Very good point. Yes, the prevalence and power of private insurance companies in healthcare is excessive...
This boils down the reason why this is never going to happen. The healthcare industry is a HUGE moneymaker in this country - no way all these insurance companies are going to allow the government to take their role (and profits).
While this is a problem of individuals, the repercussions of those individuals actions spills over to the rest of the US citizenship and that is why the federal government should get involved.
Someone gets fat, their likelihood to be afflicted by disease skyrockets, they need healthcare that they possibly can't afford - they get treated, and the money comes from "somewhere". Thats the problem at the core of this discussion - the healthcare system as it stands allows for irresponsible behavior with repercussions for unrelated parties. Someone gets stuck footing the bill and theres no good framework to address it currently. Its imbalanced.
To paraphrase the pro-choice crowd - no one should tell me what to do with my body.
And why can't people comprehend that some of us want to better the world in general. I don't think everything should be opensource, but reinventing things from scratch all the time is just stupid.
There are tons of lame FOSS projects out there, but things like Linux, Apache, perl, PHP, python, ruby, jquery, MySQL, Postgres, etc... are used to power plenty of money making projects out there. The developers on these projects have really made the world a better place. No longer do we have to pay Microsoft for every move we make. Instead we can use gcc to compile our software and Qt to create an application framework.
Open Source has contributed to our economy much more than it has ever taken.
Housing should get back to a reasonable level where 2 people earning an honest income should be able to get into a starter home. And NO, $300,000 for a shoe-box with a leaky roof is not a starter home.
I have a different view than most. I live in Colorado, and I bought my home in 01 for about 145K. At it's peak, it only hit about 175K. Now it's back down some, but things never got crazy here like they did everywhere else. In fact, I think most prices here have been pretty stagnant for the last 3 or 4 years. My home is reasonable sized, three bedrooms, two car garage, definitely not a shoebox. I know some of you have been dealing with some insane real estate markets the last couple of years,
It sounds to me like the mere idea of buying a house on credit is the problem. If we can assume most people need to live in a house then why aren't they more affordable so a person could actually save up for a time and then buy it? Letting banks essentially control the housing market via credit is a bad, bad idea and will leave us all as lifetime slaves to the fat-cats.
To an extent it is. Part of the housing bubble was undoubtably created by the easy access to credit and low interest rates. There is a certain amount any given individual or family can spend on a monthly house payment. Lowering interest rate allows for higher sales prices and keeping the same monthly payment.
Realistically though, buying a home on credit isn't an unreasonable practice. A house has inherent material and labor costs, so the cost's can't be lowered significantly. Raw property costs are somewhat variable, but construction costs are pretty linear. I would guess there are a large number of homes in the US right now that are actually valued at less than what it cost to build them.
The system actually works fairly well as long as you don't have people either buying more house can they afford, or taking equity out of their home in a heloc and spending it on something frivolous. Traditionally it has been the responsibility of the banker to make sure these things don't happen. They have fallen down on the job, and now we are going to bail them out.
The real problem here was the burst in the bubble of real estate prices. I thought (not completely sure of this) that we were likely through the worst of the foreclosures. Of course, this may depend on the economy. Problem is, home prices have dropped and many people owe more on their home than it is currently worth. This makes these mortgage notes extremely high risk. Forclosures aren't really a problem if the property values match up with the mortgages. This is why, traditionally, you had to have a certain percentage downpayment on a house. The mortgage companies have looked the other way on some of this, and now are looking at owning a bunch of overpriced houses.
It is unclear to me if helping pay housing debt will fix the problem, and it would be incredibly expensive to give everyone in the country who is (currently) upside down in their mortgage enough money to make the notes they hold worth something - more expensive than helping the banks out.
We have two suggestions on how to solve this:
1. Government buys securities from banks, giving the banks a shot in the arm, and getting the "bad" securities out of the way so that investors will be more willing to purchase new ones.
2. Government helps pay housing debt from individuals, preventing their foreclosure. Knowing that the foreclosure rate isn't going to spike up (because gov't is preventing exactly that), the securities start being purchased again (as they are no longer perceived to be a bad investment, since a massive foreclosure spike isn't on the horizon anymore). The difference is that a bunch of people get thrown out of their homes on option 1, and they likely have very different costs (not sure how different, offhand). It seems like either gets you to the same place in the end, however.
No, the difference here, is that in solution 1 banks and other financial institutions that have made bad decisions get a pass. This is only acceptable because a failing bank, insurance company, brokerage firm, etc... impacts EVERYONE. This staves off another great depression.
