"Fact" 1: Click here. Go to page 42 (page 56 of the pdf). Look at the graph. Notice that the 2010 projection for healthcare spending in 2025 is about 7% of GDP and a hair lower than when recent healthcare changes are excluded.
(but I am probably just reinforcing your viewpoint...)
I should clarify something. It is not the case that a majority of Americans believe in creationism, but it is the case that if evolution is the factor that sways your vote, you're going to vote for the republican.
In other words, an evangelical may vote for Sam Brownback because of his support for creationism, but a liberal will have a litany of reasons to vote against him, even if he changed his stance on the FSM.
We Americans have a schizophrenic attitude towards authority and the written word.
It doesn't matter how many times your mother tells you not to believe everything you read, because when you go to school the "right" answer is what the textbook says.
Whether we like it or not that translates into instilling an aura of authority towards print journalism. On the other hand we Americans have a habit of glorifying rebellion from the "conventional wisdom." Combine the two, and we end up with a large portion of the population that doesn't know how to handle facts.
The era of objective journalism was a lot shorter than most people tend to think. The very idea that journalism was different from politics really only emerged around WWII.
Go look up some revolutionary era newspapers, some Jacksonian era newspapers, some antebellum newspapers, some reconstruction newspapers, some gilded age newspapers... you'll see bias not even fox news would stoop to.
Sure. Now lets contrast Sweden and Norway and France to Pinochet's Chile and Saudi Arabia and Goni's Bolivia. Clearly the only right answer is privatization...
This is where American politics gets weird. The party that proports to be populist is on the wrong side of public opinion for almost all the one-issue voters: guns, abortion, gay rights, creationism, etc. etc. I guess the exception was the Iraq War, but as a issue that had the poer to decide a vote, it had a shelf life of about 18 months, whereas for the right guns and abortion have been going strong for decades.
If you design a device that is not properly operated by 1 in 100,000 people leading to severe injury or death, AND YOUR COMPETITORS HAVE NO SUCH PROBLEM, your users may be stupid, but it's still a design flaw.
It may be that all things are equal, and the Toyota hysteria caused over reporting of problems with their cars and under reporting of problems on other makes, or it could be like the Audi 5000 - the consequences of a design decision weren't fully appreciated. (In that case, an engineer thought, "who doesn't want to be able to heel-toe?" The answer turns out to be senior citizens who buy full sized German sedans with automatic transitions.)
Nuclear energy hasn't been a physics problem since sometime in the 1960s. For about half a century nuclear power has been a political and diplomatic problem.
Given that precious few political problems have been solved by technological means, I'm not going to make any bets as to when or whether we replace coal power with nuclear power.
We can bury all the short half-life, highly radioactive waste we produce and not worry about it. The same cannot be said of Carbon Dioxide.
Sure, I'd rather huff CO2 than Sr-90, but given the choice I'd rather see us producing (and burying) a couple hundred tons of Sr-90 than a couple of hundred billion tons of CO2.
There are all those things except the nuke drop (and the North may even be able to do that - but probably not). But you missed the most important part: tons and tons of mines, both anti-personnel and anti-armor.
Why would it be a war crime? A predator pilot has a better picture of what's going on than a tank commander, a fighter pilot, or a Apache pilot. I suspect the same is true when you compare robots with high def cameras and guards in towers with binoculars and rifle sights.
Oil is subsidized, to the tune of about $4.5 billion dollars a year (which IMO is a bad policy decision, but I digress), we also pay ~47/cents in fuel taxes per gallon of gasoline, which works out to something like $66 billion in taxes a year. Then you add in the taxes on non-gasoline oil based products and taxes the oil companies pay directly, and it's obvious that taxes >> subsidies in the oil business. If we added the $4.5 billion directly onto the cost of gasoline, it would add ~3 cents to each gallon.
On the other hand, sometime in the next 20 years gas is likely to hit $8/gallon, at which point we'll either be thankful we subsidized the nascent EV industry in the early 2000s, or wishing we had spent more money encouraging it.
8 hours on 240V, which admittedly, is the highest power in most homes.
However, it's not unreasonable to think that if (when?) EVs catch on utilities will start running 480V and up to residences, and much higher voltages to places like freeway rest-stops. It will probably still take longer than getting 20 gallons of gas, but not necessarily much longer.
