no effort at all. It's a major challenge to prevent hemp from growing -- just look at how much money the US spends trying to save America from the evils of prosperous hemp farms.
believing anything people tell you about.
Have you actually studied ecology, or trophic levels, or how energy is tranferred within food-webs, or anything even remotely related to biology or science of any kind? I have. It's actually my major in university (this is where the neoconservative typically starts babbling like a monkey with Down's syndrome about how godless and socialist anyone with a university education is). I've gone through the math, the research, the facts. As have many of the proponents of biofuels.
Most tellingly, you'll notice that even the critics of biofuels aren't stupid enough to claim that they are the same as petroleum -- anyone with an IQ over 70 understands that getting energy from plants is carbon neutral. That is, it doesn't cause a net-increase of atmospheric carbon levels, wherease petroleum DOES cause such a net-increase.
I'll state this again, so that you can realize the depths of your stupidity: even the scientists who most strongly criticize the concept of biofuels do so only because their analyses suggest that it will require using more energy from petroleum than the energy we will actually get from the biofuels. Now, if you were making THAT argument, you wouldn't be a fucking moron. But you're not -- you're making the stupid, idiotic argument that the carbon in plants was generated by magic, so burning them is no different than burning petroleum.
But what about global warming? Aren't bio-fuels the holy solution to that big problem created by those evil Bush voters? Isn't that what "you people" have been preaching all those years while talking about bio-fuels?
Using biofuels doesn't sequester carbon... but it also doesn't increase carbon emissions. I'm not sure what it is that you don't understand about this very simple concept. That's why we use the term carbon neutral. Not positive, not negative, but neutral. They even provide a nice buffering system, since any unused biomass can simply be left in place (for forest biomass) or reduced to charcoal and plowed back into the land as fertilizer (for agricultural biomass).
Let's review:
Step 1: limit the use of petroleum.
Result: CO2 levels stop rising so quickly. This will at least give the biosphere a bit more time to adapt, and provides a longer window of time in which to research more long-term solutions. After all, the supply of petroleum IS finite, and it would be nice to stretch it out until we've also found ways to make our favourite plastics from cheap, renewable sources.
Step 2: start using biofuels, to provide a mobile source of energy for vehicles. The global population is expected to peak, so the global demand for vehicle fuels should also peak. Almost everything else can just run on electricity -- but for now, vehicles need hydrocarbons.
Result: we (you, technically, since I live in a nation with an oil surplus and don't drive anyway) no longer have to pay huge amounts of cash to countries that hate us. Fuel prices are somewhat more stable, because there are many different feedstocks that can be used. CO2 emissions don't increase as a result of this, because biofuels are carbon neutral.
Step 3: expand the use of nuclear power dramatically (and anyone who says something stupid about nuclear waste gets sentenced to spend the day in the smokestack of a coal plant with a geiger counter; they also get to write an essay on why America's ban on reprocessing nuclear fuel is backwards and paranoid), to supplant at least some of the world's fossil fuel reactors. The remaining fossile fuel reactors are upgraded to be cleaner and more efficient.
Result: enough electricity to keep our industries humming along, and to supply the power for producing hydrogen (assuming that hydrogen vehicles pan out), as well as for powering electric cars (for those people that can get by with one), yet CO2 emissions level off and the ecosphere gets some time to adapt and balance itself.
Step 4: laugh at the folks who whined about how evil and terrible biofuels are.
Result: good times are had by all, except the aforementioned folk, who will probably STILL be convinced that everything was wonderful in the past and that everything is terrible now, no matter how much more peaceful, safe, free, and prosperous our society has become.
Do you understand now?
Maybe you're still confused about WHAT we'll be making biofuels FROM. You still think that we'll be turning corn into ethanol, don't you! That would explain it... you've missed the entire point about cellulosic ethanol -- turning the low-value parts of the plant into something of greater value. It's a wonderful free-market idea. Ethanol is generally worth a lot more than straw, so turning straw into ethanol is a profitable and ecologically sound thing to do. So, we open a bunch of plants that turn cellulose into ethanol, and farmers can make up their own minds about whether to sell their straw, corn husks, diseased plants, etc, based on whether it's more useful for some other purpose or not. The free market sorts it all out. All that's been missing is the will to invest in the necessary science and technologies.
Well, I was using it sarcastically. Republicans toss out the word communist to refer to absolutely anyone that they disagree with.
But fifties retro isn't that rare... especially since neoconservatives are still using the word communist without even the slightest understanding of what the word means. My associates and I frequently use the term "commie-pinko-with-aids" to refer to anything over which people show an irrational dislike or an irrational level of polarization. I mean, it sums up the whole mindset of the ultra-liberal or neo-conservative whackos (like the guy I was responding to).
An example, from one of the most inspiring Americans I've ever run across on the net, on his list of Things that need to BE DESTROYED.
American Assholes who think that it's perfectly fine to disregard or weaken the Constitutional Amendments about Freedom of Speech, Freedoms of Petition and Assembly, Seperation of Church and State, Unfair Search and Seizure, Due Process, Cruel and Unusual Punishment, and the amendments regarding elections, states' rights, minorities' rights, women's rights, etc. but if anyone DARES to suggest that maybe not everyone should be allowed to own a fully automatic assault rifle, or that maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea to check their criminal backgrounds first, then they're "GODDAMN COMMIE UNAMERICAN PINKO SCUM! HANG 'EM! YOU MEAN I GOTTA WAIT SEVEN WHOLE DAYS BEFORE I CAN UNLOAD A 32 ROUND CLIP OF HOT DEATH INTO MY BOSS IN A LITTLE OVER A SECOND AND A HALF? WHAT IS THIS? COMMUNIST CHINA?"
At the same time, you're trading ONE source of carbon (dino-fuel) for ANOTHER one, giving you a whole 0% worth of carbon emission savings.
How exactly will ethanol involve trading the one for the other? We don't have closed-cycle ethanol production yet, but that's because this kind of mass-scale ethanol production is still being developed. There's absolutely no reason at all to think that cellulosic ethanol can't be produced entirely using energy from the feedstock, and maybe electricity produced using solar, wind, nuclear, or hydroelectric power.
I'm a conservative. Not far right, but a proud right-wing person.
No, you're a proud retard. I've met real conservatives and talked to them about these issues. They're not like you. They try to actually understand science, rather than just going around whining about how the hippies want to take away their SUVs. They also don't use retard terms like "right-wing".
You're not increasing the carbon-capture effect, as you're removing ONE KIND of plant (sometimes natural forest) for ANOTHER one, giving you an extra 0% worth of carbon-absorption capacity.
Who said anything about trying to increase carbon capture? The goal is to create a mobile energy source for vehicles that is carbon-neutral. Not carbon negative, just carbon neutral.
Except that they're doing it for money. They need a plan-B in case their conventional oil operations gets fscked up, as they don't give a crap if they're making money selling oil, coal or magic fuel.
...
No, ethanol and biodiesel are the darlings of a group of environmentalists whose cause is just about trying to destroy Exxon, Shell and others
...
