I had Speakeasy for two years, excellent, but pricey. With Cyberonic (dumb name!) I get similar pings to my Speakeasy SDSL, and massive uploads. Teh support aren't as friendly, but I don;t have to stay on hold for 30 mins at a time.
Maybe instead of just blindly throwing more transistors at the problem, they will be forced in the future to design energy efficient chips using reversible logic that recycle much of their computational energy? This becomes obvious every time I open the closet and the blast of hot air from the space heater masquerading as an SMP server hits me in the face.
I consider gun ownership part of the culture of personal responsibility that every truly honorable society should strive for. Life is a precious gift, and the taking of life one of the most serious acts a person can take. If you feel that owning a gun is your best bet to preserve life, especially that of you and your family, then go ahead and buy a gun.
Dude, it seems to me that in Afghanistan -- thanks mainly to the free-spending Carter and Reagan regimes -- that every person in Afghanistan who wanted any kind of lethal weaponry could acquire it. What happened? THe loss of central control, endless slaughter, and the rule of the strong -- which you dismiss as some kind of "learning curve" -- followed by religious theocracy. Maybe that's why so many religious fundies in the US seem to be in bed with the NRA?
The chimera that a gun-enhanced family is a safer family is a myth. Quite the reverse is true.
I hate to be a Dell booster, but when they can basically give away P4 1.8GHz machines for $340... with XP included, I have to wonder how thin some of these profit margins actually are.
Anyone who looks with clear eyes at the record of human history and who extrapolates it forward should see this as a very plausible and likely future path.
This is delusional optimism. Anyone who looks with clear eyes at the record of human history (and pre-history) sees that localized human socieities follow a predictable pattern of expansion followed by dieback. Sometimes the cause is external -- war or invasion or disease or climate. Sometimes the cause is internal: stasis, political disorganization, social transformation, resource exhaustion. Every single piece of available evidence points to this conclusion -- yet you somehow manage to convince yourself of some privileged exceptionalism that will enable your society to endure? I have a bridge you might be interested in...
The various human civilizations that have energed since the Holocene were lucky to be existing in an especially mild inter-glacial period not characterized by hyper-aridity. This is a special and situational set of circumstances that cannot be exxpected to continue indefinitely.
Wonder what's on for TV? I just whip it out, surf to tv.yahoo.com and find out. Having a discussion at the table about how many pounds in a metric tonne? Pull it out and check online. Wonder what the wheather is like?
It's just nonstop action and adventure and Questions That Matter in your place, isn't it?
... But I do know what you mean. I was able to cancel the digital TV Guide thingy (slow, remote was a pain) once I found Gist.
Gibbon wrote his history in a day when we knew far less about the "Barbarians" than we do now, far less about the economics of the Roman Empire. The result was he had to construct a story, one in which (in fact) Christianity is the villain bringing the Empire into eventual decline. He may be right about this, I suspect it's a gross oversimplification, but whatever, when he actually wrote it, it was a story.
The transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire and then in the Roman Christian Empire was not so much a tale of military defeat but instead a gradual yet systematic progression. Urban centres that had endured for centuries disappeared "overnight" -- well, within a generation or two. Mostly this was not a result of warfare, but of a change in people's perceptions of what was important. A lot of this was due to the immigeation into the Roman Empire of people from the north of Europe who didn't share the same fasciunation with communal property and urban tithes. The cultural division between the the Gallo-Romans and the Carolingian/Merovingian Franks in what became France is a classic example of this change and the difficulties both "sides" had in evolving a common set of laws acceptable to all members of both communities.
The rise of a version of Christinaity to eminence within the Roman Empire was an effect of a growing tendency towards centralization, coupled with a general shift in people's attitudes from a simple, direct relationship with nature (animism) to a complex system of Pagan (then Christian) hierarchies and moral sensibilities. Between 50AD-250AD saw a huge growth in the complexity and depth of Pagan philosophies (the Stoics, etc) as well as Christian philosophies.
