Further on.. do people really think that every little ailment they have requires a 'medical professional'?
(I am NOT advocating that laypersons diagnosis or treat anything remotely serious.. just it seems to me people are heading to ERs/MDs for issues that could easily be treated at home with just a tiny bit of knowledge..)
It's amazing how much people's threshold for going to a doctor varies. Some people really do go everytime they have an observable symptom (or at least seem to). Others won't go until their scrotum is the size of a grapefruit and starting to undergo gangrene. Still others just plain never go. IMHO grade school health class should focus on "this is nothing, whereas this is serious", because laypeople often have no idea.
Even more complicated is the patient who has something that's harmless, but thinks it's serious so they don't go to a doctor. I was at the autopsy of such a man a couple months ago. He had a huge abscess on his head, which I'm sure grew over time and was rather painful. He was convinced it was a tumor, so he avoided seeing doctors and was rather worried about it for the last year of his life. Any doctor/nurse could have drained it, and put his mind at ease, and likely done some tests to see how bad of shape his heart was in.
You're completely right, I should have clarified "the most economically costly". It is estimated to have caused $235 billion (World Bank) to $309 billion (Japan) in immediate damages, which is 2-3 times that of the Kobe Earthquake (1995) and 3-4 times that of Hurricane Katrina (2005).
Actually I don't remember any of that. Checking the initial article reveals that I don't remember it because it didn't happen. One person said it wasn't a meltdown, and nobody said anything like "STFU luddites" (nothing even close to that quote ever appears).
I also wouldn't gloat... given the most costly natural disaster in human history, which claimed 20,000 lives, only two workers died from the nuclear plant, and there have been no cases of radiation poisoning. Compare this to the six who immediately died in the nearby oil refinery.
At worse, there may be a 0.1% increase in cancer risk due to radiation for the locals (per the most pessimistic scientist opining on the topic), but a lot more have died from the simple loss of electricity. Plus, that works out to ~1,000 deaths over ~50 years, compared to 1,200 cancer deaths due to coal mining (not burning) in Appalachia in the US each year.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but that comment did make me curious enough to see how Slashdot fares at predicting the future.
If such critical systems are compromised then it's better for them to go down randomly for a short time for reasons easy to identify than to let them continue running and likely be shut down (or tampered with) maliciously at the worst possible time.
Bottom line here: Don't trust the FDA when it comes to food safety. It may be their responsibility to ensure food is safe, but they're so horribly underfunded and compromised by corporate interests that they cannot realistically be expected to succeed.
It's not just corporate interests. Originally, they wanted to put dietary/herbal supplements through the same requirements as medications, i.e. that they aren't harmful and they actually do something. Public outcry stopped that measure. Apparently there's a very sizable number of people who do not believe their favorite supplement both works and isn't toxic, but want to take it anyway.
Or at least they don't want to risk it being taken off the market for being either a waste of money or toxic (perhaps both)... Do people encourage their enemies to take these things, or what? "Try all-natural Coniine supplements, that'll help you stop smoking!"
People are 'civil' to each other in real life. I prefer having an internet where people can be honest. If the signal-noise ratio for what you want to hear isn't to your liking, talk to like-minded people in real life.
Being able to speak your mind without consequences requires privacy, and I think it's beneficial to have that option (and not to pretend you're talking without anonymity). For example, in real life, I wouldn't bother arguing with your point because there's no benefit to me doing so, and a small risk associated with disagreeing with someone.
First, these are inpatients, so they generally have a team of doctors managing their multitude of problems and that endocrinologist is likely just ensuring their blood sugar stays under control. Also, it's two minutes each time; he likely gets called about every four hours on a difficult to-control patient.
Second, doctors would all love to spend much more time with patients. (Except, maybe surgeons...) If a patient requires more time, most doctors will spend it (hence one reason doctors are never on time). However, the primary determinate of time spent is probably reimbursement. Extra time on a patient is generally a money-losing proposal. There's also the fact that there's a doctor shortage so there's simply not enough time to give.
