What is your source for the wind gust behavior? (I mean this non-confrontationally, but my geeky lack of social skills betrays my intentions). I am an industry that occassionally intersects with wind power generation, and my understanding is that gust are universally bad - they want steady and reliable. Gust mean problems, period. If you have a source, it helps me learn professionally. I've been taught that they can't operate in gusty conditions, bad for the machinery as well as the grid.
Seriously, there is a problem in that a lot of waste is dumped into the ocean, effectively distributing it widely and making that ultimate recycle way harder. Landfills make more sense, but we have a lot of ocean-front cities. All that ocean. So tempting. So free.
not the U-r-gay-an embassy (apologies to Homer Simpson, no offense to Uruguayans), I don't think he is actually doing very much at this point, certainly not molesting women, for example. It is, essentially, prison, with the added feature that it doesn't count as prison time and costs Sweden and Britain nothing. Everyone wins! From what I've heard of Swedish prisons, the food in the embassy is likely not as good, and his internet access is probably slower.
Earthquakes are not predictable in the specific, they are somewhat predictable in general. Italy is subject to earthquakes, generally. This is well-known, and documented through a long history of having earthquakes. Why the country does not adopt reasonable earthquake construction standards and _enforce them_ is a great mystery to people in other earthquake prone areas (Japan, California, et.al.). It's third-world. The fact that you put geologists in jail instead, for not predicting the specific (impossible) is baffling. You all know there will be earthquakes. Anyone, politician, "scientist", or whoever that says otherwise should be mocked by a public that knows better.
If your website takes ads from Iranian companies and has an interface in Farsi then yes, you should obey the laws of Iran. If you don't like it, then don't do business there.
So, if I take Spanish ads, which countries laws am i subject to? There are dozens of contenders. Farsi is not owned by Iran, anyone that wants to can speak it, inside of Iran or out. Just as English isn't owned by the United Kingdom or the United States. You do business where you do business, not per the language that you use. Its gonna always come down to where you are physically located.
Multi-nationals are more vulnerable this way, because they do actually have a physical presence in many countries. I don't have any sympathy - its something an enterprise has to negotiate - you have to select a set of countries that have reasonably compatible laws to operate in, so that you don't get into a "banned in one country, required in another" bind.
Per the CDC: For those who are sexually active, condoms may lower the risk of HPV infection. To be most effective, they should be used with every sex act, from start to finish. Condoms may also lower the risk of developing HPV-related diseases, such as genital warts and cervical cancer. But HPV can infect areas that are not covered by a condom - so condoms may not fully protect against HPV. People can also lower their chances of getting HPV by being in a faithful relationship with one partner; limiting their number of sex partners; and being with a partner who has had no or few prior sex partners. But even people with only one lifetime sex partner can get HPV. And it may not be possible to determine if a partner who has been sexually active in the past is currently infected. Not having sex is the only sure way to avoid HPV.
I wonder what the equilibrium point is? it should be mathmatecally determinate: Given a risk of 1 in 750,000 for the vaccine to cause a polio, what percentage of the population would have to take the vaccine to produce a 1 in 750,000 risk of an un-vaccinated person contracting the disease, accounting for socialization patterns, etc.
Further, what would the media impact be? would people be frightened into taking the vaccine before the equilibrium point? or would the media lag so badly we'd wind up in an occillating pattern?
I like the essence of your plan - give some tangible benefit in exchange for vaccination. But the specific has a problem. The tax credit is not enough to overcome the anti-vaxxer fear that they're actually hurting their child, and not useful to the living-off-the-grid crowd (they're not filing returns anyhow). Maybe a free solar panel per person per 5years, on proof of maintained vaccines for 5 years? I know the money could be turned into solar panels, but you might entice a few off the grid people. The anti-vaxxers aren't going to be moved by any value proposition, given their conviction that vaccines are bad.
High risk exercise, not sure what that would include. I've never heard of a case so no, but most people sick enough to need a transplant are not doing a lot of exercise, high risk or otherwise. Doesn't come up.
If it makes you feel the system is more fair, they do not do transplants for overweight people. Weight under control is a pre-condition for transplant, both for health and for the do-ability of the surgery.