It's a lot easier and sexier to imagine that the Roman Empire broke up because of barbarian invasion. The more comprehensive account of its gradual transformation, and the of the people from Animism through Paganism into Christians, is best told not in war-obsessed works such as Gibbons' but instead in something like History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium.
In many ways the decline of the British Empire will seem similar in centuries to come. Sustained by small-scale military endevours, except for the war against the 13 Colonies the UK never fought a sustained campaign against any of its colonies that demanded independence. Instead, it slowly withdrew from them. Imagine India and Zimbabwe a century from now... they will have very little in common except for their past membership of the British Empire. But they will share some common language similarities (British English) and some cultural institutions. So it was in far-flung sections of the Roman Empire that began to evolve and acculturate their inherited Latin into regional dialects and local laws and customs.
Dude, you forgot Levy's "Hackers"
on
Electronic Life
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Well you know I find it suspicious that the Cordelia character in Angel has also just returned from some higher plane of something-or-other. Maybe her and Daniel Jackson (ascended) were getting it on in some weird posthuman sense?
The happiest day of my life will be three years from now when I have the entire B5 series on DVD sitting on my shelf. And the week I make my kids watch it with me, non-stop from start to finish, nothing will match it.
You know, karma and kids being what they are, your kids are going to grow up to be hardcore Trekkies, and probably Renaissance Faire wibbly eared elf lovers as well.
I'd also argue that the number of people and the technology (goats) being used to defoliate the landscape in the Sahara probably had about a percent of a percent of an effect on the landscape change, while the climate shift probably did just about all of the work there.
You're wrong, according to most students of ecology. You're probably thinking of sopmething along the lines of the Charney Effect. The gross effects on the Sahara were anthropogenic, not physical. Teh Sahara is prone to periods of hyper-aridity, but the geologically recent massive enlargement coincicides with the introduction by humans of domesticated animals: goats, sheep, and cows. These alien species tipped the land over into its modern incarnation of super-desert.
this planet could support hundreds of billions of people.
I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and perhaps allow you to wallow in your own conceited ignorance, but this sent your diatribe over the top.
I am curious to know exactly how you would support these "hundreds of billions" of people, and at what subsistence level? Where will all their shit go? If they are eating meat, where will all the shit from their animals go? And where will you get the freshwater to irrigate the crops to feed the people and animals? At current rates, most freshwater aquifers will be drained within a few decades.
No one can really live easily in Death Valley or the Sahara, but people still do it.
It's very specious to apply a thermodynamic principle to ecology -- these are different domains.
I note that millenia ago far more people lived and worked in the Sahara. In fact, some of the earliest domestication happened there. But what happened? The goats denuded the landscape and this, coupled with a climate shift, led to wholsescale desertification.
So it's not an equilibrium reaction. Sometimes things can be knocked so far out of whack they don't recover... or they go through an irreversible phase transition.
When a society is not armed, the government can take every freedom and the people won't be able to do anything.
Gotta be a troll, but just in case you're serious...
I note that one of the most heavily armed countries in the world was Afghanistan, thanks chiefly to the US funding of Islamist and terrorist organizations there right through the 1980s. Basically, anyone with a penis was given free access to an array of weaponry from personal firearms to SAMs. And what happened? The central government collapsed and the country became a war-torn anarchy where the will of the strongest (eventually the Taliban) prevailed.
I don't think that the religious fundamentalists in the US will ever be able to destroy the federal authority, but I note with interest a significant overlap between religious fundamentalism and pro-gun...
I wouldn't like to try reading some Joyce or Camus -- with multi-page paragraphs and run-on sentences that go for ever -- on the tiny, lo-res screens of a PDA.
I see lots of people asking basic questions such as "What about...?" and "What if...?" and "How come...?" Come on people, get past the popsci article and go straight to the source from the guy himself.