Solution 2 results in a bunch of individuals who made bad decisions getting a pass, plus a lot of profiteers jumping on the bandwagon (heck, if they passed something like this I might get real delinquent on my mortgage really fast). IMHO if you made a bad decision you should get thrown out of your home. One of my pet peeves in this whole situation is the 'thrown out of your home' argument. MOST people who are in trouble have only owned their home a few years. It's not like this property has been in the family for generations and now they are losing it. It's not like the kids grew up there. They purchased a home on a bad loan, couldn't afford it, and will have to move out. Most of them have no equity in the home (otherwise we wouldn't have a problem), so if the lender allows them to make a short sale, they really aren't out too much. It's not like we are going to have millions of people living under bridges - they just won't OWN their house anymore.
That also puzzles me. Why not, just to throw a wild idea out, take a portion of the bad dept on for the people who are getting kicked out. I mean like buy 1/2 or 2/3 of the dept from the citizens affected, so they aren't evicted.
Surely that would work just as well.
The best reason not to do that is because it would REALLY piss off those of us who are responsible and pay their mortgage. I'm not exactly getting rich here, but I didn't get an interest only loan with an adjustable rate, and I'm paying my mortgage every month. Why should we bail out a bunch of people who bought houses they shouldn't have, gambling on the idea that real estate would increase in value at a linear rate forever, and now can't pay for them.
I have great compassion for people who have had circumstances (lost jobs, personal loss, etc...) who are losing their homes. If there was a reliable way to identify these people (and if would trust our government) I think that would be a great thing to do. I have no compassion for someone who didn't do their due diligence prior to signing the papers.
FWIW I don't think we should be bailing out banks that took on too much risk with sub-prime mortgage funds either, but not bailing them out will impact the economy and all of us regardless of our personal decisions. From that standpoint it makes sense to prop up the economy.
That's only assuming your diesel/gasoline/ethanol engines are at the same levels of efficiency.
Alcohol (methanol or ethanol) fuels have a higher octane rating than gasoline. An engine designed specifically for alcohol with a higher compression ratio and proper ignition timing can extract more of the energy available from the fuel. This reduces the 30% difference between alcohol and gasoline.
The same would hold true for any two diesel and gasoline engines that are compared - the difference between the two may change based on the design of the engines. In fact, this is part of the appeal of a diesel engine. Diesel fuel itself allows for much more powerful/efficient designs.
In shallow water not much. But they are talking way off shore. Think about hundreds or thousands of feet of cable dangling from a barge. Then think of a cost of miles of undersea cable to service just one data center. Would you really save enough to make it worth the effort, cost, and risk?
Plus, no real redundancy here. What happens when the fishys nibble through the cable at the bottom of the ocean? The whole datacenter is down for days until you can run a new line? You send deep sea divers down to repair it?
I know, there's been underwater cabling for 50 years or so now, but there still has to be some sort of potential problem that wouldn't be as easy to fix as a datacenter on land.
My thought is it probably has more to do with new pairs of shoes. Most serious runners replace their shoes relatively often. Nike is probably concerned that people aren't buying new expensive (I'm assuming) sensor shoes every time they buy new shoes. They are just putting the old sensor on new shoes.
It's still stupid, but there actually might be a financial motivation behind it.
It might not cost them much to support Linux on delivery, but there are probably some additional costs associated. On the consumer grade hardware, you probably get some morons that didn't know what they were buying and freaked when it wasn't Vista. I'm sure there are support costs of that nature.
I'm guessing it was just causing more problems than it was making sales.
Like many creative types, their creation is almost like a one of their children. And I'd be pretty pissed too if someone copied things from me and published them as their own work.
Not only that, but there are some legal issues with protecting copyrights. IIRC you can't just pick and choose where you defend you copyrights.
That said, I'm not sure why some of these copyright holders don't make more deals with these sites and give them a license to distribute the content. These people obviously went to a lot of work aggregating the content and getting the site to a high ranking location in Google. Why not partner with them on some level rather than haul them into court??
The real issue we will run into is the need to store power.
Storage is obviously an issue, but transmission is just as pressing. This is not a new problem, it's one if the primary drawbacks of nuke plants. Everyone has the NIMB syndrome when it comes to nukes, but the same problem arises when it comes to high tension transmission lines. No one wants to live under those things, and it's more expensive to bury them.
br>
It's not like you can just go "okay, for the next 3 hours this coal plant needs to produce more power", they just don't work that way (however natural gas plants are able to do this, which is why they're used for supplemental power despite being more expensive than coal).
