More specific to elections though, isn't it about time we abolished the electoral college and go right to a popular vote? There is clearly no legitimate reason for it to still be around.
If you read the US Constitution, you will realize that it is the States that vote for the President, and that the President represents the States, not the People. That would seem to be an obvious legitimate reason to keep the electoral college around. To get rid of the electoral college, you would have to get rid of the States. The popular vote theater is a 20th century invention, and arguably one of dubious value at that.
One of the big problems in the US is not that we do not elect the Federal President by popular vote, but that so many people who insist on offering their opinion on how we should change the system have no bloody clue how it currently works. The level of ignorance on this topic makes the argument for why the Federal elections, outside of the House of Representatives, have traditionally been firewalled from the popular vote.
The reality is that the US did invent many of these technologies and in some cases is still significantly ahead of the rest of the world with respect to a number of types of design and fabrication technologies. There is mathematics and algorithm research that is outright classified and has never been published. The US is still responsible for grossly disproportionate amount of the R&D in the industrialized world. The numbers don't lie, and places like Europe do not remotely pull their per capita weight in R&D no matter how you mangle the numbers.
Now, some of this technology, like encryption algorithms, is a horse that has long since left the barn. Other technologies, like advanced materials fabrication, is an area where non-US capabilities are often technologically inferior even though it is well-known that this technology exists and you can buy the finished product overseas -- basically a very technologically advanced trade secret. And then there are technologies that have no foreign equivalents that may not be exportable at all, which includes a not insignificant range of science and applied mathematics research.
And no, it is not arrogant to think that a lot of this technology is unique to the US, since that is the factual case. Sure, some of it is idiotic and pointless policy, but there is a lot of technological know-how that does not exist anywhere else. The fact that US military technologically is chronically a full generation ahead of the rest of the industrialized world essentially implies this (the reheating of 1980s technology by the Russians notwithstanding), as does the fact that most R&D still happens in that country. If the EU was doing vast amounts of R&D that was comparable, a case might be made, but it isn't. Neither is Asia.
If that is your standard, the oldest functioning democracy with universal suffrage that I am aware of is New Jersey, which discriminated on neither the basis of race nor sex in their constitution since before the United States even existed.
The advantage military technology has is that it is results oriented. In terms of capability they know where they are today and they can specify in considerable detail exactly where they want to be. In the case of organizations like DARPA, they give considerable latitude to the designers in how they solve these problems and the US DoD is relatively patient when it comes to ultimately getting the results they were looking for. There are qualities reflected here that are absent in many other sectors that have little to do with military research per se. In fact, these qualities are not intrinsic to military research at all, so I would say it reflects favorably on the R&D culture that the US DoD has fostered that so many interesting "blue sky" research projects get funded that more conservative private sector institutions would never consider.
There is still plenty of basic science and technology research that gets done outside of military research circles, but military research has the advantage that they are working toward a specific result or technology, even when working on "blue sky" projects. I suspect that focus on specific high-level results combined with wide latitude in design and patience in delivery breeds a very productive research environment relative to those with less critical or obvious goal structures.
As a point of fact, thermite ignition boosters often use sulfur as an oxidizer. Consequently, it would not be surprising at all to find significant sulfur residue at a thermite burn site even though thermite itself contains no sulfur. Which is not to say the guy is not an idiot.
Maybe you are a different kind of vegan, but the kind of forage that grows in the rocky, arid soil of the American West is not suitable for a human diet. Nor would the land be economically productive for most other kinds of agriculture. It is a bit equivalent to raising goats in other parts of the world; a goat can get fat on land no human ever will.
Even if you did some heavy genetic engineering and gene splicing to find something that would grow moderately well in that soil and ecology, it is questionable whether or not the yield would actually ever be economical. If you are picturing giant fields of grass, you are picturing wrong. Think more like sagebrush, wire scrub, and a lot of rocks. The grasses that grow between them are actually pretty nutritious for a bovine, but distributed sparsely.
But hey, if you can find a vegan willing to scramble over volcanic rocks and narrow canyons for patches of protein-rich grass there is a whole world of free food waiting for you just east of the Sierra Nevada.
become vegan, or at least vegetarian (the cattle industry is extraordinarily destructive to the planet
The "cattle industry" is essential to the ecology of places like the American West, where they replaced the critical role of vast herds of wild bison. A major percentage of the American cattle herd is raised on the range, marginally arable land, where bison used to roam. If you remove the cattle, you either have to replace them with bison (in which case there is approximately zero net benefit) or you can collapse the ecosystem -- your choice. In either case, you are neither adding to the amount of plants that can be reasonably grown nor mitigating damage to the environment.
