I always get a chuckle out of the Aquafina bottle with it's little squiggle logo evocative of mountains. In reality, it's distilled/bottled in Munster, IN, a very flat place that is a few miles away from Lake Michigan.
It's all a matter of will. The numbers don't matter much. Do you have some latin? Look up Carthago delenda est and you'll see that the only thing saving muslims is the conviction of a majority in the west that they are worth saving. We're perfectly capable of replicating the roman experience. We just don't want to.
Oh great, right wing = klan lover and it gets moderated +3 insightful? What a way to prove the guy's point. That kind of crap is the worst stereotype mongering there is in politics and gives rise to its mirror image left winger = traitor, something that, until recently, the right has been reluctant to go full bore about. Unfortunately for the left, the self-restraint is gone and Ann Coulter's Treason is a best seller.
Meaningful reforms are not accomplished by simply adding dollars. That's just funding the status quo. The right's pushing for meaningful reforms while the left is pushing to halt reform or gut it if they can't halt it. When work requirements were proposed, the left railed against them, then when they became inevitable, argued for keeping them weak, and when they were passed have consistently argued for not strengthening them or reducing them. It's classic rear-guard resistance.
The current incarnation of this on social program reforms is to retain government control over investment decisions and unleash the SS trust fund et al from their current investment limitations imposed to try to ensure that we wouldn't have socialism via the back door of govt. buying up firms in the stock market.
Your observation on the US population is similar to your prior one on overcrowding. The US has a birthrate that hovers right around replacement level and only grows via immigration. In fact, its highest birth rate segments are immigrants. The rest of the 1st world has lower immigration and lower birth rates than the US. The 3rd world has plummeting birth rates but they are starting from much higher levels so they are still growing too but the trends are clear and they're in all the reputable statistics.
On traveling you also don't get it. I was referring to the rise of the city and the great emptying of the countryside, a phenomenon that's been going on for well over a century. People clump into cities and megalopoli because they want to be able to go to the museum more than once every few years and like the plentiful jobs there. We're discussing two entirely different time scales for these trends. On my scale, your commuting problem is a bit of white noise in the trend.
As commute times go up, businesses factor that into relocation and expansion plans and create new jobs in cities that aren't so problematic. There's a cycle of growth and retrenchment that goes on but the trend towards city living to cut down on travel continues unabated.
Islam had a great period of civilizational dominance. China did too but both have clearly fallen behind since that period. It's a fair question whether Islam can deal with modernity. The prospects aren't looking too bright by objective measurements.
As for Hitler and his disdain for the darker races, you might want to look up the history of the Nazi relationship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the SS battalions raised from among the muslims. History is history but at least don't quote selectively to give a false impression.
On the Palestinians/Israel. Muslim lands host, literally the last refugee camps from the post WW II settlement. Jews were expelled and ran for their lives all across the Middle East when Israel was established. Houses were confiscated, monies expropriated, and no restitution has ever been forthcoming. In the same era that those jews were running, the germans were being expelled from Konigsberg and other places and all sorts of populations were being shifted all over the map. Today, all those people have been settled down and their children are citizens of the land of their birth except for the Palestinians.
Why are muslims so inhospitable, so cruel, and have not let Palestinians assimilate? Why are these people born in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, etc. not given passports in the land of their birth? Why should they be any different than the Germans who were expelled or the indians who fled?
Every military analysis I've read on the 1967 war is unified in stating that Israel merely disrupted the timing of the forthcoming muslim attack by attacking first. It was pretty obvious that there would have been a war without Israeli preemption but with Israel being in a weaker military position.
Please feel free to list the sects that the doctrine of kill infidels or force them into dhimmi status doesn't apply to and then feel free to list the countries where those sects dominate.
You obviously *have* been sheltered from any reasonable exposure to the projections on all those lovely government social services you advocate. All of them pretty much require growing populations to manage things so x retirees are always supported by y workers where y is significantly larger than x. Since we're at the leading edge of a world-wide population implosion (everybody's birth rates are dropping fast, including the 3rd world) This makes for big trouble.
