I'd much rather vote for a person than vote for a party. I just wish we had approval voting instead of pure plurality choice.
I also like that the President can be opposed to the congress, but I usually think gridlock is a good thing. It hampers, but does not entirely prevent, some instances of the politician's syllogism. "We must do something. This is something. We must do this!"
Well, given the number of people who die each year for the lack of a kidney donation, the fact that one kidney is generally sufficient, I would suggest that allowing people to sell a kidney would be in our overall best interests... I'm awaiting any actual reason other than the 'ick' factor to ban paying kidney donors. There would be a hell of a lot more kidneys available and fewer people dieing if they were sellable.
Infant mortality includes a number of things, such as parental neglect, which have no bearing on the medical system because it extends to a full year after birth.
Perinatal mortality includes the birth itself up to one week afterwards and the last few months of pregnancy. From what i've seen, that's when most mothers spend the most time seeing doctors, especially the birth itself, and hospitals are already required to provide free care. One of the strengths in our current system is handling birth complications. As previously indicated, infant mortality is also affected by how various places define live birth. Perinatal mortality is not.
If we're concerned about the effects of medical care, perinatal mortality is a better measure. Using that rate, the US (7) is slightly better than, for example, the UK(8), and more than twice as good as Cuba(17), which people love to point out has a better infant mortality rate than we do. This also prevents the issues with defining a live birth, since it includes late term still births. That said, I wouldn't say our infant mortality numbers are 'very bad' as the grandparent suggested. Yes, several countries are higher than us. But 2/3 of the countries in WHO's list have more than twice our infant mortality rate.
Acually, you misread opensecrets. The page he linked was for all health care sections. Health professionals is the first listed subcategory that you could check in the pull down menu and had it's own report, separate from his link. It still doesn't include health insurance. As for the overall insurance numbers, you may want to notice the huge upsurge in democrat donations in the last election cycle, as they gained power.
Actually, it was compromises necessary to get anything through the democrats in the house that ushered it in... It would be amusing to blame it all on the house dems, but that would be only slightly more fair than your statement, as congress has more of an impact on the budget than the president does.
Actually, your link appears to be for health care providers, not insurance. There is no category for 'health insurance' but insurance shows a massive surge in cotributions to democrats once they seemed to be regaining power.
Well, there's a bit more too i than that. Leviticus explicitly states "Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you.." at least as translated.
You do realize the radioactive danger of any given substance is inversely proportional to it's half-life right? something with a half-life of a billion years is generally not all that dangerous. U-238 has a half life of about 4.47 billion years and is far less dangerous than U-235 or U-234. I would be perfectly content to have a brick of depeleted uranium as a paperweight on my desk. Enriched uranium on the other hand...
Also... uranium is no more chemically toxic than any other heavy metal, such as lead. If inhaled as dust, it becomes more of a problem as it bypasses the skin and accumulates rather than clearing out of your system. Alpha particles are easily avoided, but damaging.
Please note that the current health system bears at most a superficial resemblance to a free market. Why should the employer be expected, and in some cases compelled, to provide health care coverage for it's workers? Start looking at the various regulations in insurance such as what has to be covered, who can do the covering, what types of insurance a single company can provide, etc. Also check into how difficult it is for a medicare accepting doctor to stop doing so without breaking the law.
"A founding principle of America is that all this score keeping is a pro bono service of the invisible hand" No it isn't, your assertions to the contrary. If that is truly how you think the term is used, I would urge you to actually listen to people using the phrase, as it would seem you formed a definition on your own and used it instead.
The invisible hand is a misnomer. It would be somewhat more accurate to call it the distributed hand. People, by looking out for their own long term interests, avoid a large number of choices which appear to be in their short term best interests, and they do so with only limited specialized information about their area of expertise. Allowing rat poison in your rolls is bad for a bakery, regardless of any regulatory structure placed to prevent it. The score keeping you're referring to is not invisible, it's just handled by each person regarding only the transactions they are involved in. It's not free, nor is it a provided service.
The ranking you refer to explicitly lowers our score based on distribution of health care independent of outcomes. If you base it just on outcomes we creep back up the rankings. Still not best, but the decision to include that in the ranking artificially lowers the US.