Take medication management for example. Going through each medication a patient is on at each visit would be of great benefit, and fix a lot of problems the summary outlines. However, this would likely take twenty minutes or so for each elderly patient, and medicare doesn't pay for that. IOW, doctors would only be able to see half as many patients, and lose half their revenue. This is in the setting of primary care clinics going bankrupt in droves, and seniors already having great difficulty to find a doctor accepting new patients.
From a dietary point of view, the only point in eating meat is to get proteins. [...]
Everything else you get it from plants: including all the really important vitamins, and so one. Except some B vitamins which are absent in plants but present in yeast (beer!!!) and in animal products (milk).
It's actually quite the opposite. A human can survive on a purely meat diet (e.g. traditional Eskimo). There are essential amino acids, and fats, but no essential carbohydrates. As for vitamins, there are none that are exclusively found in vegetables (which kinda makes sense, given that we're an animal). In fact, it's far easier to consume toxic levels of vitamins by eating meat than vegetables (e.g. bear liver).
Fruits and vegetables are very energy rich due to 10,000 years of agriculture and selective breeding (similar to what we've done to cows and chickens), so you have to be careful with them if you live a modern, semi-sedentary lifestyle. That said, I personally prefer vegetables to offal and milk to bone, plus we're built to be adaptable to a wide variety of diets.
Quibbling aside, you're completely right otherwise. We don't get too much from animal muscle other than protein with good proportions of amino acids (again, we're an animal so that makes sense). Or at least nothing else we'd miss. And one of the points of our stomach is to degrade protein into short polypeptides which are further broken down to amino acids before being absorbed in the gut, so there's not likely to be any significant dietary/health difference between vat grown and natural meat. The taste, OTOH...
My guess is that someone doesn't know what the "L" in "URL" stands for. If that's not the case, I've got some directions (to a bridge) I'd like to sell...
IMHO, it's related to how powerful x86 hardware has become. There's probably a generation of programmers that haven't really grasped the concept of various operations having a cost.
On a desktop you can write back and forth to disk rather quickly, and only power users will notice the delay, so many programs do so annoyingly frequently (e.g. it takes one million writes to boot Windows). Now that mobile devices are gaining popularity, the philosophy of "why optimize, it already runs fast enough on my hardware" is starting to show its weakness.
Of course, that's why I chose to only program as a hobby. I can waste all the time in the world on premature optimization just for the heck of it.
I suppose you could remove the steering wheel and pedals as a theft deterrent. Or just have them drive aimlessly rather than park for any length of time. More amusingly,you could have the car go on a AI driven "joy ride" due to "tampering" if someone attempts to steal it. You know, find the nearest cliff, calculate the minimum braking distance at top speed, and perform a few trials to verify it.
Starvation is a social and political problem, not an economic one as we have more than enough food in the world to feed everybody. As for throwing $7M into this, why not? Some of the best ideas are ones that seem silly (hence why nobody has ever tried them), and this is pocket change for the US Military. Even if the primary research topic proves impractical, there are bound to be a variety of spin-off technologies applicable to other areas.
I assume that's why they're semi-autonomous. The orders don't need to come as frequently and allow for the AI to determine the exact method for completing them. The orders also come from a soldier in the field, so they may be conveyed over an optical link, which is much harder to jam.
Yes, and the fear is that it isn't all that different from H1N1, which likes to cause pandemics. The 1918 flu was a H1N1 subtype, and "only" had 10% - 20% mortality. Nowadays, not only are population densities higher, we're also more interconnected, so we probably wouldn't get away with "just" 3% of the world's population infected like in 1918.
Corporations are simply amoral, because they're no more than intangible figments of our collective imagination (supported by law). The people running these corporations are responsible for restraining them to some semblance of a moral framework. Sadly, as corporations grow and layers of abstraction are glued together with market-speak, the ability of any single person to monitor their actions wanes. Therefore, slave mining in Africa to sweatshop assembly in Asia get overlooked, with profit incentive to not look too deeply and to shift culpability.
