If everyone--- and I mean EVERYONE--- had to pay cash out of their own pockets for medical services, then you can bet you'd see some true price competition emerge.
I'm sure that all the people who need, say, and appendectomy in the next couple of hours so they don't die from peritonitis are really, really inclined to do some shopping around for the best price. Especially when they're feverish, in pain, and vomiting once in a while.
Not sure where you are but in the US only Los Angeles is overpopulated. New York is intentionally overcrowded.
Overpopulation has nothing to do with overcrowding and everything to do with resources. How are you going to support a population of Americans that doubles every generation? Simple answer: You aren't, at least not for long. And then you're in for some major population reduction through a combination of violence, disease, and shortage of resources (people starving or freezing to death).
And having small families that at the same time support their own elderly isn't going to work. Simple statistics is all that's needed to prove it. The cost of supporting an elderly person have a mean (m) and a standard deviation (sigma), and in order to keep the chance of not being able to pay for that below a certain percentage, you mean+x*sigma in funds, with sigma being significant compared to mean. If the costs are pooled, then mean rises with the number n of people in the pool, but sigma only rises with the square root of the number of people in the pool. Hence, the amount of funds necessary per elderly person in the pooled system is mean + (x*sigma)/(sqrt(n)).
I just read a pretty compelling study about how Americans consistently rate their health care as "the best in the world", however by virtually any meaningful metric it is factually not the best healthcare in the world.
What a stupid study. Of course Americans usually rate everything American as "best in the world". Because if it's not American, it cannot be best in the world, period.
Which they or their families should pay for. Somewhere along the line we got this idea that people should not have to bother to save for retirement and that the government should replace the family as the caretaker of the elderly.
Yay, let's go back to everyone having a minimum of five kids (the more the better). Overpopulation be damned.
Do you think Big Pharma is in the business of finding CURES?
Yes. See vaccines, for example, which are pretty much dirt cheap compared to waiting for an epidemic and then selling stuff that alleviates the symptoms.
Nope: they're in the business of getting people DEPENDENT upon something and then continuing to sell that something to them for a LIFETIME.
That business model can be trivially beaten by someone who actually makes a cure and sells it for an amount that will amortize, with interest, to what the "bad drug company" you describe would earn by selling to the patient over his lifetime.
Duh. That's basic economics. If you make a cure, you can make a lot of money _and_ put the competitors out of business by destroying their business model.
The central point is that Foreigners from around the world have entered the United States then summarily been kidnapped by the CIA, and thrown on jets to countries that torture, then tortured. I'm not going to a country that does that to people. It might happen to me.
Well, you're in luck. You don't even have to enter the US to have that happen to you.
There's a semicolon after "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself", so the "without due process of law" applies exclusively to the "deprived of life, liberty or property" part.
Hm, ok scratch that. Apparently, it's a comma, not a semicolon.
There's a semicolon after "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself", so the "without due process of law" applies exclusively to the "deprived of life, liberty or property" part.
Violence usually works, innocent or not. And only a small minority of government types are prohibited from going that route by some piece of paper, usually called "a constitution". In any kind of autocratic government, the head honcho can crack down on anyone he doesn't like, without needing any laws. Making laws is such a long process, giving orders to his personal bunch of thugs is so much faster.
The rest of the argument then collapses, just like an empty rhethoric shell should.
But the thing is, you *don't* sail your capital ships right up to the enemy battleship and try to shoot at it with ship-to-ship missiles. That would be tactically moronic.
Yes. Especially when your anti-ship missiles have ranges of several hundred miles, while the battleship can only shell things a few tens of miles away. And you don't even need any kind of ship to use the missiles, you can just launch them from a land-based platform, long before the battleship ever gets close enough to engage it.
These ships were designed to withstand 1 ton projectiles impacting the side so modern missiles are a joke to them.
Modern anti-ship missiles can carry almost one ton of _payload_ in addition to a few tons delivery system, and come in at "projectile" speeds (mach 2+). Also, they're designed not to impact the side, but to go for the juicier parts farther up, if desired. Oh, and they also usually don't come alone.
Plus having a ship that can shell 20 miles inland eliminates the need to risk any pilot lives when you are lobbing VW busses full of explosives at targets.
20 miles inland isn't so impressive when the enemy can fire back from 200 miles inland.
to the modern... "Just ram the fuckers with a submarine" approach that we employ today... *wipes tear*
That approach was first invented by the US Navy, though. However, applying it to another submarine instead of some random fishing vessel is quite a refinement.
It can go red giant, which is already enough to toast us.
Actually, Earth is toast much earlier than that. As the sun ages, its luminosity increases, and in only about a billion years, there will be no liquid water on Earths surface due to the increased temperature, even though the sun will live for another couple of billion years before becoming a red giant.
By manipulating magnetic fields in a particular way and making the spacecraft a particular shape, it might be possible to deflect incoming metallic debris.
For something coming directly your way, the only thing you're going to accomplish is making things worse by increasing the impact velocity.
Maybe a gigantic eddy current brake might work and slow down debris enough to reenter more quickly. However, it'll also work just fine on any satellite that's out there, so it's probably only something to consider if there's so much junk in orbit that we need to clean it up no matter what the collateral damage is.
Or just launch some bombs and detonate them in orbit. Make sure the blast radius is large enough to either force the surrounding debris along with the debris generated by the bomb out of orbit or into the atmosphere.
Two points:
1. Blast radii of bombs are small (that includes nuclear ones).
The Hubble is also Obsolete due to new technologies like Adaptive optics that allow ground based telescopes to achieve the same clarity as the Hubble.