I joined Netflix, one of the first of the DVD rental mailer companies, a long time ago and like it a lot. I was interested, then, to read a rough calculation that, in terms of 190,000 MPEG-2 format DVDs, Netflix's daily bandwidth totals 1.5 TB. This is a sizable fraction of the current total estimated Internet daily bandwidth: somewhere between 2-4 TB. Of course, Peter Wayner's calculations do not allow for the online delivery of movies in more compression-efficient formats, such as the MPEG-4-derived DIVX, where a typical 4-7 GB DVD can be reduced to around 700 MB with minimal quality loss.
I guess the CD manufacturers also thought they were safe, when a typical CD occupied 700MB of data in an era of mainly dialup connections. Then along came MP3 with its one-tenth compression ratio and so much for that idea. Netflix's current success is a temporary artifact of our restricted bandwidth and lack of suitable MPEG-4 hardware players.
And I found out from some surfing that some Netflix competitors, such as CafeDVD, QwikFlicks, and DVD Avenue, are cheaper and offer porn, something Netflix avoids.
There are several glaring omissions from the official record of the final minutes of FLight 93. The anomalous debris pattern and the apparent loss of all onboard recording equipment means that an accurate record can not be made. Instead, what we have is mythmaking.
Several ground-based observers have described a large explosion on-board. Several passengers phoned to say one of the hijackers was wearing what looked like an explosive vest.
Also, it's important to note that only the flight cockpit hijackers knew they were on a suicide mission -- and their identities are still suspect. At least three of them appear to have used identity theft to hide their real identities. They were mercenaries, professional Islamist soldiers. Most of the rest of the hijackers were dupes, simple goon muscle lied to by their masters and convinced they were on a standard hijacking mission.
It's at least as likely that they were the ones who struggled onboard Flight 93 to regain control. After all, they were armed.
One of the problems of running for office is that you have to represent all of the people, not just a single issue (OK, a bunch of technology and civil liberty issues).
That's really one of the fundamental problems with the US democratic model. It's locked in this "pocket borough" early-19th Century model, with no transferable votes and single-seat elections. Most modern democracies that came about in the late 19th Century wisely moved to some version of proportional representation, which enables single-issue candidates and niche parties. Instead of deadening consensus bilateral politics you get a coalition and a delicate interplay of negotiation. You also get to laugh at some absurd combinations of parties (such as in Italy or Israel) and laughing at pols is always A Good Thing.
> 1. All the money we give out every year to keep most 3rd world countries from colapsing?
The percentage of foreign aid as a percentage of total GNP by the US actually ranks among the lowest of all developed nations and is almost less than a tenth of the UN-recommended minimum. European countries such as Denmark and Sweden do far better. And of the paltry US aid amount, fully two-thirds of it goes to Israel and Egypt.
> 2. The constant military help we give countries who need it?
See point 1 above.
> 3. A government run by the people for the people? Granted it could be better.
The US political system is hidebound and locked in this weird two-party timewarp. You have no proportional representation and an unresponsive government almost totally controlled by special interests and lobbyists. Most social democricies evolved more inclusive political systems in the 20th century but the US system definitely dates from the early 19th. Where are your coalitions, your multi-seat districts, your party lists? Your political system scores abusmally on issues of transitivity and concordance.
> 4. Having our women on equal ground with our men in every aspect of our lives?
The gender gap for wages in the US is still pronounced. It is much less in European countries, such as Sweden, where State-sponsored universal child care facilties and generous statutory maternity and paternity leave enable women to pursue their careers with less disadvantage.
> 5. Having most of our diverse religous and ethnic backgrounds get along together?
Your US system is born of low population -- rather than deal with an interlocking, complex, mannered society you thrive on isolation and reclusiveness. European social systems are born of a much more densely inhabited continent where different cultures do not have the luxury of withdrawal or migration. It will take the US another century or two to reach European levels of social complexity.
> 6. Having a country where a "common" class person can become the richest person in the world? Granted I don't like Bill Gates.
US social mobility now ranks in the second-tier of developed nations, along with such luminaries as France and Italy. Northern European countries, less Latin in character (such as the UK and Germany) actually feature higher social mobility than the US.
> 7. A country where EVERY child has the ability to get an education?