Modern society has been constructed to pack people tightly in order for them to travel less and have wide access to the specialized resources of the city. This concentration has nothing to do with population growth in the entire system that funds government services which would be negative if not for immigration and *is* negative in Europe, sharply so in many cases.
The old-time skeptics of govt. transfer payments called them Ponzi schemes, doomed to eventually run out of steam and collapse in a spectacular fashion. If people like you have their way and halt reform, they're likely to end up being proved right.
I expect that local governors will be appointed. It's not only the New world colonies that will provide inspiration for the new model but the bad experiences of the company towns that are likely to find an echo. A space colony is likely the best condition to promote the company town mentality with all of its freedom eroding negative tendencies.
The law man, the pastor, and the transporter need to be from a different authority chain. Also, it would probably be wise to discourage grants on entire celestial bodies but instead make people use what they claim. Thus, if there's a case of bad treatment people can get out, or worse (from the company's perspective) split off from the company and claim their own parts of the planet setting up instant competition.
Too many countries are filled with elites actively discouraging patriotism instead of ensuring it turns in healthy directions. National pride fills a vacuum in the human soul. What replaces it when it's suppressed is, frankly, more worrying to me.
We have the corporate governance we have because the shareholders have not been included in the information revolution. 50 years ago, the amount of information and control imbalance between management and shareholders was not so bad. Then, management had quarterly spreadsheets to manage their business and shareholders had yearly meetings where they were fed pap.
Today, managmeent has real time or daily updated data marts that allow them to drill down into every detail of the business providing a level of information and control that is a great leap forward in management. Shareholders have yearly meetings where they are fed pap. Everything else is 3rd party innovation that is guesswork. There are no major company provided innovations to improve shareholder oversight.
This situation cannot last. As companies veer off into their management empire building fantasies, shareholders will inevitably wake up and fix the problem. The only major questions are when and how.
Well we *could* get rid of malaria but we chickened out before we completely eradicated it. You can't blame the pharma/chemical or medical industry for that one though, it was the greens banning DDT that was the problem.
One really good prospective cure is adult stem cell research which will allow you to be fixed by yourself and without having to go on anti-rejection meds for the rest of your life. The really funny thing is that the inferior treatment of fetal cells (which leaves you dependent on anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life) get hyped oh so much more and usually by people who like to claim to superior feelings of compassion.
WW II was a great innovative period. It was not all that great for humanity and we would have been much better off short circuiting it in 1937-1938.
A pure example from the period: nazi scientists made great innovative strides in hypothermia treatment. We've never gotten better baseline data than their experiments. Their innovation was to throw jews into freezing cold water and measure how they died in various situations.
Are the scientists going to the millionaires and asking to be sent? That phase will come later. I can see John Carmack going to orbit. I can also see him funding some scientists to gow and research neat stuff after he went up but I don't see him doing the second *before* the first.
The first challenge is cheap, reusable lift which is why everybody's concentrating on the X Prize and not fundraising to send scientists to the ISS.
Actually, it's quite likely that their first impression of us has already been formed by our EM emissions long before they hit the boy bands. They may be seriously confused when they meet the rest of us but they will likely be comforted that their first contact will be with the familiar faces of Menudo or NSync.
I think I spent enough time typing to get my point across. Secular benefit for the state should generally be the qualifier. That's my position and you should be bright enough to apply it to all your other unanswered questions.
I do find it funny that your last example implies that homosexual atheists have a special talent for clothing. That one's a real blast from the past. I found it amusing, particularly considering your evident attitude about life.
The lowest incidence of sexual disease transmission is among the celibate, then amongst the monogomous.