Really? I thought most modern coal plants crushed the coal into a powder and used it to fire a turbine, much the same as you would with Natural Gas. Why aren't they able to vary the power production the same way the could with a Natural Gas plant?
People are worried about the long term trends right, not the yearly variation?
Absolutely. Thing is, all of these predictions are being made on relatively short term data. 2005 peaked at.62 degrees above the mean, with 2006 being at.54 and 2007 being at.57. If 2008 comes in lower still, it would appear we have a cooling trend, not a warming trend.
In fact, if the average, as the article states, comes in.1 below any year since 2000, that would put us at.38 (2001 being at.48, coolest since 2000 so far). That's a pretty significant movement in the opposite direction from predictions.
It's to do with the safety of the competitors (underdeveloped bones etc.)
The safety issue doesn't make sense. All of these girls are competing in Jr. events before turning 16. It's not like they aren't allowed to compete until 16, just not at this level. If it's really a safety issue, they shouldn't be allowed to train or compete until 16.
that's because marketing keeps changing history to suit their needs.
It is one thing about linux I like. you can see the progression of change in the software. everyone else tries to hide what horrible things and stupid ideas they tried in the past. In 6 years time people are going to go there was Vista?
I agree. One of the great things about Linux is it's more or less linear progression. Things that work well and can't be improved much are left alone. Things that don't work right are constantly revisited and modified. Support for new file systems, hardware, network protocols, etc.. are added.
Windows just moves stuff around, slaps a new GUI on and calls it a major release.
I saw that documentary too. IIRC, there were a finite number of inhabitable worlds, maybe a few thousand (not sure they actually ever told us). This could still mean that the habitable planets are rare, just that all of them are colonized by humans.
I never liked Jar-Jar much, but I agree, that wasn't all that was wrong with the movie.
He is at about the same level of annoyance that the Ewoks were in Jedi, the difference is the rest of the movie. Jedi was a GREAT story, and even if the acting and some of the dialog was a little shaky. Episodes I, II and III all suffered from poor writing. The story just wasn't there. It made annoying characters like Jar-Jar just stand out all the more.
it's disheartening that such a large crowd can watch (in person, and around the world) such a display and have no reason to realize they've been duped.
Yeah, next thing you know there will be athletes that don't meet the age requirements and artifically enhanced results due to performance enhancing drugs. Maybe the finish in the American swim relay last night was 'cinematic'.
Will the fakery of the Olympics never end? Next time I think they could save a lot of money and just have George Lucas create an animated 20,000 hour film of the Olympics.
Very quickly this will become an issue of children taking performance enhancing drugs, which is already happening. Impossible! Well, then please explain how EXACTLY high school -> college football(u.s.) players balloon in size and weight in less than 1 year? And then the next jump from college to pro creates more impossible body metrics.
"Children" (I think you meant teenagers and high school athletes) shouldn't take steroids, not for any moral reasons, but because they aren't needed and can be harmful. Most high school athletes have tons of Testosterone in their system, don't really need more. The jump in size over a year between highschool and college is easy to explain. They are 18. Any healthy 18 year old man who trains properly can put on a HUGE amount of mass in less than a year.
What is happening is parents are giving their kids HGH to make sure they get as tall and big as possible while they are growing. Is this wrong as well? Is it OK if it's parent and doctor sanctioned?
Steroids are most effective on men who are past their sexual prime. That's why you see guys like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco being suspected or admitting to juicing. You don't need it as much at 20 as you do at 40.
If you can't tollerate my complex reasoing, then look at sports pharma as a way to fix every game played. I can pick winners and losers by giving one team pharma X and giving the other pharma Y. I can pick a World Series winner at the beginning of the season just that easily. Impossible you say? Well ask Bjarne Riis about doping his way into a Le Tour victory.
This is absolutely not true. If it were I GUARANTEE you every major sports franchise would be doping their players to the gills. Training, coaching, technique, work ethic, natural talent and any other number of factors work into winning a sports championship. You seriously think Bjarne Riis was the only one doping on the tours he won?
Drugs are no bigger indicator of success than any other factor. Can you tell me the winner of this year's Super Bowl based on what team has the most talent? The highest salary? The biggest players? The 'best' coach? The best work ethic? In fact, the team that had the 'best' coach, a serious work ethic, great talent, and was likely using lots of steroids, if I know Bill Belichik's attitude on winning and cheating, actually lost to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl. Drugs have an impact, but not nearly as much as you seem to think.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good point. Yes, the prevalence and power of private insurance companies in healthcare is excessive...