Remember saying this? My point was that ethanol and biodiesel aren't just being pushed by environmentalists -- they're being pushed by basically everyone except insane retards who fear change and deliberately misunderstand science to try and support their deranged fears. Oil companies, environmentalists, politicians (including conservative, Republican ones), scientists, etc. The only ones who oppose the idea are people who somehow tie renewable power to evil hippy conspiracies against them personally.
I stand by my clain that you are a retard. You don't know jack-shit about how the carbon cycle works, and you've completely dismissed a very promising set of techologies just because a few people that you dislike happen to be among the innumerable masses who support it. It's no different than me saying the Jesus is the darling of maniacs who bomb abortion clinics -- it would be a deliberate misrepresentation of Christianity on my part. Yet that's exactly the position you're taking here.
The stupidest thing is, you're suggesting that whack-job environmentalists love ethanol because it will destroy oil companies... who are themselves invested in ethanol. Do you understand how retarded that sounds? It's almost as retarded as when you claim that using less petroleum is awful, because we'll kill some plants along the way. And still not as retarded as your drivel about how not increasing global carbon levels is somehow the most evil plan ever devised by man... despite completely overlooking the fact that the oceans will still act as an enormous carbon-sink. Ethanol and biodiesel plans will only put just the tiniest little dent in the carbon sequestration part of the carbon cycle.
I don't know about you, but I would expect governments to already be protecting nuclear power plants. The presence of a reprocessing center at those sites shouldn't make a difference.
For building a dirty bomb? Any terrorist who tried to get nuclear materials for a dirty bomb from a nuclear power plant would have to be insane. They could get suitable materials from hospitals and from chemical supply companies using just a fraction of the effort.
The only realistic concern with reprocessing is the possibility of making a nuclear weapon from recovered materials -- and that's rather outside the scope of what a terrorist group might accomplish. It's a rather non-trivial task to design, build, test, and deploy a nuclear weapon. It's something that nations do. And any nation that wants to reprocess its nuclear waste is already free to do so -- France, for example, reprocesses 30% of its nuclear waste. What are you worried about, that the US government might start reprocessing its nuclear waste and build some nukes from it?
Nuclear power is not "emission free". Sure, it produces no CO2, but it produces lots of nasty stuff that we have to pack away for a few thousand years. And even if you reprocess the fuel itself, there's still lots of other material that becomes irradiated that must be disposed of.
You also fail to mention any way that nuclear power would actually work as a motor vehicle fuel. Battery technology won't let us all drive electric cars, trucks and semis. So we're left with bringing the power plant along with our vehicle. There's no way in hell we can put nuclear reactors in every car, truck and semi on the road.
Oh dear god no. I was with you up until this bullshit.
1. That nasty stuff? Coal produces more per megawatt. The only difference is that there's no way "to pack it away" -- it just goes out into the air where we have to breathe it. So if we BURNED our nuclear waste, it would STILL be cleaner than coal... and until we have enough altnerative power to dispense with coal, nuclear kicks the shit out of it.
2. Anything radioactive is, by definition, a power source. Reprocessing (which is illegal in the US... I guess your Congress LIKES nuclear waste) can allow the re-use of 95% of the "waste".
And how to power vehicles? You've heard of this "hydrogen" stuff people are going on about? Guess where we get the hydrogen? Hydrogen is a form of power storage; you can use electricity from any source to generate it, including nuclear.
No, ethanol and biodiesel are the darlings of a group of environmentalists whose cause is just about trying to destroy Exxon, Shell and others
I just had to laugh when I saw this, given that Shell in particular is investing in both ethanol and biodiesel.
I hate to toss around insults, but what a fucking retard you are!! Ethanol is the darling of farmers who want to make money because they're capitalists. See how that works? They turn corn husks and straw into ethanol, sell the ethanol, and make money. Of course, they could just keep living off of government bailouts the way they do right now... but I thought we were trying to get away from that kind of shit.
Biodiesel, meanwhile, is the darling of big industrial companies, who want to use the technologies that they developed for oil refining to turn cheap feedstocks -- like the offal from slaughterhouses, waste plastics, and so on -- into oil. They want to take cheap stuff, turn it into more valuable stuff, and sell it for money because they're capitalists. See how that works?
You communist types make me sick. You think that everyone on earth just goes around subscribing to your stupid little ideologies. Sorry, it's not the case. Most of us are a bit more pragmatic, and would like to make some money rather than your solution of just weeping like a spanked child everytime everytime you gas up your hummer and while paying the Islamic fundamentalist oil-masters.
Oh, and where do you think that the carbon in plants COMES from? That's right -- the air. It's called a cycle -- the carbon cycle. Plants consume CO2, plants die, plants rot / burn, CO2 gets released. Seriously, you ARE a retard. Possibly an inbred one, but there's no way to be sure. How do you not KNOW these things?!? Do you live in a cave? Are you a convict? Have you spent your entire life in a church basement hiding from the Great Science Conspiracy that wants to destroy you with evil notions of evolution and thermodynamics?
Where is all of this gibberish about corn coming from?! The article is about cellulosic ethanol -- it's right there in the title. No corn is required. You can make cellulosic ethanol from grass clippings, from tree branches, from discarded copies of Atlas Shrugged, etc. I'm pretty sure those things don't require fertilizer... except maybe the grass, and even then it's only to satisfy the needs of people with so little to entertain them that their sole joy in life comes from getting grass to grow as fast as possible so that they can mow it a little more often.
Thanks for not reading the article... or even the headline. The article is about CELLULOSIC ethanol. You know, cellulose? The stuff that isn't sugar?
You can make cellosic ethanol from grass clippings, those bags of leaves that everyone is getting rid of each falls, fallen tree branches, corn husks, not to mention the tonnes of produce that each and every grocery store throws away every single day because it couldn't be sold.
Who says that his encoding scheme uses fixed-length tokens? Maybe in his system, one character decodes to 256 different multicharacter strings, chosen for their frequency of use?
I'll be I could develop an encoding scheme like that for neoconservative diatribes. Let's see:
Hell, with this encoding scheme and a good pseudorandom number generator, could make state-of-the-union speeches obselete. Of course, developing a comparable encoding for hypothetical Democrat presidents is left as an exercise for the reader.
Rather than than breeding a whole bunch of dogs, why not just fire a few government officials for trying to prevent people from having some fun in their free time? That seems even easier still, and it actually increases personal freedom rather than decreasing it.
No one said anything about a single-payer system. They do work extremely well in practice, but still, single-payer is not the last word in socialized healthcare. But any socialized system has to be universally available -- exluding folk based on bizarre, arcane conditions, so that they don't find out they're getting a bill until after their trip to the hospital, etc.
It's often very much rival (if I see the doctor, someone else has to wait) and very much excludable.
Unfortunately, under the current system, if you see the doctor for a nasty outbreak of excema, somone else may have to wait in the lobby with a severed artery. And I'm not making that claim lightly. The private system tends to place specialists not where they're needed, but where the money is. The rich need their skin tended, so the doctors are working doing that rather than performing skin grafts for poor folks who need it. With the exception of the emergency, where triage rules, a wealthy person's splinter can easily take priority over the uninsured fellow who needs his hand sewn back on.