IMHO, the obesity epidemic can be summed up by "exercise-diet mismatch". We Americans are still eating like our farming grandparents did (worse even), yet with modern conveniences and a sedentary lifestyle. I still sigh when people act astonished upon hearing that someone walked a mile rather than driving (then offer to drive them back).
For you, don't forget that water, muscle, bone, and fat all contribute to weight. Exercise increases muscle mass (which increases bone mass), so your weight may not change (or increase even) despite losing fat. Visceral fat is also more highly associated with disease, and less noticeable if you lose it. More muscle equals a higher basal metabolic rate and exercise capacity, which should lead to even greater fat loss. Keep at it, and the results will show. For now, take comfort in knowing that even a small amount of fat loss has measurable and positive health effects.
That's the rub though- vaccines used to be for life threatening diseases like polio and smallpox but are now more and more prescribed for things that are merely a nuisance(chicken pox anyone?).
Chicken pox is actually an example of a vaccine that's given more for economic reasons. The vaccine does help (prevents chicken pox and later shingles), but not enough people die from it to warrant routine vaccination. However, children usually miss about a week of school, and their parents miss about a week of work. The economic and educational burden added to the health burden is why the varicella vaccine is a routine vaccination. Something like influenza has similar arguments, but influenza kills enough people each year to justify routine vaccination based on public health reasons alone.
Very common diseases still kill a lot of people. 99.9% of people may recover just fine, but it's much safer to take the vaccine to prevent the 0.1% chance something really bad will happen to you. Plus, who likes being sick? "What doesn't kill me only makes me stronger" isn't sound medical advice for viruses.
My mom is a nurse, and her best friend was paralyzed from the flu shot. How's that instead of a @#$@ three days of down time?
I take it your mother's best friend got Guillain-Barre syndrome? That disease is still poorly understood, but we do know it's associated with influenza, which is why you have something like a 1/1,000,000 chance of getting it after a flu vaccine. The funny thing is, you're far more likely to get GBS if you actually acquire influenza. The overall risk is much lower if you get the vaccine.
Now, obviously lower risk != no risk. Your mother's friend suffered a tragedy that hopefully more research can prevent. It's sad, but you can do everything right and still have bad things happen to you.
I'm sure the doctors are not concerned with the $10-15 per shot they would get
A few years ago a number of pediatricians and family practitioners were complaining that reimbursement for vaccines was below cost, not even including the expenses associated with storage or having a trained person give it. This is in the setting of unprecedented numbers of small practices going under because they can't generate a profit with the massive overhead (usually 1+ full-time employee) required to get meager reimbursements (often near cost).
Another perspective is that of public health. An anti-vaccine patient may take twice or three times as long to see, because you have to argue with them every visit, yet receives little of the benefit of regular pediatrician appointments (the vaccines) and presents a high liability (e.g. getting sued when they contract a vaccine-preventable illness). So, when most clinics are completely filled, wouldn't it be better to see three patients who will take the vaccines over the one (likely affluent) who won't?
It's certainly an ethical dilemma. That said, each doctor has rights as well, including who they treat (within limits of course). In an ideal world no patient would have trouble finding a healthcare provider nor would we be limited to 15 minute office visits. Sadly, we don't live in such a world so we have to maximize the benefit for each healthcare dollar. Some patients and essentially every doctor will face economic and ethical challenges as a result.
Umm... since when are comfort and freedom the same thing? Freedom is picking where you live and not being awoken in the middle of the night by your boss to do an extra shift. Comfort and security are the most common promises made by those seeking to take one's freedoms.
10 NASA cuts projects laypeople can relate to in favor of obscure ones that only astronomers care about
20 Come budget review time, constituents aren't asking their representatives to fund NASA, corporations aren't lobbying for it either
30 NASA's budget is again cut
40 GOTO 10
Now, to be fair, NASA is favoring more cost effective programs. Discovering planets lightyears away is of great use to fields outside of astronomy and causes advancement in human-usable technologies I'm sure. But garnering funding requires appealing to the masses, and I doubt many laypeople would be able to name even one of NASA's currently planned projects.
"Free Market" at work, apparently. It doesn't fix shit.