Heterosexuality is preferred over homosexuality for good secular reason apart from religious justification. Somebody's got to repopulate the country as we all grow old and die. To ignore such basic facts of life is the sign of somebody quite young or in a very sheltered environment. You aren't, by chance, in academia are you?
Exchange handles Active Directory integration (you need to add Samba for that), IMAP, POP3, and shared collaboration folders. You can cobble together replacements for most of it except the requirement to handle MAPI for Outlook integration.
Actually, the OSS community has a considerable number of the pieces already. Exchange data store doesn't have to be replicated anymore, that's gone with Exchange 2k3. You can pull a lot of code from Samba's Active Directory section to accomplish what Microsoft had to code from scratch. Microsoft coded an SMTP, POP3, and IMAP MTA as well. The competitor merely needs to take code from best of breed apps or the apps themselves that do each of the above.
In other words, the OSS team would have a lot of work to do but a lot of the work is already done by the Sendmail, Samba, etc teams who have created a majority of Exchange's features for their own purposes.
They just want to break it apart so that they can go about replacing it all in manageable chunks. Doing server and client replacement simultaneously is just too complex. What they want is a replacement back end so they can swap that out with their limited IT resources and then move users one at a time to the native client for the new server.
One question that never seems to be answered is what is the flat rate project to replicate the feature set in, let's say Exchange 2k? I think that once it's up, running, and only needs the relatively minor work of patching, the community could take it over.
No doubt this would be a project best done in the 2nd/3rd world to make the dollars stretch further.
So what would be a good cost estimate for writing it for pay? Or would it be cheaper to buy out Bynari or some other competitor to open their current solution?
The left always wants to trot out the miser/bigot/mean/nazi labels at the drop of a hat. The truth is that the current system is headed for disaster and every year of delay makes fixing things more painful.
No, you have no idea. I spent most of this morning on a church project. I put in a good 10 hours a week on average on this or that work for my church and also contribute a significant portion of my income to charity. I don't name my church or what charities I consider worthy because I don't want to get sidetracked into theology or picking on this charity or that.
You ask if I would fund gay meals on wheels. Yup. If they were stepping up to the plate and fulfilling a need that others were not, I'd feel discomfort with their message and make the same sort of rules that the religious charities now have not to publicly fund their recruitment efforts but for food program, I'd say they deserved a check for the secular purpose.
As a private citizen I'd do my best to create better charities to fulfill that need without sending a check to people I think are morally bad for society but unless alternatives existed that did the job better, the poor matter most of all.
On the GMHC, they're fixated on condoms. As such, they're stuck on advocating the 3rd most effective anti-AIDS message (abstinence and monogomy being #1 and 2 respectively, see Uganda). They're a poor use of taxpayer's resources because of that.
They're also a poor group to back because they actively undermine public health efforts to treat AIDS like SARS, syphilis or any other contagious disease (remember the bath house controversies?). They are, however, doing *some* good, and deserve *some* funding on that basis.
Pedophilia got brought in as a clear behavior based grouping that is rightly discriminated against. I could have said necrophiliacs just as easily. The point was to draw a clearer line without having to get into the entire "what's wrong with being gay" issue.
Gay as biology used to be the old idea, poor people they couldn't help themselves and people spent some considerable effort looking for a fix.
Gay advocates used to claim that they chose homosexuality. So the response was, ok, it's a disgusting behavior that has various biological (gay sex passes disease more easily than regular intercourse does) and social problems associated with it (those pedophile priests generally weren't going after the little girls) so let's discriminate based on behavior.
Now the response is that gays are born that way after all but heaven forbid that somebody try for a cure. Gay advocates seem to want it both ways, establishing their behavior as an acceptable lifestyle choice, no matter the poor outcomes, but protected from any social and legal opprobrium because there is no choice after all.
I'll see your Madison and raise you a Washington.
"[I]t would be particularly improper to omit, in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe. No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men, more than the people of the United States."