Some of the other individual components are suspect too. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the issues involving the definition of live birth when calculating infant death. When looking into it, I found that using perinatal mortality (of which infant deaths are a subset) reversed the relative ranking of the US and UK. Perinatal mortality probably has it's own issues, but it does eliminate differences in treatment of extremely premature births.
I disagree, it's far more unnatural to treat merely touching something as a click. Clicks require definite pressure. When you use a mouse, are your fingers on the buttons, or hovering over them? The way touchpads handle it makes far more sense.
For the sake of argument: Actually, there are a number of potential benefits to greater CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Crop yields, Cloud Cover, Preipitation: These are all potentially beneficial, and are not an exhaustive list. It's nice to pretend an argument is beyond the pale, but it is not known what the net effect of increasing CO2 concentrations would be.
Except that it was just the first error, and Pachuri (sp?) initially defended it, and used that number to get funding for his own projects... I hate to tell you, but when the head of the IPCC is pushing bad numbers for his own profit, it puts the whole process under suspicion. And when people keep digging and finding more issues, I'm not inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Granted, most errors so far relate to costs of Climate Change as opposed for evidence that it is occuring, but since that section is critical for justifying government policy it doesn't save the report.
The problem is that the corrections, which supposedly adjust for UHI effects, ADD warming to the record instead of removing in on average. Watts checked one station and found an increased warming trend, and got accused of cherry picking. Real climate used a subset of stations and showed that on average there was no net change to the data from those stations. I used the easily accessible GHCN v2 data and averaged all adjustments for all stations and found a warming trend in data that on average reduced temperature. So the adjustments reduced temperature but increased the slope. I included all stations in the GHCNv2 set. If I had only included stations that had a non-0 adjustment each year, the effect is larger and rougher, but still present. I'd rather have used GISS or CRU numbers, but the adjusted and unadjusted numbers aren't quite as easy to extract with their data. I've downloaded it, just haven't done it yet. If any step increases the warming trend, and isn't acknowleged, then all steps are suspect. My hunch is that they used an algorithm to correct data which magnifies any trend present in the data.
I hate to say it because I rather disliked him... but although GWB was a terrible public speaker, he likely isn't as dumb as some people like to think.
Hmm... I'm not sure I buy your spin on the results of being attractive or unattractive. Take the marginalized, naturally unattractive individuals (ignoring extreme cases such as a missing nose...): If you separate out the ones who do something about their appearance, they are the ones who aren't convinced they are victims of cirumstance, and are likely to lean conservative. That doesn't mean they lack empathy, just that they don't see handouts as an effective long tem strategy. The ones who believe they are victims of fate don't bother working at their appearance, and are convinced that attractive people are just lucky, and thus tend to think another impersonal force in the form of government can make up for those unfair base conditions.
I would argue that the "anybody willing to work hard will find success" mindset has more to do with choices they made than circumstances beyond their control. It's almost always held by people who worked at something and noticed an improvement in circumstances as a result. Once there's a small positive feedback to working at improving one's situation, it becomes a reinforced behaviour. Unfortunately, the size of the payback IS dependent on startion conditions, and it may be hard to spot the reward.
It's too bad you don't have a weapon in that scenario, although most anarchists and libertarians would encourage you to arm yourself. Remember: when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. As I understand it, being totally against all forms of taxation is a marker of anarchism rather than libertarians. It's a murky line though...
As for the existence of roads, I would note that there is nothing stopping a group of people from maintaining their own road at their own expense, which happens with a number of small communites with private roads. It would even be possible for a private individual to own and operate a toll road. Remember that the heaviest used bridge in the US connecting to Canada is a privately owned toll bridge.
Incorrect. The question before the court was whether the FEC's decision to prevent the airing of a movie depicting Hillary in a negative fashion within 60 days of the election was legitimate. The decision by the FEC to block it depended on special rules which only apply to collective entities such as corporations and unions. As a side issue, the court decided 8-1 that disclosure was still required. Please at least read the 7 page summary before spouting off. Or read the 180+pages of partial dissents and concurring opinions. Or at the very least find a law blog with details. Further, It didn't grant corporations exemptions from the same campaign financing restrictions which apply to people.
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I'd much rather vote for a person than vote for a party. I just wish we had approval voting instead of pure plurality choice.