The perceived problems with recreational drugs: 1) in a lot of cases, dietary/drugs/alcohol caused the problem that requires the transplant. there are generally moral qualms about giving an unrepentant person a transplant for a condition they themselves caused and show every sign of causing again. there are always better candidates. 1) impairs ability/discipline to manage a transplant regimine 2) represents a willingness to disregard medical opinion of the transplant team (e.g. doctor shopping). given that you can find a doctor to tell you anything is ok, doctor shopping represents a risk to the organ, and the organ are in extremely limited supply. (as a practical matter, post-transplant, there isn't anything they can do about your drug/alcohol issues, so they're extra diligent on the upstream side). if you're going to make up your own mind on the safety of recreational drugs, you'll make up your own mind on diet, exercise, prescribed drug use, etc. Given that your going to be part of how the transplant regimine is evaluated for other patients, they want to know that you're at least doing what they have you down on paper as doing. 3) some drugs popularly assumed to be harmless are not (mj particularly carries a fungus that can be deadly in an immunosuppressive environment). anything intravenous is a source for hepatitis, of course. and most of them affect your judgement. 4) there is some value judgement going on with non-kidney transplants particularly. The supply is extremely limited, so there is always a number of candidates for any given organ. They have to choose. You want to be the more attractive candidate, not the jackass telling them where to stuff their book learn'n about drugs.
Its not just recreational drug impairment that gets you off the list. I knew a young woman who'd had a stroke, and the resulting mental impairment rendered her unable to follow a drug regimine on her own, and she was off the list as a result.
The drug regimine is pretty demanding. I'm taking 7 different drugs plus 2 vitamin supplements at 4 times of the day, with another drug on a periodic/as needed basis. That's a maintenence regimine - the "right out of the hospital" schedule was more like 14 drugs. Right out of the hospital, there may be dietary restrictions as well (I had a low potassium restriction for a while). Gotta have enough mental wherewithal and discipline to follow that.
Pointed out in another comment - in the US, drinking alcohol or active recreational drug use will keep you off transplant lists. There will always be another candidate better than you, if you are still in the process of wrecking your organs. I suppose it is this way in most countries.
Generally, in the US, we go to extremes at end-of-life (regardless of cause) rather than spend the money up front. There is always another treatment, and doctors here are pretty aggressive at using them. I sometimes think people die simply from being worn out by treatments.
Ever since I started working in '95, insurance has always differentiated between smokers and non-smokers. Other issues start to be hard to judge. How many cupcakes is "too many"? Insurance companies could just arbitrarily decide who's got healthy habits and who doesn't, but i'm betting that would quickly boil down to just how much people cost, regardless of why. If there is a standard, there has to be a way to measure it. Smoking is pretty easy, 'cause smokers have a hard time doing without for very long, and it's a very visible and distinct activity that goes with it.
"Unsafe actions of others" is pretty broad too - does that include bicycling (one of the more dangerous sporting activities)? Most things people do are less safe than taking a 1hr walk/day and spending the rest of your time eating oatmeal, reading, and sleeping. Most of us want more of a life than that. So, which "less safe" activities do you want to punish? Most people seem to say "all the ones I don't do".
Further, the time I got pneumonia, i did go straight to the ER - because it can kill pretty quickly if not treated. Pneumonia needs ER treatment. Perhaps you meant influenza, which sometimes does and sometimes does not. Neither is going to be absolutely prevented by regular doctors visits. Exposure and age are your two big risk multipliers there - not readily adjustable by government action. My pneumonia seems to have stemmed from a very small amount of aspirated vomit (side-effect of yet another problem), so again, doctors visits (there were many) did not prevent it.
Cirrhosis, you will get treatment for. Treatment effectiveness is limited so you'll need to be off the drugs/alcohol for a while to get on a transplant list, these days. And they blood test to make sure. So, yeah, they will let you die rather than give you the best treatment.
I suspect your Australian left-side-driving brain turned things inside out.
For the American audience, these speed are not remarkable: 70kph ~= 42mph 80 ~= 48 90 ~= 54 (the "slow" highway speed limit) 100 ~= 60 (typical is 65mph/108kph) 120 ~= 72 (occassionally 75mph/124kph) 130 ~= 78
In NV, there are stretches of road where the limit is 75mph (and that is unenforced due to the 2 patrol car/day schedule, see Top Gear s12e2). 80mph is routine for many parts of California (in spite of a 65mph limit). 130kph sound fast to an American who can't do metric conversions, but it really isn't that fast in practice. You'll see a few people doing 90mph in those situations. 100mph+ is considered unreasonable by about 98% of the population in almost all scenarios. (that would bet 160kph)
On the other hand, a town near me has a school on the highway through town, and that has a limit of 15mph (22kph). And it is effectively enforced by the population going that speed (so no bad actors could go through there faster due to the traffic jam). Hehe, one of our managers got a ticket for 30mph through there yesterday, and he regarded it as a fair cop.