This boils down the reason why this is never going to happen. The healthcare industry is a HUGE moneymaker in this country - no way all these insurance companies are going to allow the government to take their role (and profits).
I disagree.
While this is a problem of individuals, the repercussions of those individuals actions spills over to the rest of the US citizenship and that is why the federal government should get involved.
Someone gets fat, their likelihood to be afflicted by disease skyrockets, they need healthcare that they possibly can't afford - they get treated, and the money comes from "somewhere". Thats the problem at the core of this discussion - the healthcare system as it stands allows for irresponsible behavior with repercussions for unrelated parties. Someone gets stuck footing the bill and theres no good framework to address it currently. Its imbalanced.
To paraphrase the pro-choice crowd - no one should tell me what to do with my body.
And why can't people comprehend that some of us want to better the world in general. I don't think everything should be opensource, but reinventing things from scratch all the time is just stupid.
There are tons of lame FOSS projects out there, but things like Linux, Apache, perl, PHP, python, ruby, jquery, MySQL, Postgres, etc... are used to power plenty of money making projects out there. The developers on these projects have really made the world a better place. No longer do we have to pay Microsoft for every move we make. Instead we can use gcc to compile our software and Qt to create an application framework.
Open Source has contributed to our economy much more than it has ever taken.
Housing should get back to a reasonable level where 2 people earning an honest income should be able to get into a starter home. And NO, $300,000 for a shoe-box with a leaky roof is not a starter home.
I have a different view than most. I live in Colorado, and I bought my home in 01 for about 145K. At it's peak, it only hit about 175K. Now it's back down some, but things never got crazy here like they did everywhere else. In fact, I think most prices here have been pretty stagnant for the last 3 or 4 years. My home is reasonable sized, three bedrooms, two car garage, definitely not a shoebox. I know some of you have been dealing with some insane real estate markets the last couple of years,
It sounds to me like the mere idea of buying a house on credit is the problem. If we can assume most people need to live in a house then why aren't they more affordable so a person could actually save up for a time and then buy it? Letting banks essentially control the housing market via credit is a bad, bad idea and will leave us all as lifetime slaves to the fat-cats.
To an extent it is. Part of the housing bubble was undoubtably created by the easy access to credit and low interest rates. There is a certain amount any given individual or family can spend on a monthly house payment. Lowering interest rate allows for higher sales prices and keeping the same monthly payment.
Realistically though, buying a home on credit isn't an unreasonable practice. A house has inherent material and labor costs, so the cost's can't be lowered significantly. Raw property costs are somewhat variable, but construction costs are pretty linear. I would guess there are a large number of homes in the US right now that are actually valued at less than what it cost to build them.
The system actually works fairly well as long as you don't have people either buying more house can they afford, or taking equity out of their home in a heloc and spending it on something frivolous. Traditionally it has been the responsibility of the banker to make sure these things don't happen. They have fallen down on the job, and now we are going to bail them out.
It is unclear to me if helping pay housing debt will fix the problem, and it would be incredibly expensive to give everyone in the country who is (currently) upside down in their mortgage enough money to make the notes they hold worth something - more expensive than helping the banks out.
We have two suggestions on how to solve this:
1. Government buys securities from banks, giving the banks a shot in the arm, and getting the "bad" securities out of the way so that investors will be more willing to purchase new ones.
2. Government helps pay housing debt from individuals, preventing their foreclosure. Knowing that the foreclosure rate isn't going to spike up (because gov't is preventing exactly that), the securities start being purchased again (as they are no longer perceived to be a bad investment, since a massive foreclosure spike isn't on the horizon anymore). The difference is that a bunch of people get thrown out of their homes on option 1, and they likely have very different costs (not sure how different, offhand). It seems like either gets you to the same place in the end, however.
No, the difference here, is that in solution 1 banks and other financial institutions that have made bad decisions get a pass. This is only acceptable because a failing bank, insurance company, brokerage firm, etc... impacts EVERYONE. This staves off another great depression.
Solution 2 results in a bunch of individuals who made bad decisions getting a pass, plus a lot of profiteers jumping on the bandwagon (heck, if they passed something like this I might get real delinquent on my mortgage really fast). IMHO if you made a bad decision you should get thrown out of your home. One of my pet peeves in this whole situation is the 'thrown out of your home' argument. MOST people who are in trouble have only owned their home a few years. It's not like this property has been in the family for generations and now they are losing it. It's not like the kids grew up there. They purchased a home on a bad loan, couldn't afford it, and will have to move out. Most of them have no equity in the home (otherwise we wouldn't have a problem), so if the lender allows them to make a short sale, they really aren't out too much. It's not like we are going to have millions of people living under bridges - they just won't OWN their house anymore.