The Army, for instance: my being in the country doesn't mean we're any less safe from war (it's nonrival) and, if you were taking up a collection to pay for it and I didn't, you couldn't exactly say "oh, everyone in this country can be safe from war, except for that guy over there." (nonexcludable).
Sure it's excludable. When an invasion occurs, no one bothers to protect your house when the enemy wants to loot it and send you to the gulags. No one bothers to try and rescue you either if you're taken as a conscripted labourer by the enemy. The army isn't working on your behalf. And of course, it ignores the fundamental question: what if I don't agree that an army is necessary at all? Maybe I don't believe that anyone will invade my country; why do you have such a disgusting sense of entitlement to take MY money to alleviate YOUR xenophobia?
Besides, how is that different than healthcare -- if you get treated for TB, you can't pass it on to the uninsured family next door, even though they didn't pay for that service. Seriously, outbreaks of serious illnesses are a much more plausible threat than war -- the preventable infections (mostly the flu) kill more Americans per year than war, crime, and suicide combined. Making sure that your neighbour's family gets antibiotics and flu shots means less chance that they'll pass some nasty bug on to your family.
Those free-market things some people love to talk about only really work so wondrously well if transaction costs are low, and there aren't barriers to entry: roads don't really qualify (a, tollbooths - even with modern speed-pass-whatever, and b, natural geographic monopolies on 'em).
Libertarians would disagree with you. If your property has a road with a tollbooth, and my property has a road that I've licensed to a corporation for a yearly fee and which generates revenue using road-side advertising instead of tolls... whose going to make money? Or the people in a region can form a cooperative to own and operate a free road system on their respective lands -- that way, there's no coercion involved. If someone wants out... well, they'll have a hard time getting anywhere. Talk to some libertarians sometime, they've actually thought about this stuff, rather than simply condemning it out because of your sense of entitlement to free roads.
Currency is one of those few interesting cases where there's a greater benefit from having fewer options available, and a free market solution would be less than efficient.
The Scottish would beg to differ. They have private banks that issue their own pound sterling, which receive widespread use in Scotland and England despite not being legal tender. Is the government really necessary here?
Just wait until multiple-drug-resistant TB comes strolling through a major city. It's already simmering in among the homeless population and among the injection-drug-using population of nearly every major metropolitan area in North America. It wouldn't take much for it to break out into the population at large.
People like to bring up the fact that fire departments are a public service because you need the fire on your neighbour's house put out right away, regardless of whether he can pay. So what if he gets an serious infectious disease? Be nice if he could get treated before it spreads to your family. Same goes for the junky who walked into the cornerstore just before you did, getting whatever germs he might be carrying all over the door handle, the counter, the change that the cashier is about to give to you...
The earlier in the transmission chain that a disease gets treated, the fewer people get infected. It's a pity more people don't see that.
You are, of course, welcome to disagree with what The Evidence says, to present a case for it, or to not present a case and just say I'm wrong, and disagree with what actually constitutes The Facts and what constitutes propaganda.
So... exactly what "facts" support the case for private healthcare (or more accurately, for the absence of socialized healthcare -- they're not mutually exclusive)? I'd take your side more seriously if there were ANY evidence. Right now, every single shred of real, ojective data supports the position that the free market (or what passes for it in the US) is incapable of providing reasonable levels of healthcare for more than a minority of people, while in economies very similar the that of the US, universal health care systems provide reasonable levels of care for nearly everyone, and in most cases still allow the wealthy to pursue superior levels of care.
I also don't believe that anyone else fundamentally has a right to my money (via tax dollars) to attain such health care; and not half so much offended by the idea of taxes and losing my own personal money as the sense of raw entitlement that I'm running into. (It leaves me with a very bad reaction, and far more vehement opposition to things than I would otherwise normally have).
I only buy this argument from people who likewise believe that we should privatize the armed forces. After all, it's an extremely socialist institution. That's 2.3 million personell who are living off money taken by taxation.
Assuming that you do support a public military, what makes you feel so "entitled" that you can take money from other people to assuage your own cowardice? Maybe the rest of us aren't quite so paranoid and xenophobic that we need to squander all those resources on an overblown military, vastly larger than what we could ever need for self-defensive purposes? Or maybe the rest of us believe in defending ourselves, in the form of volunteer militias and so on.
The "entitlement" argument is just so much bullshit.
I am not trying to keep anybody down and wage class warfare.
Nevertheless, that's precisely what you're doing. The portion of the population without healthcare, in most cases, can't get it.
Consider my friend Allison: at the age of 15, she developed a rather serious tumour in her cerebellum. She comes from a poor family. Luckily, we're Canadian, so she was able to have it treated it using state-of-the-art gamma knife surgery, and now she's healthy again. In the United States, she would be dead -- it took 10 years to completely treat her tumour, as it recurred several times. Allison's mother had to stop working to care for her, so there would have been no way for her to pay skyrocketing health insurance premiums, let along pay for rent and food and whatnot without the kind of disability assistance and caregiver's allowance that Canada's social welfare programs provide.
Now, you can dither and whine about whether or not her mother could have had health insurance, blah blah blah. But here's the real crux of the matter: if Allison were American, how would she be supposed to get her own health insurance once she's living on her own? She's confined to a wheelchair for life, she needs specially designed corrective lenses for an eye that will no longer track properly, she has organ damage from spending several years on steroids, etcetera. What healthcare plan is going to cover her? Is she being arrogant, or suffering from some evil sense of "entitlement", just for not wanting to DIE from the first easily treatable malady that comes along?
I just don't understand why anyone would begrudge others the basic right to live. The fact that you would get so upset at the very notion of social support is mind boggling, especially since you purport to be a moral person. Since when does a moral person expect people like
But does the government actually use that position to bargain? I don't think anyone has suggested that the entire problem is the lack of a universal coverage system -- there are certainly other aspects.
One of those is this unhealthy notion that the government shouldn't interfere with business and industry. That would be a fine principal if the government actually followed it, but they don't. So now they're in that shitty half-way position of being knee-deep in healthcare, but unwilling to involve themselves positively. Instead of bargaining prices down, the US government tends to simply accept contracts that are offered to them. In the best case they take the lowest bid; in the worst case, they take the bid offered by the CEO who happens to be golfing buddies with the beauracrat in charge of the contract. That's NOT bargaining; in fact, that's pretty much the opposite of bargaining.
Even if one did irrationally oppose universal healthcare, there are other things that could be done to help the situation.
Banning pharmaceutical patents.
Forcing the AMA/Nursing College to allow more doctors/nurses to graduate. There's something deeply, deeply disturbing about giving a profession the power to artificially limit the quantity of labour available -- especially when lives are on the line.
Forcing the AMA to accredit more immigrant doctors. There's something peculiarily disgraceful about having a skilled-labour shortage and simultaneously having people with PhDs and medical degrees driving taxis and running Donair stands. I work part-time at a service station to pay for school, and I'm actually training a guy with a medical degree. The guy who comes in to help out with maintenance can run a refinery. I've already trained a software engineer and a teacher, and I worked alongside another programmer. Granted this is getting a bit off the topic of healthcare, but it's just so insane that we all of these skilled labourers who can't use their skills because the members of the relevant professional associations don't want to see their artificially created labour shortages disappear.