Must factor in tires. Tires can only go so fast before they come apart. Higher speed is higher stress, and this is not a linear function. Tires themselves are rated for what they can handle, but you have to calculate in degredation with age. Beyond about 75mph, your going to start running into older tires failing. At those speeds, it can be catastrophic.
Problem number 2 is enforcement. Everyone dreams up a scheme where they can drive faster, but it the rule is not fairly simple and obviously easy to enforce, the top speed for the fastest car becomes the top speed for everyone, including idiot kids in badly maintained clunkers with ancient tires, coming the other way down the road toward you.
Further, this doesn't account for driver quality (including temporary impairment, drunk, tired, etc). Too many people don't recognize impairment and slow down (or not drive altogether). Higher speed limits mean they have even less reaction time before they cause damage.
Gotta get the bad cars and bad drivers off the road before you change speed limits.
Not really true - most conditions are not communicable. Gunshot wounds - no. Alcohol/drug abuse - no. Cancers, heart disease (the two biggies) - no (mostly, a few cancers might be communicable). Diabetes - no. The communicable stuff is the hardest to treat, public health or no, but not because of cost. Vaccines are cheap to free, anyone should be getting them as a child right now, unless your parents are irresponsible, but we're having issues with compliance. Likewise, compliance is a problem with antibiotic regimes (gotta take the whole thing), and not exposing other members of the public (remember that TB patient flying around the country?).
"Obamacare" (and medicare, mostly) is not about public risk, it's about the social decision of who you think you are responsible for taking care of. We're already dealing with communicable stuff as well as we can, within the personal freedom constraints we have set for ourselves. We aren't forcing people to take their pills or shots, or stay out of the sun, not skydive, stay home in their closet, etc (mostly).
I'd like to see a chart detailing all the difference between the countries - would cut down speculation and assumption a lot. Off the top of my head, i can think of a few other contributing factors for differences in driving/driving related deaths:
1) difference in driving population
a) lower/higher test/competency requirements
b) age of drivers (do some countries have younger/older drivers, the two most accident prone demographic groups)
c) literacy in signage (or the non-requirement of literacy for countries using more international text-free signage)
d) driving culture (how much social approval for drugged or distracted driving, how proud are people of their driving skills)
(proud of driving skills may not corelate with actual low death rates...suspect the corelation is elsewhere)
e) average passengers (expect huge correlation, more passengers is more potential casualties, and more distraction for drivers) 2) Driving environment
a) physical road conditions (average age/maintanence level, build level (dirt, gravel, undivided highways, divided, limited access, etc)
b) weather (snow/ice frequency, etc)
c) pedestrian culture (india vs new jersey)
d) traffic law culture (how strict is average adherence - india vs germany)
e) isolation of roads (how bored will drivers get)
f) average speeds (urban and rural, vs speed of accidents)
g) gas prices
h) availability of alternate transportation (get shy, uncertain drivers off the road) 3) Vehicles
a) average age
b) average maintenance level (particularly tires)
c) safety features (some evidence suggests a negative correlation for some features)
d) power/weight averages (don't think this would correlate)
Anyone got a data source that would cover these factors?
I've watched a bit of "... worst drivers" shows, and they seem to pick set of drivers for each series where they have one driver for each stereotype bad driver type. (shy, aggressive, dominating passenger) plus a few genuine idiots. Be interesting to see if some countries do a better job of filtering one or another stereotype (genuine idiots being the most irredeemable type).
Which explains why americans are so socially inept and so fat, and so selfish. Well done mister, don't stop, put a fence around your house and kidnap another 14 year old teenage.
That gets today's prize for most ridiculously over-the-top hate-and-assumption-filled response.
1) Social skills are learned in pubs, bars and the like, while drinking alcohol. 2) Staying out of bars, pubs, etc, will make you fat. 3) Failure to drink enough and be in the company of others while doing so will result in selfishness. 4) Americans are particularly vulnerable due to their lack of drinking. 5) People that disagree with you are child molesters. or is it "people that don't drink"? or "people with fences around their house"? you should clarify this point for us.