This was not from a private letter but from our first President's first inaugural address. The first Congress also established an office of Chaplain for each house and prayers are offered regularly on the taxpayer dime. No doubt Madison was a personal witness to all this. Somehow, I've never heard the major controversy over the address' prayer (as GWB's invocation did during his inaugural) nor was the Chaplain position ever in serious doubt.
Non-preferentialism might have had some doubters among the founders but they clearly did not have the votes to put their preferences into action, nor did Washington fear their poor opinion. George Washington was obsessed with doing everything correctly in order not to corrupt the republic into some other form of government like a monarchy.
As to your last paragraph, asked and answered. I won't fall for your trick of mixing conduct groups with factors at birth and without control by the individual.
In fact, US doctors are facing competition in some sectors from foreign doctors. Telemedicine gets x-rays read just as fast and as accurately in India as they get done at the local hospital.
The US gives out a lot of J-1 visas to medical residents from all over the world, trains them, licenses them for work in the US, and then forces them to go home. I know some of these people personally and they're good docs.
Certain parts of many jobs will always need to be done locally but many things don't have to be locally done and people who compete in those areas are finding that foreign competition is growing as we get more interconnected.
Re:Liberalism != (Communism || Socialism)
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
There's only one problem. It's quite likely that the federal government would be unable to resist the temptation to throw its weight around and pressure firms not to invest in tobacco or other undesirable firms.
Individual control of funds is beneficial because it makes it harder to politically corrupt the process.
It doesn't. You can't just zero out the energy used to recycle CO2 into breathable O2. Sure, we could run our cars off the resultant energy but we would all be dead. Living is generally considered a human need.
The last time I read that I chased down the companies the guy was touting and out of three firms, two of them were requesting comments on the idea of porting to Mac OS X. Today, you're correct that some serious CAD/CAM applications are not available on Mac, especially 3d apps but don't kid yourself that these companies have an allergy when it comes to the platform. If they can make money they'll port in flash.
Slashdot Mirror
I always get a chuckle out of the Aquafina bottle with it's little squiggle logo evocative of mountains. In reality, it's distilled/bottled in Munster, IN, a very flat place that is a few miles away from Lake Michigan.
And yes, it's a Pepsi product.
It's all a matter of will. The numbers don't matter much. Do you have some latin? Look up Carthago delenda est and you'll see that the only thing saving muslims is the conviction of a majority in the west that they are worth saving. We're perfectly capable of replicating the roman experience. We just don't want to.
Oh great, right wing = klan lover and it gets moderated +3 insightful? What a way to prove the guy's point. That kind of crap is the worst stereotype mongering there is in politics and gives rise to its mirror image left winger = traitor, something that, until recently, the right has been reluctant to go full bore about. Unfortunately for the left, the self-restraint is gone and Ann Coulter's Treason is a best seller.
Meaningful reforms are not accomplished by simply adding dollars. That's just funding the status quo. The right's pushing for meaningful reforms while the left is pushing to halt reform or gut it if they can't halt it. When work requirements were proposed, the left railed against them, then when they became inevitable, argued for keeping them weak, and when they were passed have consistently argued for not strengthening them or reducing them. It's classic rear-guard resistance.
The current incarnation of this on social program reforms is to retain government control over investment decisions and unleash the SS trust fund et al from their current investment limitations imposed to try to ensure that we wouldn't have socialism via the back door of govt. buying up firms in the stock market.
Your observation on the US population is similar to your prior one on overcrowding. The US has a birthrate that hovers right around replacement level and only grows via immigration. In fact, its highest birth rate segments are immigrants. The rest of the 1st world has lower immigration and lower birth rates than the US. The 3rd world has plummeting birth rates but they are starting from much higher levels so they are still growing too but the trends are clear and they're in all the reputable statistics.
On traveling you also don't get it. I was referring to the rise of the city and the great emptying of the countryside, a phenomenon that's been going on for well over a century. People clump into cities and megalopoli because they want to be able to go to the museum more than once every few years and like the plentiful jobs there. We're discussing two entirely different time scales for these trends. On my scale, your commuting problem is a bit of white noise in the trend.