I also like that the President can be opposed to the congress, but I usually think gridlock is a good thing. It hampers, but does not entirely prevent, some instances of the politician's syllogism. "We must do something. This is something. We must do this!"
Well, given the number of people who die each year for the lack of a kidney donation, the fact that one kidney is generally sufficient, I would suggest that allowing people to sell a kidney would be in our overall best interests... I'm awaiting any actual reason other than the 'ick' factor to ban paying kidney donors. There would be a hell of a lot more kidneys available and fewer people dieing if they were sellable.
Infant mortality includes a number of things, such as parental neglect, which have no bearing on the medical system because it extends to a full year after birth.
Perinatal mortality includes the birth itself up to one week afterwards and the last few months of pregnancy. From what i've seen, that's when most mothers spend the most time seeing doctors, especially the birth itself, and hospitals are already required to provide free care. One of the strengths in our current system is handling birth complications. As previously indicated, infant mortality is also affected by how various places define live birth. Perinatal mortality is not.
If we're concerned about the effects of medical care, perinatal mortality is a better measure. Using that rate, the US (7) is slightly better than, for example, the UK(8), and more than twice as good as Cuba(17), which people love to point out has a better infant mortality rate than we do. This also prevents the issues with defining a live birth, since it includes late term still births. That said, I wouldn't say our infant mortality numbers are 'very bad' as the grandparent suggested. Yes, several countries are higher than us. But 2/3 of the countries in WHO's list have more than twice our infant mortality rate.
Acually, you misread opensecrets. The page he linked was for all health care sections. Health professionals is the first listed subcategory that you could check in the pull down menu and had it's own report, separate from his link. It still doesn't include health insurance. As for the overall insurance numbers, you may want to notice the huge upsurge in democrat donations in the last election cycle, as they gained power.
Actually, it was compromises necessary to get anything through the democrats in the house that ushered it in... It would be amusing to blame it all on the house dems, but that would be only slightly more fair than your statement, as congress has more of an impact on the budget than the president does.
Actually, your link appears to be for health care providers, not insurance. There is no category for 'health insurance' but insurance shows a massive surge in cotributions to democrats once they seemed to be regaining power.
Well, there's a bit more too i than that. Leviticus explicitly states "Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you.." at least as translated.
You do realize the radioactive danger of any given substance is inversely proportional to it's half-life right? something with a half-life of a billion years is generally not all that dangerous. U-238 has a half life of about 4.47 billion years and is far less dangerous than U-235 or U-234. I would be perfectly content to have a brick of depeleted uranium as a paperweight on my desk. Enriched uranium on the other hand...
Also... uranium is no more chemically toxic than any other heavy metal, such as lead. If inhaled as dust, it becomes more of a problem as it bypasses the skin and accumulates rather than clearing out of your system. Alpha particles are easily avoided, but damaging.
Please note that the current health system bears at most a superficial resemblance to a free market. Why should the employer be expected, and in some cases compelled, to provide health care coverage for it's workers? Start looking at the various regulations in insurance such as what has to be covered, who can do the covering, what types of insurance a single company can provide, etc. Also check into how difficult it is for a medicare accepting doctor to stop doing so without breaking the law.
"A founding principle of America is that all this score keeping is a pro bono service of the invisible hand" No it isn't, your assertions to the contrary. If that is truly how you think the term is used, I would urge you to actually listen to people using the phrase, as it would seem you formed a definition on your own and used it instead.
The invisible hand is a misnomer. It would be somewhat more accurate to call it the distributed hand. People, by looking out for their own long term interests, avoid a large number of choices which appear to be in their short term best interests, and they do so with only limited specialized information about their area of expertise. Allowing rat poison in your rolls is bad for a bakery, regardless of any regulatory structure placed to prevent it. The score keeping you're referring to is not invisible, it's just handled by each person regarding only the transactions they are involved in. It's not free, nor is it a provided service.
Further Car Analogy: Would you expect insurance you bought after a crash to cover replacing that car? Yay, pre-existing conditions!
The ranking you refer to explicitly lowers our score based on distribution of health care independent of outcomes. If you base it just on outcomes we creep back up the rankings. Still not best, but the decision to include that in the ranking artificially lowers the US.