I could go for this, if you could get it to be actually enforced. Selective enforcement ("i think drunk drivers are bad, so i'll bust them, but texting, hey, everyone does that, it can't be bad") is a problem. Fill in your own law-enforcement preferred and hated activities. Not only do you have to get police to agree to actually enforce per measured-risk, you have to get cranky old judges who liked things the way they were back then to all be on the same page.
Of course, I recall an episode of Better of Ted where the geeks try to grow meat in the lab. When the tester eventually eats it, they ask how it tastes, and from my recollection, I believe the answer was, "like despair".
In this context, that extra 'f' is pretty important. For those who haven't watched this excellent show, Ted is not the name of the synthetic beef.
I would like to see a source for your claim that insects are 90% efficient. And cows produce milk, which per this source, is pretty damn good (magic??), so good i'm not sure how much to trust the source: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S/T3.expansion.html
100% agree - noobs should be tolerated and helped where they are showing some willingness to pay attention and learn. Videos are for when you have an organized group that is stuck. The nature of some of the LFx is that your not sure what your going to get, so you'd have to have watched every video for every fight the before doing anything. Give me a RealId and i'll happily ignore people who are going to bash noobs for not getting a PhD in WoW before playing.
As opposed to the president, who quit halfway through a Senate term, or a pair of Senators (Clinton and Kerry) who quit halfway through to be Secretary of State? Maybe a San Francisco mayor that quit to be lt. governor? Politicians moving on to larger jobs is a universal, not a new, Republican, or Democrat phenomenon.
About the only thing no one quits is the House - because the two year terms line up with whatever other election you want to pursue. And even then, i think there are a couple people who've bailed to move up. Really doubt they were all members of the same party that you don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
someone on slashdot understanding peak shaving, yay!
What is your source for the wind gust behavior? (I mean this non-confrontationally, but my geeky lack of social skills betrays my intentions). I am an industry that occassionally intersects with wind power generation, and my understanding is that gust are universally bad - they want steady and reliable. Gust mean problems, period. If you have a source, it helps me learn professionally. I've been taught that they can't operate in gusty conditions, bad for the machinery as well as the grid.
So how does the sequence of (1) "Am I Under Arrest", (2) "Can I Go Now?" work during a traffic stop?
It generates an arrest.
but, but,.... it's a WHOLE LOT of smug.
Seriously, there is a problem in that a lot of waste is dumped into the ocean, effectively distributing it widely and making that ultimate recycle way harder. Landfills make more sense, but we have a lot of ocean-front cities. All that ocean. So tempting. So free.
not the U-r-gay-an embassy (apologies to Homer Simpson, no offense to Uruguayans), I don't think he is actually doing very much at this point, certainly not molesting women, for example. It is, essentially, prison, with the added feature that it doesn't count as prison time and costs Sweden and Britain nothing. Everyone wins! From what I've heard of Swedish prisons, the food in the embassy is likely not as good, and his internet access is probably slower.
Earthquakes are not predictable in the specific, they are somewhat predictable in general. Italy is subject to earthquakes, generally. This is well-known, and documented through a long history of having earthquakes. Why the country does not adopt reasonable earthquake construction standards and _enforce them_ is a great mystery to people in other earthquake prone areas (Japan, California, et.al.). It's third-world. The fact that you put geologists in jail instead, for not predicting the specific (impossible) is baffling. You all know there will be earthquakes. Anyone, politician, "scientist", or whoever that says otherwise should be mocked by a public that knows better.
If your website takes ads from Iranian companies and has an interface in Farsi then yes, you should obey the laws of Iran. If you don't like it, then don't do business there.
So, if I take Spanish ads, which countries laws am i subject to? There are dozens of contenders. Farsi is not owned by Iran, anyone that wants to can speak it, inside of Iran or out. Just as English isn't owned by the United Kingdom or the United States. You do business where you do business, not per the language that you use. Its gonna always come down to where you are physically located.
Multi-nationals are more vulnerable this way, because they do actually have a physical presence in many countries. I don't have any sympathy - its something an enterprise has to negotiate - you have to select a set of countries that have reasonably compatible laws to operate in, so that you don't get into a "banned in one country, required in another" bind.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/culturing-science/2013/01/29/killer-cats/
Per the CDC:
For those who are sexually active, condoms may lower the risk of HPV infection. To be most effective, they should be used with every sex act, from start to finish. Condoms may also lower the risk of developing HPV-related diseases, such as genital warts and cervical cancer. But HPV can infect areas that are not covered by a condom - so condoms may not fully protect against HPV.