Etcetera...
There's any number of things that the US could do, but it doesn't do any of them.
ALL socialized healthcare systems are, to one degree or another, "baseline" models. For example, in British Columbia (where I live), a wide variety of things aren't covered: corrective lenses, orthodontia, medication (unless you're earning below $20,000 a year), wheelchairs, prostheses, etc. LOTS of things aren't covered, and are the individual's "own problem". It's odd that you would suggest that such a system is politically unlikely... or do you just mean politically unlikely in the USA? Because frankly, it seems much MORE likely than alternatives like buying everyone free medecine and round of LASIK surgery and a pony and some tasty pies.
Your odd comment about worshipping myself still doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I don't purport to have some kind of "ideological perfection" -- there are ideologies that I emphatically disagree with yet respect. But letting people die because one is too stubborn to accept real facts about the efficacy of different healthcare models isn't one of them.
For example, if someone were to take the libertarian stance of "it's wrong to use force to coerce some people into supporting others", that would be one thing. I disagree with the premise that collectivism is wrong, but I can respect that it's coming from reasonable ethical framework.
Conversely, if someone acts as if they care about other people, and are only opposing socialized healthcare because it's soooo expensive, well then they're retarded windbags who've deliberated ignored the real data about the matter. Similarly, if someone tries to claim that "research will stop! NOOO!", they're deliberately ignoring the real state of medical research in America -- in which the research is actually done using public money in universities, and big drug companies just add a huge markup to cover marketing costs, investor relations, the CEO's new Bungelow in Micronesia, etc, despite having added nothing of value beyond the extremely inexpensive act of actually manufacturing the drugs.
Thinking about American healthcare just in terms of GDP doesn't entirely make sense. It ignores the potential for regulating the prices of drugs downwards (or to ban drug patents entirely, or at least on drugs researched using public funds). It ignores the ability of the government to bargain aggressively for reduced rates from specialists, clinics, and private practices. It overlooks the fact that as government healthcare spending increases, private spending will decrease by a greater amount, as the health insurance companies and their markups, marketing budgets, investor payouts, and so on are eliminated -- not to mention the fact that private insurance companies invariably have to pay more for the same medical procedures because they can't bargain at anywhere near the same scale as the government.
If it's a disagreement about something upon which reasonable people could hold different opinions, then sure. I wouldn't think less of someone for, say, not enjoying industrial music, or for thinking that Britney Spears makes really good movies. I wouldn't condemn someone for disagreeing with my theory that war is a natural and instinctual Human behaviour, and instead held the more commonly accepted theory that war is purely economic. There isn't enough evidence either way, so reasonable can disagree.
But reasonable people DO NOT ignore data that threatens their position. People who do that are dangerously irrational.
Reasonable people also also don't expect other people to die just so that we can claim that our society is keepin' it real, capitalist-style. People who cling to an ideology even when it means that millions of people suffer from and die from preventable illnesses... well, I just can't say enough bad things about them. They are either too stupid to hold sensible opinions (I suppose I might have some pity on such people, but it's hard...) or too evil to care about the suffering of others, in which I don't feel even the slightest resistance to mocking and insulting them.
And the SUV thing was what is known as a caricature -- a literary device that you may have heard of by this point in your life. I suspect you have, since you did the same thing with your little comment about "You're a boogerhead so there!". Obviously, I never said that or anything like it (this is actually the first time in the last two decades that I've used the word "booger", even if only in quotation).
Where did this silly notion that people can't use strong language in debate come from? What purpose does it serve? If you can't insult morons who hold stupid positions, who the hell can you insult?
Worshipping myself?! What are you, some kind of deranged fundamentalist christian? I mean wow, what a bizarre and insane thing to accuse anyone of.
So... you deny that you are either Christian or that you vote for the Republicans in federal elections (since the GOP dominates the Republican party at the federal level). I find that hard to believe. Actually, I could believe that you're a muslim. They almost achieve that same level of contempt for their neighbours that Christians and neocons exhibit. The church of satan theoretically endorses that kind of selfishness as well, but in practice its followers all seem to be very compassionate and highly liberal.
Maybe you believe that you are a libertarian? No, that doesn't work either. A libertarian wouldn't be so pathetically deluded as to need to lie to themselves about socialized healthcare not working. A libertarian accepts that collectivist policies may be more practical and effective than liberal ones; they don't oppose collectivism on practical grounds, they oppose it on ethical grounds. Only neoconservatives and fundamentalist Christians are so divorced from reality that they can't accept what every single piece of legitimate research into healthcare programs has found -- that socialized healthcare works much, much better than private healthcare.
So you honestly believe that fewer than 1000 American women with breast cancer go without medications that could prolong their lives?
Are figures really necessary? If you're too moronic to understand this issue for yourself, here we go:
You already know that 18% of Americans have no health coverage whatsoever (unless your FoxNews-addled mind can't undertstand basic facts, something that conservatives are renowned for); American women have a 1 in 8 chance of developing invasive breast cancer, and approximately 50% of Americans are women.
Assuming that uninsured Americans are equally distributed across both genders (an unreasonable assumption, since men have approximately 40% higher income on average, and thus are more likely to be the ones with health coverage), that's 3.38 MILLION American women who DO have breast cancer and DON'T have the basic health coverage necessary to pay for surgery, medication, chemo, or even a trip to the GP to find out why their chest hurts so goddam much.
So, let's review:
In Britain, it is newsworthy that 1000 women couldn't get some particular breast cancer drug.
In America, no one gives a flying shit that 3.38 milllion women will get breast cancer and receive no treatment whatsoever. It's considered so irrelevant that it's considered vulgar to even suggest that they could be helped, something that only a filthy liberal would even consider.
But hey, far be it from me to get in the way of your "buying myself a second HumVee is more important than whether other people die of preventable causes" belief system.
And government is always the LEAST efficient bureaucracy of all so socialized medicine would be even worse than what we have now, not to mention unconstitutional.
It's irrelevant whether or not the government is less efficient than other beauracracies -- one beauracracy is ALWAYS cheaper than dozens or hundreds of them, all getting in each other's way and interfering with each other's operations.
Sadly, reality is not on your side here. Which is nice-speak for "you're too stupid to be taken seriously by anyone". Nations with socialized healthcare systems provide better healthcare to the vast majority of their populations, at a fraction of the price. 80% of Canadians have superior healthcare to their American counterparts, and Canada's per-capita spending on Healthcare is less than half what America's is. As I said before, reality is not on your side here.
Actually healthcare would cost a LOT less if the federal government didn't regulate the industry. If the FDA (which is unconstitutional anyway) didn't exist, then there would not be such a huge cost of overhead in drug development.
Let's confine our discussion to the real world... although I sense that you have problems in this regard.