What's really, really, really good for the utilities, is that it may become possible to tell your car, "I'm not going to use you for the weekend, so if you want to sell 20% of the power stored in your batteries to the utility, go ahead."
Then if the heat wave peaks on Saturday afternoon, the power company doesn't have to spool up as much peak generating capacity, and you get a credit on your electric bill.
Plug-in-electrics aren't a panacea, but there's a lot of good things about them.
The short answer is that the top 100 hours of electricity usage, or 1.2% of the year, accounts for ~15% of the total annual power cost. The last few weeks, Boston has been churning through peak usage, which is expensive, and thus, tends to be prioritized.
So, it's true, you don't want everyone to plug in their EV at 5:00 when it's 95 degrees in Boston. We can get them to wait four hours, through some technological means - like a smart meter, their cars will still be fully charged for the morning, and it will have a minimal impact - maybe even a positive one.
Everything you say is true. What is also true is that most families have more than one car. Keep the ICE minivan for when it's your turn to take the soccer team to the game. Drive your EV to and from work.
That said, what fuel we use to power transportation is an economic problem, and as such it will never be resolved and will always be changing. Gasoline prices aren't going to stay at $3/gallon, and at some point it just doesn't make sense to drive the truck to work. We're not there yet, but the question is whether we'll have the tech to adopt to $8/gallon gas when it arrives, or whether we'll be scrambling to adapt after the fact.
In the long term, it'll work out ok either way. In the short term, it'll be better for everyone if we have alternatives - and at $3/gallon that means subsidizing new industries.
You know the old saying that, "Horsepower sells cars, torque wins races"? People don't need 300 hp cars. Not only do they not need it, but if you put someone in a 300hp gas powered sporty car and floor it, and then do the same in a 150 hp electric car, they'll pick the EV.
The reason is torque. Electric motors produce peak torque at zero rpm, which makes a huge difference for acceleration. Gas powered cars produce peak hp around a 500 rpm band somewhere north of 5k (and peak torque somewhere somewhat lower).
If you live in West Virginia where nearly all the power comes from coal, ICE engines are probably better. If you live in France, where most of the power comes from nuclear, EVs are far better for the environment, even when you include battery production/disposal.
Almost anything worth doing in this world is inevitably going to involve many long days of monotonous work, stuff that is intensely unfun, but needs to be completed. In many industries, a project continuing for a year or even many years is not unusual
Granted, but in industry you are never going to be focusing exclusively on one problem, and really the only time anyone is ever going to write a dissertation is to complete their graduate program.
Sure, there are plenty of reports in industry, but they're so completely different from a dissertation that it makes me think that the only thing a dissertation ever prepared anyone for is writing scholarly articles. In industry o you constantly write short status updates for major projects, you will never spend the amount of time writing a single report that a dissertation requires.
As for showing an interest in a particular subject... I've seen more people with advanced degrees get burned out and despise their field than undergrads.
I understand requiring a bachelor's degree (like you said, you learn how to learn), and I understand requiring a PhD for a few highly specialized and highly technical fields.
What I don't understand is what a master's degree gets you. It proves you can spend entirely too long studying one problem and then write a 100 page paper?
What I think happens all too often is that employers hire candidates with advanced degrees who don't really know how to solve problems outside of academia.
Capitalism is the cornerstone of the US economy today but that is not the reason we've survived 200 years, in fact it's a recent development.
The US was a command economy during WWII.
The US was socialist between the depression and WWII.
Capitalism arrived in the south only after WWII, before that it was feudalism.
There is nothing in the US constitution that enshrines capitalism.
The soviet union failed because inflexible idealism isn't adaptive. The US has it's ideals, but they're rather more aspirational than practical. We want freedom, not "each according to his ability..." Had the US been inflexibly capitalist, we would have ceased to exist as a political unit probably around the time Andrew Jackson took office, but definitely before WWII.
Don't know about sperm donors, but a bill is working it's way through the New Jersey legislature that will allow people who were adopted as children to unseal their records... a reversal of the law at the time of the adoption.
Slashdot Mirror
"Fact" 1: Click here. Go to page 42 (page 56 of the pdf). Look at the graph. Notice that the 2010 projection for healthcare spending in 2025 is about 7% of GDP and a hair lower than when recent healthcare changes are excluded.