People can also lower their chances of getting HPV by being in a faithful relationship with one partner; limiting their number of sex partners; and being with a partner who has had no or few prior sex partners. But even people with only one lifetime sex partner can get HPV. And it may not be possible to determine if a partner who has been sexually active in the past is currently infected. Not having sex is the only sure way to avoid HPV.
http://www.cdc.gov/hpv/prevention.html
Overall, they recommend the vaccine, but they acknowledge both that there are alternatives and the vaccine is not a cure-all.
I wonder what the equilibrium point is? it should be mathmatecally determinate: Given a risk of 1 in 750,000 for the vaccine to cause a polio, what percentage of the population would have to take the vaccine to produce a 1 in 750,000 risk of an un-vaccinated person contracting the disease, accounting for socialization patterns, etc.
Further, what would the media impact be? would people be frightened into taking the vaccine before the equilibrium point? or would the media lag so badly we'd wind up in an occillating pattern?
I suggest it as a question for What If...
I like the essence of your plan - give some tangible benefit in exchange for vaccination. But the specific has a problem. The tax credit is not enough to overcome the anti-vaxxer fear that they're actually hurting their child, and not useful to the living-off-the-grid crowd (they're not filing returns anyhow). Maybe a free solar panel per person per 5years, on proof of maintained vaccines for 5 years? I know the money could be turned into solar panels, but you might entice a few off the grid people. The anti-vaxxers aren't going to be moved by any value proposition, given their conviction that vaccines are bad.
High risk exercise, not sure what that would include. I've never heard of a case so no, but most people sick enough to need a transplant are not doing a lot of exercise, high risk or otherwise. Doesn't come up.
If it makes you feel the system is more fair, they do not do transplants for overweight people. Weight under control is a pre-condition for transplant, both for health and for the do-ability of the surgery.
The perceived problems with recreational drugs:
1) in a lot of cases, dietary/drugs/alcohol caused the problem that requires the transplant. there are generally moral qualms about giving an unrepentant person a transplant for a condition they themselves caused and show every sign of causing again. there are always better candidates.
1) impairs ability/discipline to manage a transplant regimine
2) represents a willingness to disregard medical opinion of the transplant team (e.g. doctor shopping). given that you can find a doctor to tell you anything is ok, doctor shopping represents a risk to the organ, and the organ are in extremely limited supply. (as a practical matter, post-transplant, there isn't anything they can do about your drug/alcohol issues, so they're extra diligent on the upstream side). if you're going to make up your own mind on the safety of recreational drugs, you'll make up your own mind on diet, exercise, prescribed drug use, etc. Given that your going to be part of how the transplant regimine is evaluated for other patients, they want to know that you're at least doing what they have you down on paper as doing.
3) some drugs popularly assumed to be harmless are not (mj particularly carries a fungus that can be deadly in an immunosuppressive environment). anything intravenous is a source for hepatitis, of course. and most of them affect your judgement.
4) there is some value judgement going on with non-kidney transplants particularly. The supply is extremely limited, so there is always a number of candidates for any given organ. They have to choose. You want to be the more attractive candidate, not the jackass telling them where to stuff their book learn'n about drugs.
Its not just recreational drug impairment that gets you off the list. I knew a young woman who'd had a stroke, and the resulting mental impairment rendered her unable to follow a drug regimine on her own, and she was off the list as a result.
The drug regimine is pretty demanding. I'm taking 7 different drugs plus 2 vitamin supplements at 4 times of the day, with another drug on a periodic/as needed basis. That's a maintenence regimine - the "right out of the hospital" schedule was more like 14 drugs. Right out of the hospital, there may be dietary restrictions as well (I had a low potassium restriction for a while). Gotta have enough mental wherewithal and discipline to follow that.
Pointed out in another comment - in the US, drinking alcohol or active recreational drug use will keep you off transplant lists. There will always be another candidate better than you, if you are still in the process of wrecking your organs. I suppose it is this way in most countries.
Generally, in the US, we go to extremes at end-of-life (regardless of cause) rather than spend the money up front. There is always another treatment, and doctors here are pretty aggressive at using them. I sometimes think people die simply from being worn out by treatments.