It would be nice if absolutely anyone could practice medicine or sell drugs, and there could be real competition in healthcare. But it will never happen. That's just not how real world societies function. Sane people (by which I mean not-you) accept reality and work to achieve the best possible results in it, rather than fantasizing about some mythical anarcho-syndicalist society that can never actually exist.
I particularly like the fact that you yourself have already noted that the US constitution is no longer in effect, and no longer has even the slightest relevance to how Americans conduct their political affairs... and yet you seem to still think that the claim "it's unconstitutional" is somehow meaningful.
So... how many American women who need that drug can't get it?
* sound of crickets chirping goes here *
Hundreds of thousands? Millions? That's what I thought.
Case closed, asshole. Thanks for proving my point -- any problem you can find with socialized healthcare appears a hundred times over in the Human-life-as-a-commodity system.
You knew exactly what I meant, and you deliberately misinterpreted it -- I would suggest that this can tell you something about just how completely flawed and stupid your position is.
People must have a fundamental disconnect with Reality. If there's one thing you can be certain about in life, it's death.
But from preventable causes? Do you really think kids should be dying from diseases that can be easily cured, just because they can't afford Doctor's fees?
Yes, the Government and various philanthropists and such can fund research and develop drugs without all this money-making hooplah. But if you take it away, there are drugs which are not going to be researched and which will simply will not exist. Your choice is this: live in a world where you pay lots of money for fancy drugs (and cover the marketing and the investors) which save your life (or just make it better) but put you in debt, or live in a world where you don't even have the option of going into debt to save your life because nobody researched that particular drug. You don't get a cheap Get-Out-Of-Illness-Free card.
Now this is completely laughable. You ARE a GOP puppet -- you've bought into their delusional and inaccurate view of the world.
Most basic drug research gets done at publically funded institutions already. Pharmaceutical companies mostly just find new uses for old drugs, so that they can get new patents. And then they use their patents to prevent research that isn't profitable, even if that research is by other companies or independent researchers.
When you pay those high drug prices, all you are paying for is the marketing. Your taxes paid for most of the research already. Is it really worth it, just to see a colourful label and a catchy name on the drug? Do you really prefer to pay more just for some shiny adverts in magazines?
Sure, a nationalized system might make things better in the short run by yanking a bunch of already-researched drugs into a more affordable state, but that's not a sustainable solution.
Funny, nations with nationalized systems seem to produce new drugs all the time. They seem to have all kinds of new medical research going on. And they seem to have sustained themselves for at least a few decades now, with no signs of coming apart yet.
You see, this is why I used the word ignorance. You ARE deeply ignorant -- you lack the basic facts upon which to base an opinion about socialized healthcare.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that you are deeply and personally offended by the notion of poor folk, folk with permanent disabilities, single parents, and the like, being able to receive the same level of healthcare as yourself. Being a staunch GOP supporting puppet, you see everything in life, including life itself, as a commodity -- and you hate to even imagine a world in which your wealth can't buy you preferential access to that commodity. You need to be able to live a longer, healthier life than the poor, because somehow all the other advantages that wealth gives you over them just aren't enough. You need to seem them suffer with treatable illnesses and ultimately die young, so that you can know that you're better than them -- which is ultimately the basis of the entire neoconservative mindset.
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- Solar panels need to be produced using either semiconductor fabrication (highly polluting) -- or with more cutting-edge designs, organic synthesis (mildly to moderately polluting depending on the techniques).
- Wind turbines need to be made from metals that have to be mined, smelted, forged, etc. They also require electromagnets, which usually entails the refinement of lanthanides from metal ores to get the neodymium -- and those enormous multi-stage-metal-extraction operations do produce nasty byproducts.
- Hydroelectric plants damage the upstream ecosystems (although there are ways around that), flood valleys, and can actually produce quite a bit of methane gas under certain circumstances.
Etcetera.But nuclear is so much cleaner than fossil fuel power sources that it's not even in the same league as far as pollution. Nuclear plants pollute on the scale that "green" power sources do.
Actually, the nice thing with hydrogen is that there can be a smooth, continuous changeover. There are fuel cell designs that extract hydrogen directly from hydrocarbons -- like natural gas, which can already be distributed efficiently. That's not as silly as it sounds. Fuel cells aren't heat engines, so they aren't limited by the Carnot cycle and can be vastly more efficient than internal combustion engines. So converting natural gas to hydrogen and putting it through a fuel cell can be more efficient than just burning the gas directly.Or stations could produce their hydrogen on-site using cheap electricity produced using nuclear power, allowing individual communities to invest in hydrogen technology at their liesure. Early adopters would probably include transit services and the like, since they could afford their own hydrogen production equipment. Hydrogen is awesome that way -- we wouldn't need any of this centralized bullshit; anywhere that there's electricity, people could make hydrogen. And since it doesn't need to be centralized, it doesn't require everyone to convert all at once.
1. Plants absorb CO2 from atmosphere.
2. Plants get turned into ethanol.
3. The ethanol get burned.
4. The CO2 (which came from the atmosphere in the first place) returns to atmosphere, resulting in no net-change in CO2 levels.
5. GOTO 1.
Notice how the CO2 keeps getting recycled? The carbon sinks are the plants themselves. You can't release more CO2 from a plant than it absorbed in the first place (in actuality, you release less, since plants lose a portion of their biomass during development, and they produce quite a bit of underground biomass in the form of mycorrhiza and deep root systems that don't get recovered during harvesting). Every plant you grow only ever releases as much CO2 as it absorbed in the first place -- that's the neutral part.
Let's compare that to petroleum:
1. Petroleum is pumped from underground.
2. Petroleum gets burned, releasing sequestered CO2. CO2 levels increase.
3. GOTO 1.
Notice the difference?
The point here is that plants already absorb and release carbon dioxide (not to mention a huge amount of energy) in a natural cycle -- but bacteria and fungus harvest most of the energy stored in the plants, rather than us. Converting some of that biomass into ethanol lets US use it rather than them. When you convert plants to ethanol and burn it, the CO2 that is being released CAME FROM THE ATMOSPHERE IN THE FIRST PLACE. CO2 released from petroleum was sequestered hundreds of millions of years ago, and is no longer part of the carbon cycle.
Now, one can certainly have an interesting discussion about overly intensive farming, but that still doesn't change the fact that it's impossible for a plant to release more CO2 when burnt than it absorbed in the first place. There's no particular need to harm forests to make farms - although taking deadwood from forests is a perfectly good source of biomass. There is a lot of research going on to determine better ways to farm intensively without doing so much damage to the land; genetic engineering is already producing plants that require less fertilizer, fewer pesticides, and which are more nutritious.
Of course, many of the plants that are useful for producing ethanol just happen to grow wonderfully with virtually no effort at all. It's a major challenge to prevent hemp from growing -- just look at how much money the US spends trying to save America from the evils of prosperous hemp farms.