The cost for US college education as a percentage of the average salary is far higher than in any other EU country.
> 8. A country that thoughsands of people are fleeing to every year?
All developed countries feature high immigration, or a desire for high immigration. The US has long used immigration as a strategy to fill the desolate wastes left after the genocide of the native populations. Additionally, the input of cheap immigrant labour retards the growth of salaries and wages in the US and undermines the progress of unions and collective bargaining and social compacts.
In the United States, the median real wage is about the same today as it was 28 years ago.This means that the majority of the labor force has failed to share in the gains from economic growth over the last 28 years. That is drastically different from the previous 27 years, during which the typical wage increased by about 80% in real terms. I note that this retardation of wages correlates with a dramatic increase in immigration.
> 9. A country that produces enough food to not only feed themselves but a large part of the world?
Using manifestly wasteful aquifer-draining agricultal systems that are massivley subsidized by the US taxpayer. If US food was costed to actually reflect its real inputs, it would not be able to be dumped so cheaply on international markets.
> 10. A country where people could protest against the government and ANY political official and NOT get shot or have family members killed?
Tell that to the family of MLK. There is freedom of speech in the US, but there is also repression and political assassination. In this regard, the US seems little different from the rest of the developed world.
Slashdot Mirror
Speakeasy is a good service, but expensive, and upload is capped at 128K (Covad) for low-end residential ADSL vs SDSL.
Replace DirectTV DSL with Cyberonic (Worldcom/UUNet reseller)...
1500/768, static IP, no port blocking, $40/$50
http://www.cyberonic.com/int_for_home_dsl.shtml
There are consumer reviews of their service here:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/
I had Speakeasy for two years, excellent, but pricey. With Cyberonic (dumb name!) I get similar pings to my Speakeasy SDSL, and massive uploads. Teh support aren't as friendly, but I don;t have to stay on hold for 30 mins at a time.
Speakeasy is a good service, but expensive, and upload is capped at 128K (Covad) for low-end residential ADSL vs SDSL.
Replace DirectTV DSL with Cyberonic (Worldcom/UUNet reseller)...
1500/768, static IP, no port blocking, $40/$50
http://www.cyberonic.com/int_for_home_dsl.shtml
There are consumer reviews of their service here:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/
I had Speakeasy for two years, excellent, but pricey. With Cyberonic (dumb name!) I get similar pings to my Speakeasy SDSL, and massive uploads.
Maybe instead of just blindly throwing more transistors at the problem, they will be forced in the future to design energy efficient chips using reversible logic that recycle much of their computational energy? This becomes obvious every time I open the closet and the blast of hot air from the space heater masquerading as an SMP server hits me in the face.
I consider gun ownership part of the culture of personal responsibility that every truly honorable society should strive for. Life is a precious gift, and the taking of life one of the most serious acts a person can take. If you feel that owning a gun is your best bet to preserve life, especially that of you and your family, then go ahead and buy a gun.
Dude, it seems to me that in Afghanistan -- thanks mainly to the free-spending Carter and Reagan regimes -- that every person in Afghanistan who wanted any kind of lethal weaponry could acquire it. What happened? THe loss of central control, endless slaughter, and the rule of the strong -- which you dismiss as some kind of "learning curve" -- followed by religious theocracy. Maybe that's why so many religious fundies in the US seem to be in bed with the NRA?
The chimera that a gun-enhanced family is a safer family is a myth. Quite the reverse is true.
I hate to be a Dell booster, but when they can basically give away P4 1.8GHz machines for $340... with XP included, I have to wonder how thin some of these profit margins actually are.
Anyone who looks with clear eyes at the record of human history and who extrapolates it forward should see this as a very plausible and likely future path.
This is delusional optimism. Anyone who looks with clear eyes at the record of human history (and pre-history) sees that localized human socieities follow a predictable pattern of expansion followed by dieback. Sometimes the cause is external -- war or invasion or disease or climate. Sometimes the cause is internal: stasis, political disorganization, social transformation, resource exhaustion. Every single piece of available evidence points to this conclusion -- yet you somehow manage to convince yourself of some privileged exceptionalism that will enable your society to endure? I have a bridge you might be interested in...