The idea that all cattle farming is necessarily destructive to the environment is ignorant nonsense. Sure, some of it is, but there is a large percentage that is not only non-destructive but actually allows us to produce food on land that would not otherwise be productive. Cattle were not genetically engineered from whole cloth in a lab by evil scientists somewhere in an effort to destroy the planet, they were a part of many ecosystems in temperate climates. We would not need to cut beef consumption nearly as much as some fringe vegans claim in order for it to be a net *benefit* to both the environment and food production.
It does not do the credibility of the environmentalist movement any good when they assert the necessity of making dire choices for ideological reasons with no basis in fact. Yes, meat production could stand to be decreased and/or optimized. Completely eliminating beef from the human diet not only serves no practical purpose, it would actually be counterproductive to the stated goals in many cases.
You will be surprised to find out, then, that rates of mammograms and cervical cancer screening is as high or higher in the US than most of of Europe. That is actually one of those head scratcher medical statistics, because as you note many European systems make a huge deal out of it but women simply do not take advantage of it. I would also note that you do not need insurance to get that in the US. If you track down the most recent Lancet Oncology study, they note that both incidence and diagnosis rates for most cancers are higher in the American population relative to Europe. Medical diagnostics prevalence and accuracy is another area where the US is anomalously good in medical statistics.
Most of the discrepancy in cancer survival rates are attributed to two things. First, more frequent and more accurate diagnosis allows cancers to be caught earlier in the United States on average, partly attributed to the per capita ubiquity of state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment. Second, many state-of-the-art cancer therapies and treatments are far more widely available in the United States than in Europe, in part because most of the research occurs in the United States, so the European health care systems are sometimes using less effective treatments than in the US.
In a nutshell, the differences are inexpensive, widely available, state-of-the-art diagnostics without waiting times (during which time cancer gets less treatable), and superior medical technology for some types of cancers.
Do Americans without health insurance, but with cancer, get the treatment they need?
Yes, it is a gross misrepresentation to assert otherwise, though that does not stop people. And if you think about it, it would require a really large statistical anomaly far larger than significantly better average survival rates if there was a significant portion of the US population that was not treated for cancer. It would require people with insurance to have something approaching a 100% survival rate, which is obviously not the case.
Much of the confusion relates to the fact that there is no Federal general public health care system, but every single State has one. It is not a legitimate area of purview for the Federal government, and if we applied the same standard to, say, education, one could say that the US had no universal public education system until the mid-20th century (obviously a misrepresentation as well). I was raised on free state health care in the United States, so it always surprises me to hear that it does not exist. The state systems are not as good as the private insurance system -- they have the same problems as most European style systems really -- but they are adequate if you are poor, and if you have something nasty like cancer they often pay to send you to a private medical facility that specializes in that treatment.
Life expectancy is a combination of two factors: accidents (e.g. road deaths, homicide, etc) and medical (cancer, cardiovascular, etc).
While Americans have mediocre life expectancies, it is because they have much higher statistical risk of accidental death than almost any other country in the industrialized world. If you remove accidental deaths from the life expectancy numbers, Americans are among the very longest lived people in the world. If anything, superior medical life expectancy compensates for a very high accidental death rate in the American population.
Health care should be about curing diseases, patching up injuries, and keeping people reasonably healthy. The job of a doctor is to cure my cancer, not make me feel good about my society, and to the extent the latter interferes with the former it helps no one. Would you rather have "social justice" or cancer survival rates that are comparable to the United States? Does this "social justice" really benefit the average person with cancer if they are statistically far more likely to die (e.g. Europe's deplorable cancer survival rates)?
If you pay for "social justice", that is what you get. If you pay for health care, that is what you get. They are not the same thing. If you take a person's health care money and spend it on social justice, do not be surprised when medical outcome statistics trend for the worse.
While it is popular to slag American health care, it is also vastly superior in terms of medical results across the population by a wide range of metrics. Take cancer survival rates, where the U.S. has long been the best in the world, as once again confirmed in a recent Lancet Oncology study:
"American men have a five-year survival rate of 66 percent -- compared to only 47 percent for European men." (http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba596/)
That is no small difference -- almost 20 points! -- in medical outcomes for one of the leading causes of death in the industrialized world, and a lot of other medical metrics look like this. For all the talk of preventative medicine not being available to Americans, they are actually more likely to receive it than in other industrialized countries in many cases. There is a disconnect between popular perception and the medical literature.