Ever since I started working in '95, insurance has always differentiated between smokers and non-smokers. Other issues start to be hard to judge. How many cupcakes is "too many"? Insurance companies could just arbitrarily decide who's got healthy habits and who doesn't, but i'm betting that would quickly boil down to just how much people cost, regardless of why. If there is a standard, there has to be a way to measure it. Smoking is pretty easy, 'cause smokers have a hard time doing without for very long, and it's a very visible and distinct activity that goes with it.
"Unsafe actions of others" is pretty broad too - does that include bicycling (one of the more dangerous sporting activities)? Most things people do are less safe than taking a 1hr walk/day and spending the rest of your time eating oatmeal, reading, and sleeping. Most of us want more of a life than that. So, which "less safe" activities do you want to punish? Most people seem to say "all the ones I don't do".
Further, the time I got pneumonia, i did go straight to the ER - because it can kill pretty quickly if not treated. Pneumonia needs ER treatment. Perhaps you meant influenza, which sometimes does and sometimes does not. Neither is going to be absolutely prevented by regular doctors visits. Exposure and age are your two big risk multipliers there - not readily adjustable by government action. My pneumonia seems to have stemmed from a very small amount of aspirated vomit (side-effect of yet another problem), so again, doctors visits (there were many) did not prevent it.
Cirrhosis, you will get treatment for. Treatment effectiveness is limited so you'll need to be off the drugs/alcohol for a while to get on a transplant list, these days. And they blood test to make sure. So, yeah, they will let you die rather than give you the best treatment.
I have doubts. Per this link http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/tra_dri_sid_of_the_roa_lef_or_rig-driving-side-road-left-right Germany is a right-hand drive state (along with most of the continent). For the most part, you drive faster toward the center, e.g. left lane is the passing lane.
I suspect your Australian left-side-driving brain turned things inside out.
For the American audience, these speed are not remarkable:
70kph ~= 42mph
80 ~= 48
90 ~= 54 (the "slow" highway speed limit)
100 ~= 60 (typical is 65mph/108kph)
120 ~= 72 (occassionally 75mph/124kph)
130 ~= 78
In NV, there are stretches of road where the limit is 75mph (and that is unenforced due to the 2 patrol car/day schedule, see Top Gear s12e2). 80mph is routine for many parts of California (in spite of a 65mph limit). 130kph sound fast to an American who can't do metric conversions, but it really isn't that fast in practice. You'll see a few people doing 90mph in those situations. 100mph+ is considered unreasonable by about 98% of the population in almost all scenarios. (that would bet 160kph)
On the other hand, a town near me has a school on the highway through town, and that has a limit of 15mph (22kph). And it is effectively enforced by the population going that speed (so no bad actors could go through there faster due to the traffic jam). Hehe, one of our managers got a ticket for 30mph through there yesterday, and he regarded it as a fair cop.
Must factor in tires. Tires can only go so fast before they come apart. Higher speed is higher stress, and this is not a linear function. Tires themselves are rated for what they can handle, but you have to calculate in degredation with age. Beyond about 75mph, your going to start running into older tires failing. At those speeds, it can be catastrophic.
Problem number 2 is enforcement. Everyone dreams up a scheme where they can drive faster, but it the rule is not fairly simple and obviously easy to enforce, the top speed for the fastest car becomes the top speed for everyone, including idiot kids in badly maintained clunkers with ancient tires, coming the other way down the road toward you.
Further, this doesn't account for driver quality (including temporary impairment, drunk, tired, etc). Too many people don't recognize impairment and slow down (or not drive altogether). Higher speed limits mean they have even less reaction time before they cause damage.
Gotta get the bad cars and bad drivers off the road before you change speed limits.
Not really true - most conditions are not communicable. Gunshot wounds - no. Alcohol/drug abuse - no. Cancers, heart disease (the two biggies) - no (mostly, a few cancers might be communicable). Diabetes - no. The communicable stuff is the hardest to treat, public health or no, but not because of cost. Vaccines are cheap to free, anyone should be getting them as a child right now, unless your parents are irresponsible, but we're having issues with compliance. Likewise, compliance is a problem with antibiotic regimes (gotta take the whole thing), and not exposing other members of the public (remember that TB patient flying around the country?).