The various human civilizations that have energed since the Holocene were lucky to be existing in an especially mild inter-glacial period not characterized by hyper-aridity. This is a special and situational set of circumstances that cannot be exxpected to continue indefinitely.
Wonder what's on for TV? I just whip it out, surf to tv.yahoo.com and find out. Having a discussion at the table about how many pounds in a metric tonne? Pull it out and check online. Wonder what the wheather is like?
... But I do know what you mean. I was able to cancel the digital TV Guide thingy (slow, remote was a pain) once I found Gist.
It's just nonstop action and adventure and Questions That Matter in your place, isn't it?
Gibbon wrote his history in a day when we knew far less about the "Barbarians" than we do now, far less about the economics of the Roman Empire. The result was he had to construct a story, one in which (in fact) Christianity is the villain bringing the Empire into eventual decline. He may be right about this, I suspect it's a gross oversimplification, but whatever, when he actually wrote it, it was a story.
The transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire and then in the Roman Christian Empire was not so much a tale of military defeat but instead a gradual yet systematic progression. Urban centres that had endured for centuries disappeared "overnight" -- well, within a generation or two. Mostly this was not a result of warfare, but of a change in people's perceptions of what was important. A lot of this was due to the immigeation into the Roman Empire of people from the north of Europe who didn't share the same fasciunation with communal property and urban tithes. The cultural division between the the Gallo-Romans and the Carolingian/Merovingian Franks in what became France is a classic example of this change and the difficulties both "sides" had in evolving a common set of laws acceptable to all members of both communities.
The rise of a version of Christinaity to eminence within the Roman Empire was an effect of a growing tendency towards centralization, coupled with a general shift in people's attitudes from a simple, direct relationship with nature (animism) to a complex system of Pagan (then Christian) hierarchies and moral sensibilities. Between 50AD-250AD saw a huge growth in the complexity and depth of Pagan philosophies (the Stoics, etc) as well as Christian philosophies.
It's a lot easier and sexier to imagine that the Roman Empire broke up because of barbarian invasion. The more comprehensive account of its gradual transformation, and the of the people from Animism through Paganism into Christians, is best told not in war-obsessed works such as Gibbons' but instead in something like History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium .
In many ways the decline of the British Empire will seem similar in centuries to come. Sustained by small-scale military endevours, except for the war against the 13 Colonies the UK never fought a sustained campaign against any of its colonies that demanded independence. Instead, it slowly withdrew from them. Imagine India and Zimbabwe a century from now... they will have very little in common except for their past membership of the British Empire. But they will share some common language similarities (British English) and some cultural institutions. So it was in far-flung sections of the Roman Empire that began to evolve and acculturate their inherited Latin into regional dialects and local laws and customs.
My favourite book from this era is definitely Stephen Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution . Worth it for the hottub tales alone.
Shanks left the series at the end of season five, and his character gave up human life and ascended to a higher plane of existence.
Well you know I find it suspicious that the Cordelia character in Angel has also just returned from some higher plane of something-or-other. Maybe her and Daniel Jackson (ascended) were getting it on in some weird posthuman sense?
When they put their copy of ol' Alhazrad's Necronomicon online then I'll be impressed.
The happiest day of my life will be three years from now when I have the entire B5 series on DVD sitting on my shelf. And the week I make my kids watch it with me, non-stop from start to finish, nothing will match it.
You know, karma and kids being what they are, your kids are going to grow up to be hardcore Trekkies, and probably Renaissance Faire wibbly eared elf lovers as well.
I'd also argue that the number of people and the technology (goats) being used to defoliate the landscape in the Sahara probably had about a percent of a percent of an effect on the landscape change, while the climate shift probably did just about all of the work there.