Clearly insurance companies are accidentally doing something right, though perhaps because dead people do not pay premiums. However, this is less of an endorsement of the current byzantine system and more a recognition that we do not want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
This is the same reasoning used for algorithm patents e.g. a "sort" in the abstract should not be patentable, but specific and novel mechanism for sorting should be. You are not patenting a sorted list, you are patenting the mechanism and process by which the sorted list was obtained. Many algorithm patents fall under this aegis. The MP3 algorithm patents do not prevent anyone from implementing audio compression, they merely control one mechanism of (not particularly good) audio compression. Algorithm patents do not prevent software implementations; an algorithm may be more efficient than another, but that is the kind of innovation patents are supposed to foster, and is no different than if someone invents a more efficient automobile engine. If not having the more efficient version makes someone less competitive, they can always invest in research toward a superior product or license the research already done. Alternatively, you can market the hell out of a crappy version to sell it (which happens a lot).
Of course, business process patents are a separate can of worms.
Your reasoning can be trivially extended to exclude all patentable art. The fact that you built a new widget using tools designed for the purpose of building widgets does not make the widget unpatentable. Patents are mostly about new configurations; the tools used to create those configurations are irrelevant. Consider chemical process patents, which are just algorithms for efficiently producing molecular states, despite the fact that chemistry instructions that define the process are very general and used in millions of different applications.
The real issue, which most people avoid addressing, is that there is no practical distinction between software patents, chemical process patents, or machinery patents as a necessary consequence of basic theory. The reason this has become an issue at all is because there is increasingly little distinction in practice as well. Consequently, any dividing line is going to be arbitrary and capricious. Note that there is a similar emerging problem with copyright law, which is also premised on a false model of the universe that is starting to become obvious in practice. Yet few people are suggesting we solve this problem by rectifying the law with reality, instead opting to promote an alternative fantasy model of the nature of the universe that will ultimately break when it intersects with reality.
As every computer geek should know, there is no theoretical distinction between the machine, the program, and the data. At one time there was a practical distinction, but those lines have been blurring for many decades now. Any solution that pretends like these are theoretically distinct classes of thing solves nothing, as the cause of this problem was pretending a theoretical distinction exists where none does in the first place.
You are correct, Intel processors and chipsets have limited CRC in the internal pathways. In fact, if this matters to you, it is one of the areas where AMDs silicon is better, having more comprehensive error detection. HyperTransport, for example, has CRC.
It does not surprise me at all that there are better algorithms out there or that Alder-32 failed, but the failure probability is compound. It only has to work a few times a year in many cases, and Adler-32 *is* used in some respectable systems as the error trap of last resort. Out of curiosity, not being a topical expert, what would be the best CRC algorithm to use on modern silicon? It is also worth noting that some places are starting to use cryptographic hashes instead of CRC for software checksum purposes, so perhaps this is all moot.
For these purposes, a CRC that is fast and weak is generally superior to one that is slow and strong because the CPU load of the implementation does have a measurable impact on system performance. Remember, the software CRC is supposed to catch failures in the other layers of CRC and error detection, so it does not have to be perfect. If it reduces the probability of an uncaught problem from a few times a year to a few times per millenium, that may be sufficient if using a stronger CRC means burning 10% of your total CPU time. Adler-32 is an example of an algorithm that is used in practice in preference to stronger, slower algorithms, hence why I mentioned it. If there is something as fast or faster that is also stronger, we should be using that instead.
Many of the software checksums used are intentionally weak and fast to minimize the performance impact, though as systems get bigger they may need to use something stronger to keep the probability of an uncaught error within the acceptable safety margins. Fortunately, people are working on that problem.
It has been generally well-known for a number of years now that any time you have a large cluster you cannot count on hardware checksums to catch every bit flip that may occur during copies and transmission, particularly with consumer hardware which has many internal paths with no checksums at all. Google learned this the hard way, like the supercomputing people before them, and now like Amazon after Google. And some of the better database engines also do their own internal software checksums as well to catch uncaught errors introduced as the data gets copied across the silicon, disks, and network -- it is one way they get their very high uptime and low failure rate.
It does not reflect well on the software community that most people *still* do not know to do this for very large scale system designs. The performance cost of doing a software CRC on your data every time it is moved around is low enough that it is generally worth it these days. If your system is large enough, the probability of getting bitten by this approaches unity. Very fast implementations of Adler-32 and other high-performance checksum algorithms are widely available online.
Judging high-end mathematics aptitude by looking at low-end mathematics test scores is no way to run a study. Anyone can learn mathematics well enough to get a decent score on the SAT; it would be like using rudimentary literacy as the measure of Pulitzer prize potential. What next, flipping burgers at McDonald's will make you the next Iron Chef? No one seriously doubted that males and females learn mathematics with similar aptitude in any case, so this seems to be a combination strawman and low-rent dig at Larry Summers that misses the point more than anything.