Have you actually studied ecology, or trophic levels, or how energy is tranferred within food-webs, or anything even remotely related to biology or science of any kind? I have. It's actually my major in university (this is where the neoconservative typically starts babbling like a monkey with Down's syndrome about how godless and socialist anyone with a university education is). I've gone through the math, the research, the facts. As have many of the proponents of biofuels.Most tellingly, you'll notice that even the critics of biofuels aren't stupid enough to claim that they are the same as petroleum -- anyone with an IQ over 70 understands that getting energy from plants is carbon neutral. That is, it doesn't cause a net-increase of atmospheric carbon levels, wherease petroleum DOES cause such a net-increase.
I'll state this again, so that you can realize the depths of your stupidity: even the scientists who most strongly criticize the concept of biofuels do so only because their analyses suggest that it will require using more energy from petroleum than the energy we will actually get from the biofuels. Now, if you were making THAT argument, you wouldn't be a fucking moron. But you're not -- you're making the stupid, idiotic argument that the carbon in plants was generated by magic, so burning them is no different than burning petroleum.
Using biofuels doesn't sequester carbon ... but it also doesn't increase carbon emissions. I'm not sure what it is that you don't understand about this very simple concept. That's why we use the term carbon neutral . Not positive, not negative, but neutral. They even provide a nice buffering system, since any unused biomass can simply be left in place (for forest biomass) or reduced to charcoal and plowed back into the land as fertilizer (for agricultural biomass).
Let's review:
Do you understand now?
Maybe you're still confused about WHAT we'll be making biofuels FROM. You still think that we'll be turning corn into ethanol, don't you! That would explain it... you've missed the entire point about cellulosic ethanol -- turning the low-value parts of the plant into something of greater value. It's a wonderful free-market idea. Ethanol is generally worth a lot more than straw, so turning straw into ethanol is a profitable and ecologically sound thing to do. So, we open a bunch of plants that turn cellulose into ethanol, and farmers can make up their own minds about whether to sell their straw, corn husks, diseased plants, etc, based on whether it's more useful for some other purpose or not. The free market sorts it all out. All that's been missing is the will to invest in the necessary science and technologies.
The same goes for biodiesel. Municipal dumps
But fifties retro isn't that rare... especially since neoconservatives are still using the word communist without even the slightest understanding of what the word means. My associates and I frequently use the term "commie-pinko-with-aids" to refer to anything over which people show an irrational dislike or an irrational level of polarization. I mean, it sums up the whole mindset of the ultra-liberal or neo-conservative whackos (like the guy I was responding to).
An example, from one of the most inspiring Americans I've ever run across on the net, on his list of Things that need to BE DESTROYED.
-- NegativePositive. http://negativepositive.org/I stand by my clain that you are a retard. You don't know jack-shit about how the carbon cycle works, and you've completely dismissed a very promising set of techologies just because a few people that you dislike happen to be among the innumerable masses who support it. It's no different than me saying the Jesus is the darling of maniacs who bomb abortion clinics -- it would be a deliberate misrepresentation of Christianity on my part. Yet that's exactly the position you're taking here.
The stupidest thing is, you're suggesting that whack-job environmentalists love ethanol because it will destroy oil companies ... who are themselves invested in ethanol. Do you understand how retarded that sounds? It's almost as retarded as when you claim that using less petroleum is awful, because we'll kill some plants along the way. And still not as retarded as your drivel about how not increasing global carbon levels is somehow the most evil plan ever devised by man... despite completely overlooking the fact that the oceans will still act as an enormous carbon-sink. Ethanol and biodiesel plans will only put just the tiniest little dent in the carbon sequestration part of the carbon cycle.
For building a dirty bomb? Any terrorist who tried to get nuclear materials for a dirty bomb from a nuclear power plant would have to be insane. They could get suitable materials from hospitals and from chemical supply companies using just a fraction of the effort.
The only realistic concern with reprocessing is the possibility of making a nuclear weapon from recovered materials -- and that's rather outside the scope of what a terrorist group might accomplish. It's a rather non-trivial task to design, build, test, and deploy a nuclear weapon. It's something that nations do. And any nation that wants to reprocess its nuclear waste is already free to do so -- France, for example, reprocesses 30% of its nuclear waste. What are you worried about, that the US government might start reprocessing its nuclear waste and build some nukes from it?
1. That nasty stuff? Coal produces more per megawatt. The only difference is that there's no way "to pack it away" -- it just goes out into the air where we have to breathe it. So if we BURNED our nuclear waste, it would STILL be cleaner than coal... and until we have enough altnerative power to dispense with coal, nuclear kicks the shit out of it.
2. Anything radioactive is, by definition, a power source. Reprocessing (which is illegal in the US... I guess your Congress LIKES nuclear waste) can allow the re-use of 95% of the "waste".
And how to power vehicles? You've heard of this "hydrogen" stuff people are going on about? Guess where we get the hydrogen? Hydrogen is a form of power storage; you can use electricity from any source to generate it, including nuclear.
I hate to toss around insults, but what a fucking retard you are!! Ethanol is the darling of farmers who want to make money because they're capitalists. See how that works? They turn corn husks and straw into ethanol, sell the ethanol, and make money. Of course, they could just keep living off of government bailouts the way they do right now... but I thought we were trying to get away from that kind of shit.
Biodiesel, meanwhile, is the darling of big industrial companies, who want to use the technologies that they developed for oil refining to turn cheap feedstocks -- like the offal from slaughterhouses, waste plastics, and so on -- into oil. They want to take cheap stuff, turn it into more valuable stuff, and sell it for money because they're capitalists. See how that works?
You communist types make me sick. You think that everyone on earth just goes around subscribing to your stupid little ideologies. Sorry, it's not the case. Most of us are a bit more pragmatic, and would like to make some money rather than your solution of just weeping like a spanked child everytime everytime you gas up your hummer and while paying the Islamic fundamentalist oil-masters.
Oh, and where do you think that the carbon in plants COMES from? That's right -- the air. It's called a cycle -- the carbon cycle. Plants consume CO2, plants die, plants rot / burn, CO2 gets released. Seriously, you ARE a retard. Possibly an inbred one, but there's no way to be sure. How do you not KNOW these things?!? Do you live in a cave? Are you a convict? Have you spent your entire life in a church basement hiding from the Great Science Conspiracy that wants to destroy you with evil notions of evolution and thermodynamics?
Where is all of this gibberish about corn coming from?! The article is about cellulosic ethanol -- it's right there in the title. No corn is required. You can make cellulosic ethanol from grass clippings, from tree branches, from discarded copies of Atlas Shrugged, etc. I'm pretty sure those things don't require fertilizer... except maybe the grass, and even then it's only to satisfy the needs of people with so little to entertain them that their sole joy in life comes from getting grass to grow as fast as possible so that they can mow it a little more often.
You can make cellosic ethanol from grass clippings, those bags of leaves that everyone is getting rid of each falls, fallen tree branches, corn husks, not to mention the tonnes of produce that each and every grocery store throws away every single day because it couldn't be sold.
I'll be I could develop an encoding scheme like that for neoconservative diatribes. Let's see:
! : "terrorist"
....