You're wrong, according to most students of ecology. You're probably thinking of sopmething along the lines of the Charney Effect. The gross effects on the Sahara were anthropogenic, not physical. Teh Sahara is prone to periods of hyper-aridity, but the geologically recent massive enlargement coincicides with the introduction by humans of domesticated animals: goats, sheep, and cows. These alien species tipped the land over into its modern incarnation of super-desert.
this planet could support hundreds of billions of people.
I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and perhaps allow you to wallow in your own conceited ignorance, but this sent your diatribe over the top.
I am curious to know exactly how you would support these "hundreds of billions" of people, and at what subsistence level? Where will all their shit go? If they are eating meat, where will all the shit from their animals go? And where will you get the freshwater to irrigate the crops to feed the people and animals? At current rates, most freshwater aquifers will be drained within a few decades.
No one can really live easily in Death Valley or the Sahara, but people still do it.
It's very specious to apply a thermodynamic principle to ecology -- these are different domains.
I note that millenia ago far more people lived and worked in the Sahara. In fact, some of the earliest domestication happened there. But what happened? The goats denuded the landscape and this, coupled with a climate shift, led to wholsescale desertification.
So it's not an equilibrium reaction. Sometimes things can be knocked so far out of whack they don't recover... or they go through an irreversible phase transition.
When a society is not armed, the government can take every freedom and the people won't be able to do anything.
Gotta be a troll, but just in case you're serious...
I note that one of the most heavily armed countries in the world was Afghanistan, thanks chiefly to the US funding of Islamist and terrorist organizations there right through the 1980s. Basically, anyone with a penis was given free access to an array of weaponry from personal firearms to SAMs. And what happened? The central government collapsed and the country became a war-torn anarchy where the will of the strongest (eventually the Taliban) prevailed.
I don't think that the religious fundamentalists in the US will ever be able to destroy the federal authority, but I note with interest a significant overlap between religious fundamentalism and pro-gun...
I wouldn't like to try reading some Joyce or Camus -- with multi-page paragraphs and run-on sentences that go for ever -- on the tiny, lo-res screens of a PDA.
I think Google has only improved in recent weeks. For example, my blog now gets the top hit for Irish Porn Star. That's what I call progress.
I see lots of people asking basic questions such as "What about...?" and "What if...?" and "How come...?" Come on people, get past the popsci article and go straight to the source from the guy himself.
I joined Netflix, one of the first of the DVD rental mailer companies, a long time ago and like it a lot. I was interested, then, to read a rough calculation that, in terms of 190,000 MPEG-2 format DVDs, Netflix's daily bandwidth totals 1.5 TB. This is a sizable fraction of the current total estimated Internet daily bandwidth: somewhere between 2-4 TB. Of course, Peter Wayner's calculations do not allow for the online delivery of movies in more compression-efficient formats, such as the MPEG-4-derived DIVX, where a typical 4-7 GB DVD can be reduced to around 700 MB with minimal quality loss.
I guess the CD manufacturers also thought they were safe, when a typical CD occupied 700MB of data in an era of mainly dialup connections. Then along came MP3 with its one-tenth compression ratio and so much for that idea. Netflix's current success is a temporary artifact of our restricted bandwidth and lack of suitable MPEG-4 hardware players.
And I found out from some surfing that some Netflix competitors, such as CafeDVD, QwikFlicks, and DVD Avenue, are cheaper and offer porn, something Netflix avoids.
OpenFind was developed and is based out of Taiwan
My mistake, but I see in today's news that China is instead forwarding searchers to other commercial PRC search engines. So, maybe half right?
On flight 93, the passengers fought back.
There are several glaring omissions from the official record of the final minutes of FLight 93. The anomalous debris pattern and the apparent loss of all onboard recording equipment means that an accurate record can not be made. Instead, what we have is mythmaking.
Several ground-based observers have described a large explosion on-board. Several passengers phoned to say one of the hijackers was wearing what looked like an explosive vest.