Some of the other individual components are suspect too. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the issues involving the definition of live birth when calculating infant death. When looking into it, I found that using perinatal mortality (of which infant deaths are a subset) reversed the relative ranking of the US and UK. Perinatal mortality probably has it's own issues, but it does eliminate differences in treatment of extremely premature births.
I disagree, it's far more unnatural to treat merely touching something as a click. Clicks require definite pressure. When you use a mouse, are your fingers on the buttons, or hovering over them? The way touchpads handle it makes far more sense.
For the sake of argument: Actually, there are a number of potential benefits to greater CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Crop yields, Cloud Cover, Preipitation: These are all potentially beneficial, and are not an exhaustive list. It's nice to pretend an argument is beyond the pale, but it is not known what the net effect of increasing CO2 concentrations would be.
Except that it was just the first error, and Pachuri (sp?) initially defended it, and used that number to get funding for his own projects... I hate to tell you, but when the head of the IPCC is pushing bad numbers for his own profit, it puts the whole process under suspicion. And when people keep digging and finding more issues, I'm not inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Granted, most errors so far relate to costs of Climate Change as opposed for evidence that it is occuring, but since that section is critical for justifying government policy it doesn't save the report.
The problem is that the corrections, which supposedly adjust for UHI effects, ADD warming to the record instead of removing in on average. Watts checked one station and found an increased warming trend, and got accused of cherry picking. Real climate used a subset of stations and showed that on average there was no net change to the data from those stations. I used the easily accessible GHCN v2 data and averaged all adjustments for all stations and found a warming trend in data that on average reduced temperature. So the adjustments reduced temperature but increased the slope. I included all stations in the GHCNv2 set. If I had only included stations that had a non-0 adjustment each year, the effect is larger and rougher, but still present. I'd rather have used GISS or CRU numbers, but the adjusted and unadjusted numbers aren't quite as easy to extract with their data. I've downloaded it, just haven't done it yet. If any step increases the warming trend, and isn't acknowleged, then all steps are suspect. My hunch is that they used an algorithm to correct data which magnifies any trend present in the data.
I hate to say it because I rather disliked him... but although GWB was a terrible public speaker, he likely isn't as dumb as some people like to think.
And you would be wrong.
Hmm... I'm not sure I buy your spin on the results of being attractive or unattractive. Take the marginalized, naturally unattractive individuals (ignoring extreme cases such as a missing nose...): If you separate out the ones who do something about their appearance, they are the ones who aren't convinced they are victims of cirumstance, and are likely to lean conservative. That doesn't mean they lack empathy, just that they don't see handouts as an effective long tem strategy. The ones who believe they are victims of fate don't bother working at their appearance, and are convinced that attractive people are just lucky, and thus tend to think another impersonal force in the form of government can make up for those unfair base conditions.
I would argue that the "anybody willing to work hard will find success" mindset has more to do with choices they made than circumstances beyond their control. It's almost always held by people who worked at something and noticed an improvement in circumstances as a result. Once there's a small positive feedback to working at improving one's situation, it becomes a reinforced behaviour. Unfortunately, the size of the payback IS dependent on startion conditions, and it may be hard to spot the reward.
That may explain why you are on slashdot...
*Whoosh*
I'm curious about dietary habits. I don't know of any vegan republicans, and vegans tend to be thinner than average in my experience...
It's too bad you don't have a weapon in that scenario, although most anarchists and libertarians would encourage you to arm yourself. Remember: when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. As I understand it, being totally against all forms of taxation is a marker of anarchism rather than libertarians. It's a murky line though...
As for the existence of roads, I would note that there is nothing stopping a group of people from maintaining their own road at their own expense, which happens with a number of small communites with private roads. It would even be possible for a private individual to own and operate a toll road. Remember that the heaviest used bridge in the US connecting to Canada is a privately owned toll bridge.
Incorrect. The question before the court was whether the FEC's decision to prevent the airing of a movie depicting Hillary in a negative fashion within 60 days of the election was legitimate. The decision by the FEC to block it depended on special rules which only apply to collective entities such as corporations and unions. As a side issue, the court decided 8-1 that disclosure was still required. Please at least read the 7 page summary before spouting off. Or read the 180+pages of partial dissents and concurring opinions. Or at the very least find a law blog with details. Further, It didn't grant corporations exemptions from the same campaign financing restrictions which apply to people.