" : "threat"
# : "alkayda"
$ : "nuhkular"
% : "evil"
& : "god"
' : "uh"
( : "foo"
) : "mah"
* : "fooled"
+ : "again"
, : "huggle-icious"
- : "texas"
. : "wmd"
/ : "mission"
0 : "accomplished"
1 : "damnliberalcommiepinko"
2 : "long"
3 : "war"
4 : "oil
Hell, with this encoding scheme and a good pseudorandom number generator, could make state-of-the-union speeches obselete. Of course, developing a comparable encoding for hypothetical Democrat presidents is left as an exercise for the reader.
Rather than than breeding a whole bunch of dogs, why not just fire a few government officials for trying to prevent people from having some fun in their free time? That seems even easier still, and it actually increases personal freedom rather than decreasing it.
Wasn't it around 45 in Las Vegas yesterday?
Unfortunately, under the current system, if you see the doctor for a nasty outbreak of excema, somone else may have to wait in the lobby with a severed artery. And I'm not making that claim lightly. The private system tends to place specialists not where they're needed, but where the money is. The rich need their skin tended, so the doctors are working doing that rather than performing skin grafts for poor folks who need it. With the exception of the emergency, where triage rules, a wealthy person's splinter can easily take priority over the uninsured fellow who needs his hand sewn back on.
Sure it's excludable. When an invasion occurs, no one bothers to protect your house when the enemy wants to loot it and send you to the gulags. No one bothers to try and rescue you either if you're taken as a conscripted labourer by the enemy. The army isn't working on your behalf. And of course, it ignores the fundamental question: what if I don't agree that an army is necessary at all? Maybe I don't believe that anyone will invade my country; why do you have such a disgusting sense of entitlement to take MY money to alleviate YOUR xenophobia?
Besides, how is that different than healthcare -- if you get treated for TB, you can't pass it on to the uninsured family next door, even though they didn't pay for that service. Seriously, outbreaks of serious illnesses are a much more plausible threat than war -- the preventable infections (mostly the flu) kill more Americans per year than war, crime, and suicide combined. Making sure that your neighbour's family gets antibiotics and flu shots means less chance that they'll pass some nasty bug on to your family.
Libertarians would disagree with you. If your property has a road with a tollbooth, and my property has a road that I've licensed to a corporation for a yearly fee and which generates revenue using road-side advertising instead of tolls... whose going to make money? Or the people in a region can form a cooperative to own and operate a free road system on their respective lands -- that way, there's no coercion involved. If someone wants out ... well, they'll have a hard time getting anywhere. Talk to some libertarians sometime, they've actually thought about this stuff, rather than simply condemning it out because of your sense of entitlement to free roads.
The Scottish would beg to differ. They have private banks that issue their own pound sterling, which receive widespread use in Scotland and England despite not being legal tender. Is the government really necessary here?
Why does it fell like I'm arguing the anarch
People like to bring up the fact that fire departments are a public service because you need the fire on your neighbour's house put out right away, regardless of whether he can pay. So what if he gets an serious infectious disease? Be nice if he could get treated before it spreads to your family. Same goes for the junky who walked into the cornerstore just before you did, getting whatever germs he might be carrying all over the door handle, the counter, the change that the cashier is about to give to you...
The earlier in the transmission chain that a disease gets treated, the fewer people get infected. It's a pity more people don't see that.
So... exactly what "facts" support the case for private healthcare (or more accurately, for the absence of socialized healthcare -- they're not mutually exclusive)? I'd take your side more seriously if there were ANY evidence. Right now, every single shred of real, ojective data supports the position that the free market (or what passes for it in the US) is incapable of providing reasonable levels of healthcare for more than a minority of people, while in economies very similar the that of the US, universal health care systems provide reasonable levels of care for nearly everyone, and in most cases still allow the wealthy to pursue superior levels of care.
I only buy this argument from people who likewise believe that we should privatize the armed forces. After all, it's an extremely socialist institution. That's 2.3 million personell who are living off money taken by taxation.
Assuming that you do support a public military, what makes you feel so "entitled" that you can take money from other people to assuage your own cowardice? Maybe the rest of us aren't quite so paranoid and xenophobic that we need to squander all those resources on an overblown military, vastly larger than what we could ever need for self-defensive purposes? Or maybe the rest of us believe in defending ourselves, in the form of volunteer militias and so on.
The "entitlement" argument is just so much bullshit.
Nevertheless, that's precisely what you're doing. The portion of the population without healthcare, in most cases, can't get it.
Consider my friend Allison: at the age of 15, she developed a rather serious tumour in her cerebellum. She comes from a poor family. Luckily, we're Canadian, so she was able to have it treated it using state-of-the-art gamma knife surgery, and now she's healthy again. In the United States, she would be dead -- it took 10 years to completely treat her tumour, as it recurred several times. Allison's mother had to stop working to care for her, so there would have been no way for her to pay skyrocketing health insurance premiums, let along pay for rent and food and whatnot without the kind of disability assistance and caregiver's allowance that Canada's social welfare programs provide.
Now, you can dither and whine about whether or not her mother could have had health insurance, blah blah blah. But here's the real crux of the matter: if Allison were American, how would she be supposed to get her own health insurance once she's living on her own? She's confined to a wheelchair for life, she needs specially designed corrective lenses for an eye that will no longer track properly, she has organ damage from spending several years on steroids, etcetera. What healthcare plan is going to cover her? Is she being arrogant, or suffering from some evil sense of "entitlement", just for not wanting to DIE from the first easily treatable malady that comes along?
I just don't understand why anyone would begrudge others the basic right to live. The fact that you would get so upset at the very notion of social support is mind boggling, especially since you purport to be a moral person. Since when does a moral person expect people like
One of those is this unhealthy notion that the government shouldn't interfere with business and industry. That would be a fine principal if the government actually followed it, but they don't. So now they're in that shitty half-way position of being knee-deep in healthcare, but unwilling to involve themselves positively. Instead of bargaining prices down, the US government tends to simply accept contracts that are offered to them. In the best case they take the lowest bid; in the worst case, they take the bid offered by the CEO who happens to be golfing buddies with the beauracrat in charge of the contract. That's NOT bargaining; in fact, that's pretty much the opposite of bargaining.
Even if one did irrationally oppose universal healthcare, there are other things that could be done to help the situation.
- Banning pharmaceutical patents.
- Forcing the AMA/Nursing College to allow more doctors/nurses to graduate. There's something deeply, deeply disturbing about giving a profession the power to artificially limit the quantity of labour available -- especially when lives are on the line.
- Forcing the AMA to accredit more immigrant doctors. There's something peculiarily disgraceful about having a skilled-labour shortage and simultaneously having people with PhDs and medical degrees driving taxis and running Donair stands. I work part-time at a service station to pay for school, and I'm actually training a guy with a medical degree. The guy who comes in to help out with maintenance can run a refinery. I've already trained a software engineer and a teacher, and I worked alongside another programmer. Granted this is getting a bit off the topic of healthcare, but it's just so insane that we all of these skilled labourers who can't use their skills because the members of the relevant professional associations don't want to see their artificially created labour shortages disappear.
- Etcetera...
There's any number of things that the US could do, but it doesn't do any of them.Your odd comment about worshipping myself still doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I don't purport to have some kind of "ideological perfection" -- there are ideologies that I emphatically disagree with yet respect. But letting people die because one is too stubborn to accept real facts about the efficacy of different healthcare models isn't one of them.