Is it? Can someone buy some wire, string it up, pick a frequency, download some free software that speaks CDMA or GSM and run a tower? AFAIK, every single step is heavily regulated (FCC, patent system, industry groups, land use, network connectivity etc.).
I'm not saying these are bad regulations (esp. frequency allotment), but they do stifle competition by eliminating small players. In a free market it may be profitable for a one-person business to build a tower to service their local community, but in our regulated market they can't afford the artificial start-up costs nor have time for all the bureaucracy involved. Heck, they wouldn't even be able to afford to legally defend themself from their first "radio allergy" lawsuit.
The best criminals are smart enough to make it look like a crime never occurred, and there are probably a fair number of these (not an extraordinary number, there are lucrative "honest" lines of work for smart people). This guy probably though he could pull that off.
The article isn't too explicit on the details, but it sounds like he used his position and expertise to identify 29 people who were [dumber: weren't] eligible but didn't file [dumber: yet] for substantial tax returns. Then, he used the data he had (e.g. name, social security number, finances, etc.) to file those returns, with the refunds going to accounts under his control. (Smart: setup accounts in the proper recipient's name and state, Dumb: setup the accounts in his own state/name.)
This was an all-or-nothing crime. Either it's never discovered or he's caught. Who knows if he's the first to have tried? And, for those wanting his head, it wasn't a horrible crime. It's stealing, since it's not his money, but the victim is hard to identify (the people not claiming refunds? the government for relying on ignorance/apathy to not refund extra taxes inadvertently paid?). The stiff punishment is likely related to how close he was to getting away with it and how much he almost got (i.e. to make the risk greater than the reward).
That's what I was referring to in my third sentence. Apple likes worker dorms and such. Americans have moved pass that stage and look upon it with distain. It affords more flexibility but is highly exploitive.
As for Chinese being out of work, the sad reality is that they prefer these conditions to other factories and far prefer it to farming. OTOH, by raising awareness and making exploitive factories less profitable, perhaps we can change conditions in China for the better. That's likely too optimistic, but almost anything is better than supporting it.
Slashdot Mirror
Further on.. do people really think that every little ailment they have requires a 'medical professional'? (I am NOT advocating that laypersons diagnosis or treat anything remotely serious.. just it seems to me people are heading to ERs/MDs for issues that could easily be treated at home with just a tiny bit of knowledge..)
It's amazing how much people's threshold for going to a doctor varies. Some people really do go everytime they have an observable symptom (or at least seem to). Others won't go until their scrotum is the size of a grapefruit and starting to undergo gangrene. Still others just plain never go. IMHO grade school health class should focus on "this is nothing, whereas this is serious", because laypeople often have no idea.
Even more complicated is the patient who has something that's harmless, but thinks it's serious so they don't go to a doctor. I was at the autopsy of such a man a couple months ago. He had a huge abscess on his head, which I'm sure grew over time and was rather painful. He was convinced it was a tumor, so he avoided seeing doctors and was rather worried about it for the last year of his life. Any doctor/nurse could have drained it, and put his mind at ease, and likely done some tests to see how bad of shape his heart was in.
You're completely right, I should have clarified "the most economically costly". It is estimated to have caused $235 billion (World Bank) to $309 billion (Japan) in immediate damages, which is 2-3 times that of the Kobe Earthquake (1995) and 3-4 times that of Hurricane Katrina (2005).
Actually I don't remember any of that. Checking the initial article reveals that I don't remember it because it didn't happen. One person said it wasn't a meltdown, and nobody said anything like "STFU luddites" (nothing even close to that quote ever appears).
I also wouldn't gloat... given the most costly natural disaster in human history, which claimed 20,000 lives, only two workers died from the nuclear plant, and there have been no cases of radiation poisoning. Compare this to the six who immediately died in the nearby oil refinery.
At worse, there may be a 0.1% increase in cancer risk due to radiation for the locals (per the most pessimistic scientist opining on the topic), but a lot more have died from the simple loss of electricity. Plus, that works out to ~1,000 deaths over ~50 years, compared to 1,200 cancer deaths due to coal mining (not burning) in Appalachia in the US each year.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but that comment did make me curious enough to see how Slashdot fares at predicting the future.