The controversy, which is not very controversial, has to do with differences in genders to directly manipulate certain kinds of complex system models mentally. While it tends to manifest in some areas of applied mathematics, it does not reflect any ability to learn mathematics per se.
The question of why the US has the right to possess the world's largest arsenal yet tell other people they must remain unarmed, is a separate issue, of course.
Of course, by "US" you mean "Russia", to which the US gives several billion dollars a year to dispose of their stockpile which is far larger. The US nuclear weapon inventory is a lot smaller than it used to be, and most of what is categorized as a nuke is actually a disassembled trigger rather than a warhead, and the US will have finished disposal of its chemical weapons in the next few years (not so for several other countries). The nukes (both US and the fissile material the US buys from Russia) are turned into reactor fuel.
You might want to double check your assertions about US weapons of mass destruction. The Cold War was a long time ago.
This is the same regulatory framework that stymied geothermal development in the 1990s, and a favored control mechanism by the environmentalist lobbies. They have made it very difficult to develop in the western deserts for other people, they just never expected it to impact their pet projects. An introductory course on unintended consequences.
The oil and gas development bit is a red herring, as mineral extraction (e.g. oil and gas development) is specially protected by very old Federal statutes that mitigate the regulatory overhead that the BLM can impose on power plant projects.
All these companies have to do is change them over to a serial hybrid esp for trucks. The reason is that the serial hybrid is perfect for working as a generator.
These already exist and are produced in small quantities by American truck manufacturers, with the qualifier that traditionally they have only sold them to commercial fleets rather than the broader consumer market (no link, but I looked into them in the past). The fuel economy is not that much better (~25 MPG), but having 20-25kW of electrical generation is a cool feature. If I was in the market and they were easy to buy, a diesel-electric hybrid would rate serious consideration, and not for the gas mileage (a lot of conventional diesel trucks can do something similar).
I saw this coming years ago and sold off my SUV, which was actually used as an SUV, because the gas mileage was atrocious (~15 MPG) though it was nearly indestructible as an off-road platform. Of course, it was a genuine SUV, not a repackaged minivan with a bigger engine -- SUV meant something quite different than it does now many years ago. It is a vehicle with a useful function, not a religion, and the people that slag their very existence are basically demonstrating that they are the same kind of asshole as the ridiculous SUV driving soccer mom's they detest. At the end of the day, the impact of SUVs on the climate is grossly overstated (noise, essentially) and the relative hazards are exaggerated, so I don't worry about it too much one way or another. It would be cool if diesel-electric trucks became ubiquitous, because they are cool, but that is the primary argument I could make for them. They won't save the planet, substantially improve gas mileage, or wash your dishes for you. But what do I know, I prefer to not even own a car.
The market will sort this out on its own in theory, and apparently it is in practice as well. Price signals will cause people to buy what they actually need, but I regret to inform the SUV haters that there are still plenty of legitimate use cases for big trucks and SUVs no matter what the price of fuel. (And WTF is up with the "luxury SUV" class. That doesn't even make sense.)
No it doesn't. Not even close. We have the most expensive system in the world, but by any measure of results you won't find us anywhere near the top 20. Not infant mortality, life expectancy, disease survival rates, nothing.
In the industrialized world, infant mortality is a function of genetic and ethnic demographics, some genetic groups having integer factor higher infant mortality rates (still birth, miscarriage, etc) no matter what country they live in for reasons that are not entirely clear. If you control for genetic demographics, all industrialized countries have roughly the same infant mortality rate; infant mortality rates elsewhere are the product of infectious disease. Americans have a mediocre life expectancy due to high accidental death (particularly vehicular) and homicide rates. If you only look at people who die of disease and age -- reflections of health care -- Americans are among the very longest lived people in the industrialized world.
You are just plain wrong on the disease survival rates. The latest Lancet Oncology Journal study, for example, has the US leading the world for survival rates across all cancers by a significant margin, with cancer survival rates exceeding that of Europe by 20-40% on average. For example, only half the people with cancer survive under the UK NHS, compared to two-thirds survival rate in the US. Most other direct measures of medical outcomes have the US looking similarly good.
Yeah, the US system is hideously expensive and byzantine, but in terms of actually having a positive medical outcome it can't be beat. Maybe if one of the other countries spent as much they might (or might not) have similar medical outcome statistics.