As commute times go up, businesses factor that into relocation and expansion plans and create new jobs in cities that aren't so problematic. There's a cycle of growth and retrenchment that goes on but the trend towards city living to cut down on travel continues unabated.
Islam had a great period of civilizational dominance. China did too but both have clearly fallen behind since that period. It's a fair question whether Islam can deal with modernity. The prospects aren't looking too bright by objective measurements.
As for Hitler and his disdain for the darker races, you might want to look up the history of the Nazi relationship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the SS battalions raised from among the muslims. History is history but at least don't quote selectively to give a false impression.
On the Palestinians/Israel. Muslim lands host, literally the last refugee camps from the post WW II settlement. Jews were expelled and ran for their lives all across the Middle East when Israel was established. Houses were confiscated, monies expropriated, and no restitution has ever been forthcoming. In the same era that those jews were running, the germans were being expelled from Konigsberg and other places and all sorts of populations were being shifted all over the map. Today, all those people have been settled down and their children are citizens of the land of their birth except for the Palestinians.
Why are muslims so inhospitable, so cruel, and have not let Palestinians assimilate? Why are these people born in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, etc. not given passports in the land of their birth? Why should they be any different than the Germans who were expelled or the indians who fled?
Every military analysis I've read on the 1967 war is unified in stating that Israel merely disrupted the timing of the forthcoming muslim attack by attacking first. It was pretty obvious that there would have been a war without Israeli preemption but with Israel being in a weaker military position.
Please feel free to list the sects that the doctrine of kill infidels or force them into dhimmi status doesn't apply to and then feel free to list the countries where those sects dominate.
No, really, I'm curious.
You obviously *have* been sheltered from any reasonable exposure to the projections on all those lovely government social services you advocate. All of them pretty much require growing populations to manage things so x retirees are always supported by y workers where y is significantly larger than x. Since we're at the leading edge of a world-wide population implosion (everybody's birth rates are dropping fast, including the 3rd world) This makes for big trouble.
Modern society has been constructed to pack people tightly in order for them to travel less and have wide access to the specialized resources of the city. This concentration has nothing to do with population growth in the entire system that funds government services which would be negative if not for immigration and *is* negative in Europe, sharply so in many cases.
The old-time skeptics of govt. transfer payments called them Ponzi schemes, doomed to eventually run out of steam and collapse in a spectacular fashion. If people like you have their way and halt reform, they're likely to end up being proved right.
I expect that local governors will be appointed. It's not only the New world colonies that will provide inspiration for the new model but the bad experiences of the company towns that are likely to find an echo. A space colony is likely the best condition to promote the company town mentality with all of its freedom eroding negative tendencies.
The law man, the pastor, and the transporter need to be from a different authority chain. Also, it would probably be wise to discourage grants on entire celestial bodies but instead make people use what they claim. Thus, if there's a case of bad treatment people can get out, or worse (from the company's perspective) split off from the company and claim their own parts of the planet setting up instant competition.
Too many countries are filled with elites actively discouraging patriotism instead of ensuring it turns in healthy directions. National pride fills a vacuum in the human soul. What replaces it when it's suppressed is, frankly, more worrying to me.
Perhaps the 54% could not engage in class warfare against the 46%?
We have the corporate governance we have because the shareholders have not been included in the information revolution. 50 years ago, the amount of information and control imbalance between management and shareholders was not so bad. Then, management had quarterly spreadsheets to manage their business and shareholders had yearly meetings where they were fed pap.
Today, managmeent has real time or daily updated data marts that allow them to drill down into every detail of the business providing a level of information and control that is a great leap forward in management. Shareholders have yearly meetings where they are fed pap. Everything else is 3rd party innovation that is guesswork. There are no major company provided innovations to improve shareholder oversight.