If such critical systems are compromised then it's better for them to go down randomly for a short time for reasons easy to identify than to let them continue running and likely be shut down (or tampered with) maliciously at the worst possible time.
Bottom line here: Don't trust the FDA when it comes to food safety. It may be their responsibility to ensure food is safe, but they're so horribly underfunded and compromised by corporate interests that they cannot realistically be expected to succeed.
It's not just corporate interests. Originally, they wanted to put dietary/herbal supplements through the same requirements as medications, i.e. that they aren't harmful and they actually do something. Public outcry stopped that measure. Apparently there's a very sizable number of people who do not believe their favorite supplement both works and isn't toxic, but want to take it anyway.
Or at least they don't want to risk it being taken off the market for being either a waste of money or toxic (perhaps both)... Do people encourage their enemies to take these things, or what? "Try all-natural Coniine supplements, that'll help you stop smoking!"
People are 'civil' to each other in real life. I prefer having an internet where people can be honest. If the signal-noise ratio for what you want to hear isn't to your liking, talk to like-minded people in real life.
Being able to speak your mind without consequences requires privacy, and I think it's beneficial to have that option (and not to pretend you're talking without anonymity). For example, in real life, I wouldn't bother arguing with your point because there's no benefit to me doing so, and a small risk associated with disagreeing with someone.
There are two important points.
First, these are inpatients, so they generally have a team of doctors managing their multitude of problems and that endocrinologist is likely just ensuring their blood sugar stays under control. Also, it's two minutes each time; he likely gets called about every four hours on a difficult to-control patient.
Second, doctors would all love to spend much more time with patients. (Except, maybe surgeons...) If a patient requires more time, most doctors will spend it (hence one reason doctors are never on time). However, the primary determinate of time spent is probably reimbursement. Extra time on a patient is generally a money-losing proposal. There's also the fact that there's a doctor shortage so there's simply not enough time to give.
Take medication management for example. Going through each medication a patient is on at each visit would be of great benefit, and fix a lot of problems the summary outlines. However, this would likely take twenty minutes or so for each elderly patient, and medicare doesn't pay for that. IOW, doctors would only be able to see half as many patients, and lose half their revenue. This is in the setting of primary care clinics going bankrupt in droves, and seniors already having great difficulty to find a doctor accepting new patients.
From a dietary point of view, the only point in eating meat is to get proteins. [...] Everything else you get it from plants: including all the really important vitamins, and so one. Except some B vitamins which are absent in plants but present in yeast (beer!!!) and in animal products (milk).
It's actually quite the opposite. A human can survive on a purely meat diet (e.g. traditional Eskimo). There are essential amino acids, and fats, but no essential carbohydrates. As for vitamins, there are none that are exclusively found in vegetables (which kinda makes sense, given that we're an animal). In fact, it's far easier to consume toxic levels of vitamins by eating meat than vegetables (e.g. bear liver).
Fruits and vegetables are very energy rich due to 10,000 years of agriculture and selective breeding (similar to what we've done to cows and chickens), so you have to be careful with them if you live a modern, semi-sedentary lifestyle. That said, I personally prefer vegetables to offal and milk to bone, plus we're built to be adaptable to a wide variety of diets.
Quibbling aside, you're completely right otherwise. We don't get too much from animal muscle other than protein with good proportions of amino acids (again, we're an animal so that makes sense). Or at least nothing else we'd miss. And one of the points of our stomach is to degrade protein into short polypeptides which are further broken down to amino acids before being absorbed in the gut, so there's not likely to be any significant dietary/health difference between vat grown and natural meat. The taste, OTOH...
My guess is that someone doesn't know what the "L" in "URL" stands for. If that's not the case, I've got some directions (to a bridge) I'd like to sell...
IMHO, it's related to how powerful x86 hardware has become. There's probably a generation of programmers that haven't really grasped the concept of various operations having a cost.