"Obamacare" (and medicare, mostly) is not about public risk, it's about the social decision of who you think you are responsible for taking care of. We're already dealing with communicable stuff as well as we can, within the personal freedom constraints we have set for ourselves. We aren't forcing people to take their pills or shots, or stay out of the sun, not skydive, stay home in their closet, etc (mostly).
I'd like to see a chart detailing all the difference between the countries - would cut down speculation and assumption a lot. Off the top of my head, i can think of a few other contributing factors for differences in driving/driving related deaths:
1) difference in driving population
a) lower/higher test/competency requirements
b) age of drivers (do some countries have younger/older drivers, the two most accident prone demographic groups)
c) literacy in signage (or the non-requirement of literacy for countries using more international text-free signage)
d) driving culture (how much social approval for drugged or distracted driving, how proud are people of their driving skills)
(proud of driving skills may not corelate with actual low death rates...suspect the corelation is elsewhere)
e) average passengers (expect huge correlation, more passengers is more potential casualties, and more distraction for drivers)
2) Driving environment
a) physical road conditions (average age/maintanence level, build level (dirt, gravel, undivided highways, divided, limited access, etc)
b) weather (snow/ice frequency, etc)
c) pedestrian culture (india vs new jersey)
d) traffic law culture (how strict is average adherence - india vs germany)
e) isolation of roads (how bored will drivers get)
f) average speeds (urban and rural, vs speed of accidents)
g) gas prices
h) availability of alternate transportation (get shy, uncertain drivers off the road)
3) Vehicles
a) average age
b) average maintenance level (particularly tires)
c) safety features (some evidence suggests a negative correlation for some features)
d) power/weight averages (don't think this would correlate)
Anyone got a data source that would cover these factors?
I've watched a bit of "... worst drivers" shows, and they seem to pick set of drivers for each series where they have one driver for each stereotype bad driver type. (shy, aggressive, dominating passenger) plus a few genuine idiots. Be interesting to see if some countries do a better job of filtering one or another stereotype (genuine idiots being the most irredeemable type).
Which explains why americans are so socially inept and so fat, and so selfish. Well done mister, don't stop, put a fence around your house and kidnap another 14 year old teenage.
That gets today's prize for most ridiculously over-the-top hate-and-assumption-filled response.
1) Social skills are learned in pubs, bars and the like, while drinking alcohol.
2) Staying out of bars, pubs, etc, will make you fat.
3) Failure to drink enough and be in the company of others while doing so will result in selfishness.
4) Americans are particularly vulnerable due to their lack of drinking.
5) People that disagree with you are child molesters. or is it "people that don't drink"? or "people with fences around their house"? you should clarify this point for us.
I could go for this, if you could get it to be actually enforced. Selective enforcement ("i think drunk drivers are bad, so i'll bust them, but texting, hey, everyone does that, it can't be bad") is a problem. Fill in your own law-enforcement preferred and hated activities. Not only do you have to get police to agree to actually enforce per measured-risk, you have to get cranky old judges who liked things the way they were back then to all be on the same page.
but, alas, i have no mod points. Ain't it just always that way.
Of course, I recall an episode of Better of Ted where the geeks try to grow meat in the lab. When the tester eventually eats it, they ask how it tastes, and from my recollection, I believe the answer was, "like despair".
In this context, that extra 'f' is pretty important. For those who haven't watched this excellent show, Ted is not the name of the synthetic beef.
I would like to see a source for your claim that insects are 90% efficient. And cows produce milk, which per this source, is pretty damn good (magic??), so good i'm not sure how much to trust the source: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S/T3.expansion.html
100% agree - noobs should be tolerated and helped where they are showing some willingness to pay attention and learn. Videos are for when you have an organized group that is stuck. The nature of some of the LFx is that your not sure what your going to get, so you'd have to have watched every video for every fight the before doing anything. Give me a RealId and i'll happily ignore people who are going to bash noobs for not getting a PhD in WoW before playing.
No, he means the half-term governor. Quitter!
As opposed to the president, who quit halfway through a Senate term, or a pair of Senators (Clinton and Kerry) who quit halfway through to be Secretary of State? Maybe a San Francisco mayor that quit to be lt. governor? Politicians moving on to larger jobs is a universal, not a new, Republican, or Democrat phenomenon.
About the only thing no one quits is the House - because the two year terms line up with whatever other election you want to pursue. And even then, i think there are a couple people who've bailed to move up. Really doubt they were all members of the same party that you don't like.