That also puzzles me. Why not, just to throw a wild idea out, take a portion of the bad dept on for the people who are getting kicked out. I mean like buy 1/2 or 2/3 of the dept from the citizens affected, so they aren't evicted.
Surely that would work just as well.
The best reason not to do that is because it would REALLY piss off those of us who are responsible and pay their mortgage. I'm not exactly getting rich here, but I didn't get an interest only loan with an adjustable rate, and I'm paying my mortgage every month. Why should we bail out a bunch of people who bought houses they shouldn't have, gambling on the idea that real estate would increase in value at a linear rate forever, and now can't pay for them.
I have great compassion for people who have had circumstances (lost jobs, personal loss, etc...) who are losing their homes. If there was a reliable way to identify these people (and if would trust our government) I think that would be a great thing to do. I have no compassion for someone who didn't do their due diligence prior to signing the papers.
FWIW I don't think we should be bailing out banks that took on too much risk with sub-prime mortgage funds either, but not bailing them out will impact the economy and all of us regardless of our personal decisions. From that standpoint it makes sense to prop up the economy.
Quick, somebody arrest that guy for running an online casino. Goldencasino.com appears to be functional, and if Michael Brown owns the domain name...
Citations are a matter of academic integrity and publishing ethics not law.
Not yet...
That's only assuming your diesel/gasoline/ethanol engines are at the same levels of efficiency.
Alcohol (methanol or ethanol) fuels have a higher octane rating than gasoline. An engine designed specifically for alcohol with a higher compression ratio and proper ignition timing can extract more of the energy available from the fuel. This reduces the 30% difference between alcohol and gasoline.
The same would hold true for any two diesel and gasoline engines that are compared - the difference between the two may change based on the design of the engines. In fact, this is part of the appeal of a diesel engine. Diesel fuel itself allows for much more powerful/efficient designs.
Yes, but a Prius will get 45mpg
On your 400 mile trip you will be down $6 in your $3/$4 comparison.
In shallow water not much. But they are talking way off shore. Think about hundreds or thousands of feet of cable dangling from a barge. Then think of a cost of miles of undersea cable to service just one data center. Would you really save enough to make it worth the effort, cost, and risk?
Plus, no real redundancy here. What happens when the fishys nibble through the cable at the bottom of the ocean? The whole datacenter is down for days until you can run a new line? You send deep sea divers down to repair it?
I know, there's been underwater cabling for 50 years or so now, but there still has to be some sort of potential problem that wouldn't be as easy to fix as a datacenter on land.
Google satellites of course!
Shouldn't that be Google Skynet?
My thought is it probably has more to do with new pairs of shoes. Most serious runners replace their shoes relatively often. Nike is probably concerned that people aren't buying new expensive (I'm assuming) sensor shoes every time they buy new shoes. They are just putting the old sensor on new shoes.
It's still stupid, but there actually might be a financial motivation behind it.
It might not cost them much to support Linux on delivery, but there are probably some additional costs associated. On the consumer grade hardware, you probably get some morons that didn't know what they were buying and freaked when it wasn't Vista. I'm sure there are support costs of that nature.
I'm guessing it was just causing more problems than it was making sales.
Like many creative types, their creation is almost like a one of their children. And I'd be pretty pissed too if someone copied things from me and published them as their own work.
Not only that, but there are some legal issues with protecting copyrights. IIRC you can't just pick and choose where you defend you copyrights.
That said, I'm not sure why some of these copyright holders don't make more deals with these sites and give them a license to distribute the content. These people obviously went to a lot of work aggregating the content and getting the site to a high ranking location in Google. Why not partner with them on some level rather than haul them into court??
The real issue we will run into is the need to store power.
Storage is obviously an issue, but transmission is just as pressing. This is not a new problem, it's one if the primary drawbacks of nuke plants. Everyone has the NIMB syndrome when it comes to nukes, but the same problem arises when it comes to high tension transmission lines. No one wants to live under those things, and it's more expensive to bury them.
br>
It's not like you can just go "okay, for the next 3 hours this coal plant needs to produce more power", they just don't work that way (however natural gas plants are able to do this, which is why they're used for supplemental power despite being more expensive than coal).