For example, if someone were to take the libertarian stance of "it's wrong to use force to coerce some people into supporting others", that would be one thing. I disagree with the premise that collectivism is wrong, but I can respect that it's coming from reasonable ethical framework.
Conversely, if someone acts as if they care about other people, and are only opposing socialized healthcare because it's soooo expensive, well then they're retarded windbags who've deliberated ignored the real data about the matter. Similarly, if someone tries to claim that "research will stop! NOOO!", they're deliberately ignoring the real state of medical research in America -- in which the research is actually done using public money in universities, and big drug companies just add a huge markup to cover marketing costs, investor relations, the CEO's new Bungelow in Micronesia, etc, despite having added nothing of value beyond the extremely inexpensive act of actually manufacturing the drugs.
Thinking about American healthcare just in terms of GDP doesn't entirely make sense. It ignores the potential for regulating the prices of drugs downwards (or to ban drug patents entirely, or at least on drugs researched using public funds). It ignores the ability of the government to bargain aggressively for reduced rates from specialists, clinics, and private practices. It overlooks the fact that as government healthcare spending increases, private spending will decrease by a greater amount, as the health insurance companies and their markups, marketing budgets, investor payouts, and so on are eliminated -- not to mention the fact that private insurance companies invariably have to pay more for the same medical procedures because they can't bargain at anywhere near the same scale as the government.
But reasonable people DO NOT ignore data that threatens their position. People who do that are dangerously irrational.
Reasonable people also also don't expect other people to die just so that we can claim that our society is keepin' it real, capitalist-style. People who cling to an ideology even when it means that millions of people suffer from and die from preventable illnesses ... well, I just can't say enough bad things about them. They are either too stupid to hold sensible opinions (I suppose I might have some pity on such people, but it's hard...) or too evil to care about the suffering of others, in which I don't feel even the slightest resistance to mocking and insulting them.
And the SUV thing was what is known as a caricature -- a literary device that you may have heard of by this point in your life. I suspect you have, since you did the same thing with your little comment about "You're a boogerhead so there!". Obviously, I never said that or anything like it (this is actually the first time in the last two decades that I've used the word "booger", even if only in quotation).
Where did this silly notion that people can't use strong language in debate come from? What purpose does it serve? If you can't insult morons who hold stupid positions, who the hell can you insult?
So ... you deny that you are either Christian or that you vote for the Republicans in federal elections (since the GOP dominates the Republican party at the federal level). I find that hard to believe. Actually, I could believe that you're a muslim. They almost achieve that same level of contempt for their neighbours that Christians and neocons exhibit. The church of satan theoretically endorses that kind of selfishness as well, but in practice its followers all seem to be very compassionate and highly liberal.
Maybe you believe that you are a libertarian? No, that doesn't work either. A libertarian wouldn't be so pathetically deluded as to need to lie to themselves about socialized healthcare not working. A libertarian accepts that collectivist policies may be more practical and effective than liberal ones; they don't oppose collectivism on practical grounds, they oppose it on ethical grounds. Only neoconservatives and fundamentalist Christians are so divorced from reality that they can't accept what every single piece of legitimate research into healthcare programs has found -- that socialized healthcare works much, much better than private healthcare.
Are figures really necessary? If you're too moronic to understand this issue for yourself, here we go:
You already know that 18% of Americans have no health coverage whatsoever (unless your FoxNews-addled mind can't undertstand basic facts, something that conservatives are renowned for); American women have a 1 in 8 chance of developing invasive breast cancer, and approximately 50% of Americans are women.
Assuming that uninsured Americans are equally distributed across both genders (an unreasonable assumption, since men have approximately 40% higher income on average, and thus are more likely to be the ones with health coverage), that's 3.38 MILLION American women who DO have breast cancer and DON'T have the basic health coverage necessary to pay for surgery, medication, chemo, or even a trip to the GP to find out why their chest hurts so goddam much.
So, let's review:
In Britain, it is newsworthy that 1000 women couldn't get some particular breast cancer drug.
In America, no one gives a flying shit that 3.38 milllion women will get breast cancer and receive no treatment whatsoever. It's considered so irrelevant that it's considered vulgar to even suggest that they could be helped, something that only a filthy liberal would even consider.
But hey, far be it from me to get in the way of your "buying myself a second HumVee is more important than whether other people die of preventable causes" belief system.
Sadly, reality is not on your side here. Which is nice-speak for "you're too stupid to be taken seriously by anyone". Nations with socialized healthcare systems provide better healthcare to the vast majority of their populations, at a fraction of the price. 80% of Canadians have superior healthcare to their American counterparts, and Canada's per-capita spending on Healthcare is less than half what America's is. As I said before, reality is not on your side here.
Let's confine our discussion to the real worldIt would be nice if absolutely anyone could practice medicine or sell drugs, and there could be real competition in healthcare. But it will never happen. That's just not how real world societies function. Sane people (by which I mean not-you) accept reality and work to achieve the best possible results in it, rather than fantasizing about some mythical anarcho-syndicalist society that can never actually exist.
I particularly like the fact that you yourself have already noted that the US constitution is no longer in effect, and no longer has even the slightest relevance to how Americans conduct their political affairs... and yet you seem to still think that the claim "it's unconstitutional" is somehow meaningful.
* sound of crickets chirping goes here *
Hundreds of thousands? Millions? That's what I thought.
Case closed, asshole. Thanks for proving my point -- any problem you can find with socialized healthcare appears a hundred times over in the Human-life-as-a-commodity system.
You knew exactly what I meant, and you deliberately misinterpreted it -- I would suggest that this can tell you something about just how completely flawed and stupid your position is.
Most basic drug research gets done at publically funded institutions already. Pharmaceutical companies mostly just find new uses for old drugs, so that they can get new patents. And then they use their patents to prevent research that isn't profitable, even if that research is by other companies or independent researchers.
When you pay those high drug prices, all you are paying for is the marketing. Your taxes paid for most of the research already. Is it really worth it, just to see a colourful label and a catchy name on the drug? Do you really prefer to pay more just for some shiny adverts in magazines?
Funny, nations with nationalized systems seem to produce new drugs all the time. They seem to have all kinds of new medical research going on. And they seem to have sustained themselves for at least a few decades now, with no signs of coming apart yet.You see, this is why I used the word ignorance. You ARE deeply ignorant -- you lack the basic facts upon which to base an opinion about socialized healthcare.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that you are deeply and personally offended by the notion of poor folk, folk with permanent disabilities, single parents, and the like, being able to receive the same level of healthcare as yourself. Being a staunch GOP supporting puppet, you see everything in life, including life itself, as a commodity -- and you hate to even imagine a world in which your wealth can't buy you preferential access to that commodity. You need to be able to live a longer, healthier life than the poor, because somehow all the other advantages that wealth gives you over them just aren't enough. You need to seem them suffer with treatable illnesses and ultimately die young, so that you can know that you're better than them -- which is ultimately the basis of the entire neoconservative mindset.