Also, it's important to note that only the flight cockpit hijackers knew they were on a suicide mission -- and their identities are still suspect. At least three of them appear to have used identity theft to hide their real identities. They were mercenaries, professional Islamist soldiers. Most of the rest of the hijackers were dupes, simple goon muscle lied to by their masters and convinced they were on a standard hijacking mission.
It's at least as likely that they were the ones who struggled onboard Flight 93 to regain control. After all, they were armed.
One of the problems of running for office is that you have to represent all of the people, not just a single issue (OK, a bunch of technology and civil liberty issues).
That's really one of the fundamental problems with the US democratic model. It's locked in this "pocket borough" early-19th Century model, with no transferable votes and single-seat elections. Most modern democracies that came about in the late 19th Century wisely moved to some version of proportional representation, which enables single-issue candidates and niche parties. Instead of deadening consensus bilateral politics you get a coalition and a delicate interplay of negotiation. You also get to laugh at some absurd combinations of parties (such as in Italy or Israel) and laughing at pols is always A Good Thing.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I figure the blocking is to make room in the search market for the new Chinese Google lookalike, OpenFind.
> 1. All the money we give out every year to keep most 3rd world countries from colapsing?
The percentage of foreign aid as a percentage of total GNP by the US actually ranks among the lowest of all developed nations and is almost less than a tenth of the UN-recommended minimum. European countries such as Denmark and Sweden do far better. And of the paltry US aid amount, fully two-thirds of it goes to Israel and Egypt.
> 2. The constant military help we give countries who need it?
See point 1 above.
> 3. A government run by the people for the people? Granted it could be better.
The US political system is hidebound and locked in this weird two-party timewarp. You have no proportional representation and an unresponsive government almost totally controlled by special interests and lobbyists. Most social democricies evolved more inclusive political systems in the 20th century but the US system definitely dates from the early 19th. Where are your coalitions, your multi-seat districts, your party lists? Your political system scores abusmally on issues of transitivity and concordance.
> 4. Having our women on equal ground with our men in every aspect of our lives?
The gender gap for wages in the US is still pronounced. It is much less in European countries, such as Sweden, where State-sponsored universal child care facilties and generous statutory maternity and paternity leave enable women to pursue their careers with less disadvantage.
> 5. Having most of our diverse religous and ethnic backgrounds get along together?
Your US system is born of low population -- rather than deal with an interlocking, complex, mannered society you thrive on isolation and reclusiveness. European social systems are born of a much more densely inhabited continent where different cultures do not have the luxury of withdrawal or migration. It will take the US another century or two to reach European levels of social complexity.
> 6. Having a country where a "common" class person can become the richest person in the world? Granted I don't like Bill Gates.
US social mobility now ranks in the second-tier of developed nations, along with such luminaries as France and Italy. Northern European countries, less Latin in character (such as the UK and Germany) actually feature higher social mobility than the US.
> 7. A country where EVERY child has the ability to get an education?
The cost for US college education as a percentage of the average salary is far higher than in any other EU country.
> 8. A country that thoughsands of people are fleeing to every year?
All developed countries feature high immigration, or a desire for high immigration. The US has long used immigration as a strategy to fill the desolate wastes left after the genocide of the native populations. Additionally, the input of cheap immigrant labour retards the growth of salaries and wages in the US and undermines the progress of unions and collective bargaining and social compacts.
In the United States, the median real wage is about the same today as it was 28 years ago.This means that the majority of the labor force has failed to share in the gains from economic growth over the last 28 years. That is drastically different from the previous 27 years, during which the typical wage increased by about 80% in real terms. I note that this retardation of wages correlates with a dramatic increase in immigration.
> 9. A country that produces enough food to not only feed themselves but a large part of the world?
Using manifestly wasteful aquifer-draining agricultal systems that are massivley subsidized by the US taxpayer. If US food was costed to actually reflect its real inputs, it would not be able to be dumped so cheaply on international markets.
> 10. A country where people could protest against the government and ANY political official and NOT get shot or have family members killed?
Tell that to the family of MLK. There is freedom of speech in the US, but there is also repression and political assassination. In this regard, the US seems little different from the rest of the developed world.