On a desktop you can write back and forth to disk rather quickly, and only power users will notice the delay, so many programs do so annoyingly frequently (e.g. it takes one million writes to boot Windows). Now that mobile devices are gaining popularity, the philosophy of "why optimize, it already runs fast enough on my hardware" is starting to show its weakness.
Of course, that's why I chose to only program as a hobby. I can waste all the time in the world on premature optimization just for the heck of it.
I suppose you could remove the steering wheel and pedals as a theft deterrent. Or just have them drive aimlessly rather than park for any length of time. More amusingly,you could have the car go on a AI driven "joy ride" due to "tampering" if someone attempts to steal it. You know, find the nearest cliff, calculate the minimum braking distance at top speed, and perform a few trials to verify it.
Starvation is a social and political problem, not an economic one as we have more than enough food in the world to feed everybody. As for throwing $7M into this, why not? Some of the best ideas are ones that seem silly (hence why nobody has ever tried them), and this is pocket change for the US Military. Even if the primary research topic proves impractical, there are bound to be a variety of spin-off technologies applicable to other areas.
I assume that's why they're semi-autonomous. The orders don't need to come as frequently and allow for the AI to determine the exact method for completing them. The orders also come from a soldier in the field, so they may be conveyed over an optical link, which is much harder to jam.
Yes, and the fear is that it isn't all that different from H1N1, which likes to cause pandemics. The 1918 flu was a H1N1 subtype, and "only" had 10% - 20% mortality. Nowadays, not only are population densities higher, we're also more interconnected, so we probably wouldn't get away with "just" 3% of the world's population infected like in 1918.
Corporations are simply amoral, because they're no more than intangible figments of our collective imagination (supported by law). The people running these corporations are responsible for restraining them to some semblance of a moral framework. Sadly, as corporations grow and layers of abstraction are glued together with market-speak, the ability of any single person to monitor their actions wanes. Therefore, slave mining in Africa to sweatshop assembly in Asia get overlooked, with profit incentive to not look too deeply and to shift culpability.
IMHO, the obesity epidemic can be summed up by "exercise-diet mismatch". We Americans are still eating like our farming grandparents did (worse even), yet with modern conveniences and a sedentary lifestyle. I still sigh when people act astonished upon hearing that someone walked a mile rather than driving (then offer to drive them back).
For you, don't forget that water, muscle, bone, and fat all contribute to weight. Exercise increases muscle mass (which increases bone mass), so your weight may not change (or increase even) despite losing fat. Visceral fat is also more highly associated with disease, and less noticeable if you lose it. More muscle equals a higher basal metabolic rate and exercise capacity, which should lead to even greater fat loss. Keep at it, and the results will show. For now, take comfort in knowing that even a small amount of fat loss has measurable and positive health effects.
That's the rub though- vaccines used to be for life threatening diseases like polio and smallpox but are now more and more prescribed for things that are merely a nuisance(chicken pox anyone?).
Chicken pox is actually an example of a vaccine that's given more for economic reasons. The vaccine does help (prevents chicken pox and later shingles), but not enough people die from it to warrant routine vaccination. However, children usually miss about a week of school, and their parents miss about a week of work. The economic and educational burden added to the health burden is why the varicella vaccine is a routine vaccination. Something like influenza has similar arguments, but influenza kills enough people each year to justify routine vaccination based on public health reasons alone.
Very common diseases still kill a lot of people. 99.9% of people may recover just fine, but it's much safer to take the vaccine to prevent the 0.1% chance something really bad will happen to you. Plus, who likes being sick? "What doesn't kill me only makes me stronger" isn't sound medical advice for viruses.
My mom is a nurse, and her best friend was paralyzed from the flu shot. How's that instead of a @#$@ three days of down time?
I take it your mother's best friend got Guillain-Barre syndrome? That disease is still poorly understood, but we do know it's associated with influenza, which is why you have something like a 1/1,000,000 chance of getting it after a flu vaccine. The funny thing is, you're far more likely to get GBS if you actually acquire influenza. The overall risk is much lower if you get the vaccine.
Now, obviously lower risk != no risk. Your mother's friend suffered a tragedy that hopefully more research can prevent. It's sad, but you can do everything right and still have bad things happen to you.