This situation cannot last. As companies veer off into their management empire building fantasies, shareholders will inevitably wake up and fix the problem. The only major questions are when and how.
Well we *could* get rid of malaria but we chickened out before we completely eradicated it. You can't blame the pharma/chemical or medical industry for that one though, it was the greens banning DDT that was the problem.
One really good prospective cure is adult stem cell research which will allow you to be fixed by yourself and without having to go on anti-rejection meds for the rest of your life. The really funny thing is that the inferior treatment of fetal cells (which leaves you dependent on anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life) get hyped oh so much more and usually by people who like to claim to superior feelings of compassion.
WW II was a great innovative period. It was not all that great for humanity and we would have been much better off short circuiting it in 1937-1938.
A pure example from the period: nazi scientists made great innovative strides in hypothermia treatment. We've never gotten better baseline data than their experiments. Their innovation was to throw jews into freezing cold water and measure how they died in various situations.
Are the scientists going to the millionaires and asking to be sent? That phase will come later. I can see John Carmack going to orbit. I can also see him funding some scientists to gow and research neat stuff after he went up but I don't see him doing the second *before* the first.
The first challenge is cheap, reusable lift which is why everybody's concentrating on the X Prize and not fundraising to send scientists to the ISS.
Actually, it's quite likely that their first impression of us has already been formed by our EM emissions long before they hit the boy bands. They may be seriously confused when they meet the rest of us but they will likely be comforted that their first contact will be with the familiar faces of Menudo or NSync.
I think I spent enough time typing to get my point across. Secular benefit for the state should generally be the qualifier. That's my position and you should be bright enough to apply it to all your other unanswered questions.
I do find it funny that your last example implies that homosexual atheists have a special talent for clothing. That one's a real blast from the past. I found it amusing, particularly considering your evident attitude about life.
The lowest incidence of sexual disease transmission is among the celibate, then amongst the monogomous.
Heterosexuality is preferred over homosexuality for good secular reason apart from religious justification. Somebody's got to repopulate the country as we all grow old and die. To ignore such basic facts of life is the sign of somebody quite young or in a very sheltered environment. You aren't, by chance, in academia are you?
Exchange handles Active Directory integration (you need to add Samba for that), IMAP, POP3, and shared collaboration folders. You can cobble together replacements for most of it except the requirement to handle MAPI for Outlook integration.
Actually, the OSS community has a considerable number of the pieces already. Exchange data store doesn't have to be replicated anymore, that's gone with Exchange 2k3. You can pull a lot of code from Samba's Active Directory section to accomplish what Microsoft had to code from scratch. Microsoft coded an SMTP, POP3, and IMAP MTA as well. The competitor merely needs to take code from best of breed apps or the apps themselves that do each of the above.
In other words, the OSS team would have a lot of work to do but a lot of the work is already done by the Sendmail, Samba, etc teams who have created a majority of Exchange's features for their own purposes.
The only really missing piece seems to be MAPI.
They just want to break it apart so that they can go about replacing it all in manageable chunks. Doing server and client replacement simultaneously is just too complex. What they want is a replacement back end so they can swap that out with their limited IT resources and then move users one at a time to the native client for the new server.
One question that never seems to be answered is what is the flat rate project to replicate the feature set in, let's say Exchange 2k? I think that once it's up, running, and only needs the relatively minor work of patching, the community could take it over.
No doubt this would be a project best done in the 2nd/3rd world to make the dollars stretch further.
So what would be a good cost estimate for writing it for pay? Or would it be cheaper to buy out Bynari or some other competitor to open their current solution?
The left always wants to trot out the miser/bigot/mean/nazi labels at the drop of a hat. The truth is that the current system is headed for disaster and every year of delay makes fixing things more painful.
No, you have no idea. I spent most of this morning on a church project. I put in a good 10 hours a week on average on this or that work for my church and also contribute a significant portion of my income to charity. I don't name my church or what charities I consider worthy because I don't want to get sidetracked into theology or picking on this charity or that.