(but I am probably just reinforcing your viewpoint...)
I should clarify something. It is not the case that a majority of Americans believe in creationism, but it is the case that if evolution is the factor that sways your vote, you're going to vote for the republican.
In other words, an evangelical may vote for Sam Brownback because of his support for creationism, but a liberal will have a litany of reasons to vote against him, even if he changed his stance on the FSM.
We Americans have a schizophrenic attitude towards authority and the written word.
It doesn't matter how many times your mother tells you not to believe everything you read, because when you go to school the "right" answer is what the textbook says.
Whether we like it or not that translates into instilling an aura of authority towards print journalism. On the other hand we Americans have a habit of glorifying rebellion from the "conventional wisdom." Combine the two, and we end up with a large portion of the population that doesn't know how to handle facts.
The era of objective journalism was a lot shorter than most people tend to think. The very idea that journalism was different from politics really only emerged around WWII.
Go look up some revolutionary era newspapers, some Jacksonian era newspapers, some antebellum newspapers, some reconstruction newspapers, some gilded age newspapers ... you'll see bias not even fox news would stoop to.
Sure. Now lets contrast Sweden and Norway and France to Pinochet's Chile and Saudi Arabia and Goni's Bolivia. Clearly the only right answer is privatization...
This is where American politics gets weird. The party that proports to be populist is on the wrong side of public opinion for almost all the one-issue voters: guns, abortion, gay rights, creationism, etc. etc. I guess the exception was the Iraq War, but as a issue that had the poer to decide a vote, it had a shelf life of about 18 months, whereas for the right guns and abortion have been going strong for decades.
If you design a device that is not properly operated by 1 in 100,000 people leading to severe injury or death, AND YOUR COMPETITORS HAVE NO SUCH PROBLEM, your users may be stupid, but it's still a design flaw.
It may be that all things are equal, and the Toyota hysteria caused over reporting of problems with their cars and under reporting of problems on other makes, or it could be like the Audi 5000 - the consequences of a design decision weren't fully appreciated. (In that case, an engineer thought, "who doesn't want to be able to heel-toe?" The answer turns out to be senior citizens who buy full sized German sedans with automatic transitions.)
You could have left it there.
Nuclear energy hasn't been a physics problem since sometime in the 1960s. For about half a century nuclear power has been a political and diplomatic problem.
Given that precious few political problems have been solved by technological means, I'm not going to make any bets as to when or whether we replace coal power with nuclear power.
We can bury all the short half-life, highly radioactive waste we produce and not worry about it. The same cannot be said of Carbon Dioxide.
Sure, I'd rather huff CO2 than Sr-90, but given the choice I'd rather see us producing (and burying) a couple hundred tons of Sr-90 than a couple of hundred billion tons of CO2.
which ... is what this story is about.
There are all those things except the nuke drop (and the North may even be able to do that - but probably not). But you missed the most important part: tons and tons of mines, both anti-personnel and anti-armor.
Why would it be a war crime? A predator pilot has a better picture of what's going on than a tank commander, a fighter pilot, or a Apache pilot. I suspect the same is true when you compare robots with high def cameras and guards in towers with binoculars and rifle sights.
We already do.
Ok, ours don't have guns (probably), but they do fly.
That's not what gas costs.
Oil is subsidized, to the tune of about $4.5 billion dollars a year (which IMO is a bad policy decision, but I digress), we also pay ~47/cents in fuel taxes per gallon of gasoline, which works out to something like $66 billion in taxes a year. Then you add in the taxes on non-gasoline oil based products and taxes the oil companies pay directly, and it's obvious that taxes >> subsidies in the oil business. If we added the $4.5 billion directly onto the cost of gasoline, it would add ~3 cents to each gallon.
On the other hand, sometime in the next 20 years gas is likely to hit $8/gallon, at which point we'll either be thankful we subsidized the nascent EV industry in the early 2000s, or wishing we had spent more money encouraging it.
8 hours on 240V, which admittedly, is the highest power in most homes.
However, it's not unreasonable to think that if (when?) EVs catch on utilities will start running 480V and up to residences, and much higher voltages to places like freeway rest-stops. It will probably still take longer than getting 20 gallons of gas, but not necessarily much longer.