The real problem is that people do not understand insurance, which is a financial instrument with a specific function and not a way to make other people pay your costs.
Insurance is an instrument for efficiently distributing risk, not cost. It is a distinction with a very real difference, both theoretical and practical. If you want to distribute cost the financial instrument is called "socialism" or "communism", depending on the implementation. Of course, distributing cost in no way alleviates the underlying problem of scarcity and often makes it worse.
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If you read the US Constitution, you will realize that it is the States that vote for the President, and that the President represents the States, not the People. That would seem to be an obvious legitimate reason to keep the electoral college around. To get rid of the electoral college, you would have to get rid of the States. The popular vote theater is a 20th century invention, and arguably one of dubious value at that.
One of the big problems in the US is not that we do not elect the Federal President by popular vote, but that so many people who insist on offering their opinion on how we should change the system have no bloody clue how it currently works. The level of ignorance on this topic makes the argument for why the Federal elections, outside of the House of Representatives, have traditionally been firewalled from the popular vote.
The reality is that the US did invent many of these technologies and in some cases is still significantly ahead of the rest of the world with respect to a number of types of design and fabrication technologies. There is mathematics and algorithm research that is outright classified and has never been published. The US is still responsible for grossly disproportionate amount of the R&D in the industrialized world. The numbers don't lie, and places like Europe do not remotely pull their per capita weight in R&D no matter how you mangle the numbers.
Now, some of this technology, like encryption algorithms, is a horse that has long since left the barn. Other technologies, like advanced materials fabrication, is an area where non-US capabilities are often technologically inferior even though it is well-known that this technology exists and you can buy the finished product overseas -- basically a very technologically advanced trade secret. And then there are technologies that have no foreign equivalents that may not be exportable at all, which includes a not insignificant range of science and applied mathematics research.
And no, it is not arrogant to think that a lot of this technology is unique to the US, since that is the factual case. Sure, some of it is idiotic and pointless policy, but there is a lot of technological know-how that does not exist anywhere else. The fact that US military technologically is chronically a full generation ahead of the rest of the industrialized world essentially implies this (the reheating of 1980s technology by the Russians notwithstanding), as does the fact that most R&D still happens in that country. If the EU was doing vast amounts of R&D that was comparable, a case might be made, but it isn't. Neither is Asia.
If that is your standard, the oldest functioning democracy with universal suffrage that I am aware of is New Jersey, which discriminated on neither the basis of race nor sex in their constitution since before the United States even existed.
The advantage military technology has is that it is results oriented. In terms of capability they know where they are today and they can specify in considerable detail exactly where they want to be. In the case of organizations like DARPA, they give considerable latitude to the designers in how they solve these problems and the US DoD is relatively patient when it comes to ultimately getting the results they were looking for. There are qualities reflected here that are absent in many other sectors that have little to do with military research per se. In fact, these qualities are not intrinsic to military research at all, so I would say it reflects favorably on the R&D culture that the US DoD has fostered that so many interesting "blue sky" research projects get funded that more conservative private sector institutions would never consider.
There is still plenty of basic science and technology research that gets done outside of military research circles, but military research has the advantage that they are working toward a specific result or technology, even when working on "blue sky" projects. I suspect that focus on specific high-level results combined with wide latitude in design and patience in delivery breeds a very productive research environment relative to those with less critical or obvious goal structures.
As a point of fact, thermite ignition boosters often use sulfur as an oxidizer. Consequently, it would not be surprising at all to find significant sulfur residue at a thermite burn site even though thermite itself contains no sulfur. Which is not to say the guy is not an idiot.
Maybe you are a different kind of vegan, but the kind of forage that grows in the rocky, arid soil of the American West is not suitable for a human diet. Nor would the land be economically productive for most other kinds of agriculture. It is a bit equivalent to raising goats in other parts of the world; a goat can get fat on land no human ever will.
Even if you did some heavy genetic engineering and gene splicing to find something that would grow moderately well in that soil and ecology, it is questionable whether or not the yield would actually ever be economical. If you are picturing giant fields of grass, you are picturing wrong. Think more like sagebrush, wire scrub, and a lot of rocks. The grasses that grow between them are actually pretty nutritious for a bovine, but distributed sparsely.
But hey, if you can find a vegan willing to scramble over volcanic rocks and narrow canyons for patches of protein-rich grass there is a whole world of free food waiting for you just east of the Sierra Nevada.
The "cattle industry" is essential to the ecology of places like the American West, where they replaced the critical role of vast herds of wild bison. A major percentage of the American cattle herd is raised on the range, marginally arable land, where bison used to roam. If you remove the cattle, you either have to replace them with bison (in which case there is approximately zero net benefit) or you can collapse the ecosystem -- your choice. In either case, you are neither adding to the amount of plants that can be reasonably grown nor mitigating damage to the environment.