Really? I thought most modern coal plants crushed the coal into a powder and used it to fire a turbine, much the same as you would with Natural Gas. Why aren't they able to vary the power production the same way the could with a Natural Gas plant?
People are worried about the long term trends right, not the yearly variation?
Absolutely. Thing is, all of these predictions are being made on relatively short term data. 2005 peaked at .62 degrees above the mean, with 2006 being at .54 and 2007 being at .57. If 2008 comes in lower still, it would appear we have a cooling trend, not a warming trend.
.1 below any year since 2000, that would put us at .38 (2001 being at .48, coolest since 2000 so far). That's a pretty significant movement in the opposite direction from predictions.
In fact, if the average, as the article states, comes in
Damn Canadians!
It's to do with the safety of the competitors (underdeveloped bones etc.)
The safety issue doesn't make sense. All of these girls are competing in Jr. events before turning 16. It's not like they aren't allowed to compete until 16, just not at this level. If it's really a safety issue, they shouldn't be allowed to train or compete until 16.
that's because marketing keeps changing history to suit their needs.
It is one thing about linux I like. you can see the progression of change in the software. everyone else tries to hide what horrible things and stupid ideas they tried in the past. In 6 years time people are going to go there was Vista?
I agree. One of the great things about Linux is it's more or less linear progression. Things that work well and can't be improved much are left alone. Things that don't work right are constantly revisited and modified. Support for new file systems, hardware, network protocols, etc.. are added.
Windows just moves stuff around, slaps a new GUI on and calls it a major release.
I saw that documentary too. IIRC, there were a finite number of inhabitable worlds, maybe a few thousand (not sure they actually ever told us). This could still mean that the habitable planets are rare, just that all of them are colonized by humans.
I never liked Jar-Jar much, but I agree, that wasn't all that was wrong with the movie.
He is at about the same level of annoyance that the Ewoks were in Jedi, the difference is the rest of the movie. Jedi was a GREAT story, and even if the acting and some of the dialog was a little shaky. Episodes I, II and III all suffered from poor writing. The story just wasn't there. It made annoying characters like Jar-Jar just stand out all the more.
it's disheartening that such a large crowd can watch (in person, and around the world) such a display and have no reason to realize they've been duped.
Yeah, next thing you know there will be athletes that don't meet the age requirements and artifically enhanced results due to performance enhancing drugs. Maybe the finish in the American swim relay last night was 'cinematic'.
Will the fakery of the Olympics never end? Next time I think they could save a lot of money and just have George Lucas create an animated 20,000 hour film of the Olympics.
Very quickly this will become an issue of children taking performance enhancing drugs, which is already happening. Impossible! Well, then please explain how EXACTLY high school -> college football(u.s.) players balloon in size and weight in less than 1 year? And then the next jump from college to pro creates more impossible body metrics.
"Children" (I think you meant teenagers and high school athletes) shouldn't take steroids, not for any moral reasons, but because they aren't needed and can be harmful. Most high school athletes have tons of Testosterone in their system, don't really need more. The jump in size over a year between highschool and college is easy to explain. They are 18. Any healthy 18 year old man who trains properly can put on a HUGE amount of mass in less than a year.
What is happening is parents are giving their kids HGH to make sure they get as tall and big as possible while they are growing. Is this wrong as well? Is it OK if it's parent and doctor sanctioned?
Steroids are most effective on men who are past their sexual prime. That's why you see guys like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco being suspected or admitting to juicing. You don't need it as much at 20 as you do at 40.
If you can't tollerate my complex reasoing, then look at sports pharma as a way to fix every game played. I can pick winners and losers by giving one team pharma X and giving the other pharma Y. I can pick a World Series winner at the beginning of the season just that easily. Impossible you say? Well ask Bjarne Riis about doping his way into a Le Tour victory.
This is absolutely not true. If it were I GUARANTEE you every major sports franchise would be doping their players to the gills. Training, coaching, technique, work ethic, natural talent and any other number of factors work into winning a sports championship. You seriously think Bjarne Riis was the only one doping on the tours he won?
Drugs are no bigger indicator of success than any other factor. Can you tell me the winner of this year's Super Bowl based on what team has the most talent? The highest salary? The biggest players? The 'best' coach? The best work ethic? In fact, the team that had the 'best' coach, a serious work ethic, great talent, and was likely using lots of steroids, if I know Bill Belichik's attitude on winning and cheating, actually lost to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl. Drugs have an impact, but not nearly as much as you seem to think.