What's really, really, really good for the utilities, is that it may become possible to tell your car, "I'm not going to use you for the weekend, so if you want to sell 20% of the power stored in your batteries to the utility, go ahead."
Then if the heat wave peaks on Saturday afternoon, the power company doesn't have to spool up as much peak generating capacity, and you get a credit on your electric bill.
Plug-in-electrics aren't a panacea, but there's a lot of good things about them.
The short answer is that the top 100 hours of electricity usage, or 1.2% of the year, accounts for ~15% of the total annual power cost. The last few weeks, Boston has been churning through peak usage, which is expensive, and thus, tends to be prioritized.
So, it's true, you don't want everyone to plug in their EV at 5:00 when it's 95 degrees in Boston. We can get them to wait four hours, through some technological means - like a smart meter, their cars will still be fully charged for the morning, and it will have a minimal impact - maybe even a positive one.
Everything you say is true. What is also true is that most families have more than one car. Keep the ICE minivan for when it's your turn to take the soccer team to the game. Drive your EV to and from work.
That said, what fuel we use to power transportation is an economic problem, and as such it will never be resolved and will always be changing. Gasoline prices aren't going to stay at $3/gallon, and at some point it just doesn't make sense to drive the truck to work. We're not there yet, but the question is whether we'll have the tech to adopt to $8/gallon gas when it arrives, or whether we'll be scrambling to adapt after the fact.
In the long term, it'll work out ok either way. In the short term, it'll be better for everyone if we have alternatives - and at $3/gallon that means subsidizing new industries.
Apples and Oranges.
You know the old saying that, "Horsepower sells cars, torque wins races"? People don't need 300 hp cars. Not only do they not need it, but if you put someone in a 300hp gas powered sporty car and floor it, and then do the same in a 150 hp electric car, they'll pick the EV.
The reason is torque. Electric motors produce peak torque at zero rpm, which makes a huge difference for acceleration. Gas powered cars produce peak hp around a 500 rpm band somewhere north of 5k (and peak torque somewhere somewhat lower).
Then answer is ... it depends.
If you live in West Virginia where nearly all the power comes from coal, ICE engines are probably better. If you live in France, where most of the power comes from nuclear, EVs are far better for the environment, even when you include battery production/disposal.
Granted, but in industry you are never going to be focusing exclusively on one problem, and really the only time anyone is ever going to write a dissertation is to complete their graduate program.
Sure, there are plenty of reports in industry, but they're so completely different from a dissertation that it makes me think that the only thing a dissertation ever prepared anyone for is writing scholarly articles. In industry o you constantly write short status updates for major projects, you will never spend the amount of time writing a single report that a dissertation requires.
As for showing an interest in a particular subject ... I've seen more people with advanced degrees get burned out and despise their field than undergrads.
I understand requiring a bachelor's degree (like you said, you learn how to learn), and I understand requiring a PhD for a few highly specialized and highly technical fields.
What I don't understand is what a master's degree gets you. It proves you can spend entirely too long studying one problem and then write a 100 page paper?
What I think happens all too often is that employers hire candidates with advanced degrees who don't really know how to solve problems outside of academia.
You hire them as techs and are flexible enough with your promotion system so that they can be rewarded if they show a high aptitude.
(In practice very few companies actually do this)
Capitalism is the cornerstone of the US economy today but that is not the reason we've survived 200 years, in fact it's a recent development.
The US was a command economy during WWII.
The US was socialist between the depression and WWII.
Capitalism arrived in the south only after WWII, before that it was feudalism.
There is nothing in the US constitution that enshrines capitalism.
The soviet union failed because inflexible idealism isn't adaptive. The US has it's ideals, but they're rather more aspirational than practical. We want freedom, not "each according to his ability..." Had the US been inflexibly capitalist, we would have ceased to exist as a political unit probably around the time Andrew Jackson took office, but definitely before WWII.
Don't know about sperm donors, but a bill is working it's way through the New Jersey legislature that will allow people who were adopted as children to unseal their records ... a reversal of the law at the time of the adoption.
http://www.northjersey.com/news/opinions/96449329_Flawed_adoptee_bill.html