The idea that all cattle farming is necessarily destructive to the environment is ignorant nonsense. Sure, some of it is, but there is a large percentage that is not only non-destructive but actually allows us to produce food on land that would not otherwise be productive. Cattle were not genetically engineered from whole cloth in a lab by evil scientists somewhere in an effort to destroy the planet, they were a part of many ecosystems in temperate climates. We would not need to cut beef consumption nearly as much as some fringe vegans claim in order for it to be a net *benefit* to both the environment and food production.
It does not do the credibility of the environmentalist movement any good when they assert the necessity of making dire choices for ideological reasons with no basis in fact. Yes, meat production could stand to be decreased and/or optimized. Completely eliminating beef from the human diet not only serves no practical purpose, it would actually be counterproductive to the stated goals in many cases.
You will be surprised to find out, then, that rates of mammograms and cervical cancer screening is as high or higher in the US than most of of Europe. That is actually one of those head scratcher medical statistics, because as you note many European systems make a huge deal out of it but women simply do not take advantage of it. I would also note that you do not need insurance to get that in the US. If you track down the most recent Lancet Oncology study, they note that both incidence and diagnosis rates for most cancers are higher in the American population relative to Europe. Medical diagnostics prevalence and accuracy is another area where the US is anomalously good in medical statistics.
Most of the discrepancy in cancer survival rates are attributed to two things. First, more frequent and more accurate diagnosis allows cancers to be caught earlier in the United States on average, partly attributed to the per capita ubiquity of state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment. Second, many state-of-the-art cancer therapies and treatments are far more widely available in the United States than in Europe, in part because most of the research occurs in the United States, so the European health care systems are sometimes using less effective treatments than in the US.
In a nutshell, the differences are inexpensive, widely available, state-of-the-art diagnostics without waiting times (during which time cancer gets less treatable), and superior medical technology for some types of cancers.
Yes, it is a gross misrepresentation to assert otherwise, though that does not stop people. And if you think about it, it would require a really large statistical anomaly far larger than significantly better average survival rates if there was a significant portion of the US population that was not treated for cancer. It would require people with insurance to have something approaching a 100% survival rate, which is obviously not the case.
Much of the confusion relates to the fact that there is no Federal general public health care system, but every single State has one. It is not a legitimate area of purview for the Federal government, and if we applied the same standard to, say, education, one could say that the US had no universal public education system until the mid-20th century (obviously a misrepresentation as well). I was raised on free state health care in the United States, so it always surprises me to hear that it does not exist. The state systems are not as good as the private insurance system -- they have the same problems as most European style systems really -- but they are adequate if you are poor, and if you have something nasty like cancer they often pay to send you to a private medical facility that specializes in that treatment.
Life expectancy is a combination of two factors: accidents (e.g. road deaths, homicide, etc) and medical (cancer, cardiovascular, etc).
While Americans have mediocre life expectancies, it is because they have much higher statistical risk of accidental death than almost any other country in the industrialized world. If you remove accidental deaths from the life expectancy numbers, Americans are among the very longest lived people in the world. If anything, superior medical life expectancy compensates for a very high accidental death rate in the American population.
Health care should be about curing diseases, patching up injuries, and keeping people reasonably healthy. The job of a doctor is to cure my cancer, not make me feel good about my society, and to the extent the latter interferes with the former it helps no one. Would you rather have "social justice" or cancer survival rates that are comparable to the United States? Does this "social justice" really benefit the average person with cancer if they are statistically far more likely to die (e.g. Europe's deplorable cancer survival rates)?
If you pay for "social justice", that is what you get. If you pay for health care, that is what you get. They are not the same thing. If you take a person's health care money and spend it on social justice, do not be surprised when medical outcome statistics trend for the worse.
While it is popular to slag American health care, it is also vastly superior in terms of medical results across the population by a wide range of metrics. Take cancer survival rates, where the U.S. has long been the best in the world, as once again confirmed in a recent Lancet Oncology study:
"American men have a five-year survival rate of 66 percent -- compared to only 47 percent for European men." (http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba596/)
That is no small difference -- almost 20 points! -- in medical outcomes for one of the leading causes of death in the industrialized world, and a lot of other medical metrics look like this. For all the talk of preventative medicine not being available to Americans, they are actually more likely to receive it than in other industrialized countries in many cases. There is a disconnect between popular perception and the medical literature.