I'm sure the doctors are not concerned with the $10-15 per shot they would get
A few years ago a number of pediatricians and family practitioners were complaining that reimbursement for vaccines was below cost, not even including the expenses associated with storage or having a trained person give it. This is in the setting of unprecedented numbers of small practices going under because they can't generate a profit with the massive overhead (usually 1+ full-time employee) required to get meager reimbursements (often near cost).
Another perspective is that of public health. An anti-vaccine patient may take twice or three times as long to see, because you have to argue with them every visit, yet receives little of the benefit of regular pediatrician appointments (the vaccines) and presents a high liability (e.g. getting sued when they contract a vaccine-preventable illness). So, when most clinics are completely filled, wouldn't it be better to see three patients who will take the vaccines over the one (likely affluent) who won't?
It's certainly an ethical dilemma. That said, each doctor has rights as well, including who they treat (within limits of course). In an ideal world no patient would have trouble finding a healthcare provider nor would we be limited to 15 minute office visits. Sadly, we don't live in such a world so we have to maximize the benefit for each healthcare dollar. Some patients and essentially every doctor will face economic and ethical challenges as a result.
Umm... since when are comfort and freedom the same thing? Freedom is picking where you live and not being awoken in the middle of the night by your boss to do an extra shift. Comfort and security are the most common promises made by those seeking to take one's freedoms.
10 NASA cuts projects laypeople can relate to in favor of obscure ones that only astronomers care about
20 Come budget review time, constituents aren't asking their representatives to fund NASA, corporations aren't lobbying for it either
30 NASA's budget is again cut
40 GOTO 10
Now, to be fair, NASA is favoring more cost effective programs. Discovering planets lightyears away is of great use to fields outside of astronomy and causes advancement in human-usable technologies I'm sure. But garnering funding requires appealing to the masses, and I doubt many laypeople would be able to name even one of NASA's currently planned projects.
"Free Market" at work, apparently. It doesn't fix shit.
Is it? Can someone buy some wire, string it up, pick a frequency, download some free software that speaks CDMA or GSM and run a tower? AFAIK, every single step is heavily regulated (FCC, patent system, industry groups, land use, network connectivity etc.).
I'm not saying these are bad regulations (esp. frequency allotment), but they do stifle competition by eliminating small players. In a free market it may be profitable for a one-person business to build a tower to service their local community, but in our regulated market they can't afford the artificial start-up costs nor have time for all the bureaucracy involved. Heck, they wouldn't even be able to afford to legally defend themself from their first "radio allergy" lawsuit.
The best criminals are smart enough to make it look like a crime never occurred, and there are probably a fair number of these (not an extraordinary number, there are lucrative "honest" lines of work for smart people). This guy probably though he could pull that off.
The article isn't too explicit on the details, but it sounds like he used his position and expertise to identify 29 people who were [dumber: weren't] eligible but didn't file [dumber: yet] for substantial tax returns. Then, he used the data he had (e.g. name, social security number, finances, etc.) to file those returns, with the refunds going to accounts under his control. (Smart: setup accounts in the proper recipient's name and state, Dumb: setup the accounts in his own state/name.)
This was an all-or-nothing crime. Either it's never discovered or he's caught. Who knows if he's the first to have tried? And, for those wanting his head, it wasn't a horrible crime. It's stealing, since it's not his money, but the victim is hard to identify (the people not claiming refunds? the government for relying on ignorance/apathy to not refund extra taxes inadvertently paid?). The stiff punishment is likely related to how close he was to getting away with it and how much he almost got (i.e. to make the risk greater than the reward).
That's what I was referring to in my third sentence. Apple likes worker dorms and such. Americans have moved pass that stage and look upon it with distain. It affords more flexibility but is highly exploitive.
As for Chinese being out of work, the sad reality is that they prefer these conditions to other factories and far prefer it to farming. OTOH, by raising awareness and making exploitive factories less profitable, perhaps we can change conditions in China for the better. That's likely too optimistic, but almost anything is better than supporting it.