You ask if I would fund gay meals on wheels. Yup. If they were stepping up to the plate and fulfilling a need that others were not, I'd feel discomfort with their message and make the same sort of rules that the religious charities now have not to publicly fund their recruitment efforts but for food program, I'd say they deserved a check for the secular purpose.
As a private citizen I'd do my best to create better charities to fulfill that need without sending a check to people I think are morally bad for society but unless alternatives existed that did the job better, the poor matter most of all.
On the GMHC, they're fixated on condoms. As such, they're stuck on advocating the 3rd most effective anti-AIDS message (abstinence and monogomy being #1 and 2 respectively, see Uganda). They're a poor use of taxpayer's resources because of that.
They're also a poor group to back because they actively undermine public health efforts to treat AIDS like SARS, syphilis or any other contagious disease (remember the bath house controversies?). They are, however, doing *some* good, and deserve *some* funding on that basis.
Pedophilia got brought in as a clear behavior based grouping that is rightly discriminated against. I could have said necrophiliacs just as easily. The point was to draw a clearer line without having to get into the entire "what's wrong with being gay" issue.
Gay as biology used to be the old idea, poor people they couldn't help themselves and people spent some considerable effort looking for a fix.
Gay advocates used to claim that they chose homosexuality. So the response was, ok, it's a disgusting behavior that has various biological (gay sex passes disease more easily than regular intercourse does) and social problems associated with it (those pedophile priests generally weren't going after the little girls) so let's discriminate based on behavior.
Now the response is that gays are born that way after all but heaven forbid that somebody try for a cure. Gay advocates seem to want it both ways, establishing their behavior as an acceptable lifestyle choice, no matter the poor outcomes, but protected from any social and legal opprobrium because there is no choice after all.
I'll see your Madison and raise you a Washington.
"[I]t would be particularly improper to omit, in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe. No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men, more than the people of the United States."
This was not from a private letter but from our first President's first inaugural address. The first Congress also established an office of Chaplain for each house and prayers are offered regularly on the taxpayer dime. No doubt Madison was a personal witness to all this. Somehow, I've never heard the major controversy over the address' prayer (as GWB's invocation did during his inaugural) nor was the Chaplain position ever in serious doubt.
Non-preferentialism might have had some doubters among the founders but they clearly did not have the votes to put their preferences into action, nor did Washington fear their poor opinion. George Washington was obsessed with doing everything correctly in order not to corrupt the republic into some other form of government like a monarchy.
As to your last paragraph, asked and answered. I won't fall for your trick of mixing conduct groups with factors at birth and without control by the individual.
In fact, US doctors are facing competition in some sectors from foreign doctors. Telemedicine gets x-rays read just as fast and as accurately in India as they get done at the local hospital.
The US gives out a lot of J-1 visas to medical residents from all over the world, trains them, licenses them for work in the US, and then forces them to go home. I know some of these people personally and they're good docs.
Certain parts of many jobs will always need to be done locally but many things don't have to be locally done and people who compete in those areas are finding that foreign competition is growing as we get more interconnected.
There's only one problem. It's quite likely that the federal government would be unable to resist the temptation to throw its weight around and pressure firms not to invest in tobacco or other undesirable firms.
Individual control of funds is beneficial because it makes it harder to politically corrupt the process.
It doesn't. You can't just zero out the energy used to recycle CO2 into breathable O2. Sure, we could run our cars off the resultant energy but we would all be dead. Living is generally considered a human need.
The last time I read that I chased down the companies the guy was touting and out of three firms, two of them were requesting comments on the idea of porting to Mac OS X. Today, you're correct that some serious CAD/CAM applications are not available on Mac, especially 3d apps but don't kid yourself that these companies have an allergy when it comes to the platform. If they can make money they'll port in flash.