Clearly insurance companies are accidentally doing something right, though perhaps because dead people do not pay premiums. However, this is less of an endorsement of the current byzantine system and more a recognition that we do not want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
This is the same reasoning used for algorithm patents e.g. a "sort" in the abstract should not be patentable, but specific and novel mechanism for sorting should be. You are not patenting a sorted list, you are patenting the mechanism and process by which the sorted list was obtained. Many algorithm patents fall under this aegis. The MP3 algorithm patents do not prevent anyone from implementing audio compression, they merely control one mechanism of (not particularly good) audio compression. Algorithm patents do not prevent software implementations; an algorithm may be more efficient than another, but that is the kind of innovation patents are supposed to foster, and is no different than if someone invents a more efficient automobile engine. If not having the more efficient version makes someone less competitive, they can always invest in research toward a superior product or license the research already done. Alternatively, you can market the hell out of a crappy version to sell it (which happens a lot).
Of course, business process patents are a separate can of worms.
Your reasoning can be trivially extended to exclude all patentable art. The fact that you built a new widget using tools designed for the purpose of building widgets does not make the widget unpatentable. Patents are mostly about new configurations; the tools used to create those configurations are irrelevant. Consider chemical process patents, which are just algorithms for efficiently producing molecular states, despite the fact that chemistry instructions that define the process are very general and used in millions of different applications.
The real issue, which most people avoid addressing, is that there is no practical distinction between software patents, chemical process patents, or machinery patents as a necessary consequence of basic theory. The reason this has become an issue at all is because there is increasingly little distinction in practice as well. Consequently, any dividing line is going to be arbitrary and capricious. Note that there is a similar emerging problem with copyright law, which is also premised on a false model of the universe that is starting to become obvious in practice. Yet few people are suggesting we solve this problem by rectifying the law with reality, instead opting to promote an alternative fantasy model of the nature of the universe that will ultimately break when it intersects with reality.
As every computer geek should know, there is no theoretical distinction between the machine, the program, and the data. At one time there was a practical distinction, but those lines have been blurring for many decades now. Any solution that pretends like these are theoretically distinct classes of thing solves nothing, as the cause of this problem was pretending a theoretical distinction exists where none does in the first place.
You are correct, Intel processors and chipsets have limited CRC in the internal pathways. In fact, if this matters to you, it is one of the areas where AMDs silicon is better, having more comprehensive error detection. HyperTransport, for example, has CRC.
It does not surprise me at all that there are better algorithms out there or that Alder-32 failed, but the failure probability is compound. It only has to work a few times a year in many cases, and Adler-32 *is* used in some respectable systems as the error trap of last resort. Out of curiosity, not being a topical expert, what would be the best CRC algorithm to use on modern silicon? It is also worth noting that some places are starting to use cryptographic hashes instead of CRC for software checksum purposes, so perhaps this is all moot.
For these purposes, a CRC that is fast and weak is generally superior to one that is slow and strong because the CPU load of the implementation does have a measurable impact on system performance. Remember, the software CRC is supposed to catch failures in the other layers of CRC and error detection, so it does not have to be perfect. If it reduces the probability of an uncaught problem from a few times a year to a few times per millenium, that may be sufficient if using a stronger CRC means burning 10% of your total CPU time. Adler-32 is an example of an algorithm that is used in practice in preference to stronger, slower algorithms, hence why I mentioned it. If there is something as fast or faster that is also stronger, we should be using that instead.
Many of the software checksums used are intentionally weak and fast to minimize the performance impact, though as systems get bigger they may need to use something stronger to keep the probability of an uncaught error within the acceptable safety margins. Fortunately, people are working on that problem.
It has been generally well-known for a number of years now that any time you have a large cluster you cannot count on hardware checksums to catch every bit flip that may occur during copies and transmission, particularly with consumer hardware which has many internal paths with no checksums at all. Google learned this the hard way, like the supercomputing people before them, and now like Amazon after Google. And some of the better database engines also do their own internal software checksums as well to catch uncaught errors introduced as the data gets copied across the silicon, disks, and network -- it is one way they get their very high uptime and low failure rate.
It does not reflect well on the software community that most people *still* do not know to do this for very large scale system designs. The performance cost of doing a software CRC on your data every time it is moved around is low enough that it is generally worth it these days. If your system is large enough, the probability of getting bitten by this approaches unity. Very fast implementations of Adler-32 and other high-performance checksum algorithms are widely available online.
Judging high-end mathematics aptitude by looking at low-end mathematics test scores is no way to run a study. Anyone can learn mathematics well enough to get a decent score on the SAT; it would be like using rudimentary literacy as the measure of Pulitzer prize potential. What next, flipping burgers at McDonald's will make you the next Iron Chef? No one seriously doubted that males and females learn mathematics with similar aptitude in any case, so this seems to be a combination strawman and low-rent dig at Larry Summers that misses the point more than anything.
The controversy, which is not very controversial, has to do with differences in genders to directly manipulate certain kinds of complex system models mentally. While it tends to manifest in some areas of applied mathematics, it does not reflect any ability to learn mathematics per se.
Of course, by "US" you mean "Russia", to which the US gives several billion dollars a year to dispose of their stockpile which is far larger. The US nuclear weapon inventory is a lot smaller than it used to be, and most of what is categorized as a nuke is actually a disassembled trigger rather than a warhead, and the US will have finished disposal of its chemical weapons in the next few years (not so for several other countries). The nukes (both US and the fissile material the US buys from Russia) are turned into reactor fuel.
You might want to double check your assertions about US weapons of mass destruction. The Cold War was a long time ago.
This is the same regulatory framework that stymied geothermal development in the 1990s, and a favored control mechanism by the environmentalist lobbies. They have made it very difficult to develop in the western deserts for other people, they just never expected it to impact their pet projects. An introductory course on unintended consequences.
The oil and gas development bit is a red herring, as mineral extraction (e.g. oil and gas development) is specially protected by very old Federal statutes that mitigate the regulatory overhead that the BLM can impose on power plant projects.
These already exist and are produced in small quantities by American truck manufacturers, with the qualifier that traditionally they have only sold them to commercial fleets rather than the broader consumer market (no link, but I looked into them in the past). The fuel economy is not that much better (~25 MPG), but having 20-25kW of electrical generation is a cool feature. If I was in the market and they were easy to buy, a diesel-electric hybrid would rate serious consideration, and not for the gas mileage (a lot of conventional diesel trucks can do something similar).
I saw this coming years ago and sold off my SUV, which was actually used as an SUV, because the gas mileage was atrocious (~15 MPG) though it was nearly indestructible as an off-road platform. Of course, it was a genuine SUV, not a repackaged minivan with a bigger engine -- SUV meant something quite different than it does now many years ago. It is a vehicle with a useful function, not a religion, and the people that slag their very existence are basically demonstrating that they are the same kind of asshole as the ridiculous SUV driving soccer mom's they detest. At the end of the day, the impact of SUVs on the climate is grossly overstated (noise, essentially) and the relative hazards are exaggerated, so I don't worry about it too much one way or another. It would be cool if diesel-electric trucks became ubiquitous, because they are cool, but that is the primary argument I could make for them. They won't save the planet, substantially improve gas mileage, or wash your dishes for you. But what do I know, I prefer to not even own a car.
The market will sort this out on its own in theory, and apparently it is in practice as well. Price signals will cause people to buy what they actually need, but I regret to inform the SUV haters that there are still plenty of legitimate use cases for big trucks and SUVs no matter what the price of fuel. (And WTF is up with the "luxury SUV" class. That doesn't even make sense.)
In the industrialized world, infant mortality is a function of genetic and ethnic demographics, some genetic groups having integer factor higher infant mortality rates (still birth, miscarriage, etc) no matter what country they live in for reasons that are not entirely clear. If you control for genetic demographics, all industrialized countries have roughly the same infant mortality rate; infant mortality rates elsewhere are the product of infectious disease. Americans have a mediocre life expectancy due to high accidental death (particularly vehicular) and homicide rates. If you only look at people who die of disease and age -- reflections of health care -- Americans are among the very longest lived people in the industrialized world.
You are just plain wrong on the disease survival rates. The latest Lancet Oncology Journal study, for example, has the US leading the world for survival rates across all cancers by a significant margin, with cancer survival rates exceeding that of Europe by 20-40% on average. For example, only half the people with cancer survive under the UK NHS, compared to two-thirds survival rate in the US. Most other direct measures of medical outcomes have the US looking similarly good.
Yeah, the US system is hideously expensive and byzantine, but in terms of actually having a positive medical outcome it can't be beat. Maybe if one of the other countries spent as much they might (or might not) have similar medical outcome statistics.
The real problem is that people do not understand insurance, which is a financial instrument with a specific function and not a way to make other people pay your costs.
Insurance is an instrument for efficiently distributing risk, not cost. It is a distinction with a very real difference, both theoretical and practical. If you want to distribute cost the financial instrument is called "socialism" or "communism", depending on the implementation. Of course, distributing cost in no way alleviates the underlying problem of scarcity and often makes it worse.