You can pull as many adaptive whatchamacallits out of the signal processing toolbox, but that doesn't change the simple fact that certain wavelengths will be absorbed by the atmosphere before they even get to your ground-based telescopes.
putting a impact shield around spacecraft - but the kind of impact speeds we are talking about probably makes this uneconomical as the shield would need to be massive.
The spacecraft would have trouble getting off the ground. That's even worse than uneconomical.
some kind of automated space cleaner that went around removing debris - but we had no idea how that could possibly work or be designed
The problem with this is - if that "cleaner" gets hit by debris, you've just added to the problem instead of reducing it.
pre-emptive removal of dead satalites (no, not shooting them down from earth - attaching small moters to send them into the atmosphere) - maybe steering them into a declining orbit as the last thing they do before swithing them off
That would have been a way to keep the problem in check, and it's being done with some satellites. But usually whoever puts satellites up there is too cheap to worry about disposal, since by the time it becomes a problem, they're most likely not around anymore and don't have to worry. Yay, just let the following generations clean up the crap, just like with everything else.
There have been spores tested, and the verdict is that they can survive at less than 10cm to an atomic explosion.
Citation needed.
A couple thousand degrees temperature will break up pretty much any chemical bond.
One atomic bomb can kill, at best, about 50000 people, in a dense city block less than 1 square kilometer.
Eh, what? Both of the bombs used in anger so far killed more than that (both directly by the blast and delayed deaths by radiation). And, mind you, those were small 10-15 kT devices. In todays strategic arsenals, you'll warheads ranging from a couple hundred kilotons to 1.2 megatons. And then of course, there's this little baby:
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone--- and I mean EVERYONE--- had to pay cash out of their own pockets for medical services, then you can bet you'd see some true price competition emerge.
I'm sure that all the people who need, say, and appendectomy in the next couple of hours so they don't die from peritonitis are really, really inclined to do some shopping around for the best price. Especially when they're feverish, in pain, and vomiting once in a while.
Not sure where you are but in the US only Los Angeles is overpopulated. New York is intentionally overcrowded.
Overpopulation has nothing to do with overcrowding and everything to do with resources. How are you going to support a population of Americans that doubles every generation? Simple answer: You aren't, at least not for long. And then you're in for some major population reduction through a combination of violence, disease, and shortage of resources (people starving or freezing to death).
And having small families that at the same time support their own elderly isn't going to work. Simple statistics is all that's needed to prove it. The cost of supporting an elderly person have a mean (m) and a standard deviation (sigma), and in order to keep the chance of not being able to pay for that below a certain percentage, you mean+x*sigma in funds, with sigma being significant compared to mean. If the costs are pooled, then mean rises with the number n of people in the pool, but sigma only rises with the square root of the number of people in the pool. Hence, the amount of funds necessary per elderly person in the pooled system is mean + (x*sigma)/(sqrt(n)).
I just read a pretty compelling study about how Americans consistently rate their health care as "the best in the world", however by virtually any meaningful metric it is factually not the best healthcare in the world.
What a stupid study. Of course Americans usually rate everything American as "best in the world". Because if it's not American, it cannot be best in the world, period.
Which they or their families should pay for. Somewhere along the line we got this idea that people should not have to bother to save for retirement and that the government should replace the family as the caretaker of the elderly.
Yay, let's go back to everyone having a minimum of five kids (the more the better). Overpopulation be damned.
Do you think Big Pharma is in the business of finding CURES?
Yes. See vaccines, for example, which are pretty much dirt cheap compared to waiting for an epidemic and then selling stuff that alleviates the symptoms.
Nope: they're in the business of getting people DEPENDENT upon something and then continuing to sell that something to them for a LIFETIME.
That business model can be trivially beaten by someone who actually makes a cure and sells it for an amount that will amortize, with interest, to what the "bad drug company" you describe would earn by selling to the patient over his lifetime.
Duh. That's basic economics. If you make a cure, you can make a lot of money _and_ put the competitors out of business by destroying their business model.
... so it should be hard to program. Ha ha ha.
The central point is that Foreigners from around the world have entered the United States then summarily been kidnapped by the CIA, and thrown on jets to countries that torture, then tortured. I'm not going to a country that does that to people. It might happen to me.
Well, you're in luck. You don't even have to enter the US to have that happen to you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_al-Masri
And, also luckily, if it happens to you, you won't get an opportunity to enter the US anyway.
There's a semicolon after "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself", so the "without due process of law" applies exclusively to the "deprived of life, liberty or property" part.
Hm, ok scratch that. Apparently, it's a comma, not a semicolon.
hmm, where are the brackets there?
There's a semicolon after "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself", so the "without due process of law" applies exclusively to the "deprived of life, liberty or property" part.
Violence usually works, innocent or not. And only a small minority of government types are prohibited from going that route by some piece of paper, usually called "a constitution". In any kind of autocratic government, the head honcho can crack down on anyone he doesn't like, without needing any laws. Making laws is such a long process, giving orders to his personal bunch of thugs is so much faster.
The rest of the argument then collapses, just like an empty rhethoric shell should.
Yes. Especially when your anti-ship missiles have ranges of several hundred miles, while the battleship can only shell things a few tens of miles away. And you don't even need any kind of ship to use the missiles, you can just launch them from a land-based platform, long before the battleship ever gets close enough to engage it.
These ships were designed to withstand 1 ton projectiles impacting the side so modern missiles are a joke to them.
Modern anti-ship missiles can carry almost one ton of _payload_ in addition to a few tons delivery system, and come in at "projectile" speeds (mach 2+). Also, they're designed not to impact the side, but to go for the juicier parts farther up, if desired. Oh, and they also usually don't come alone.
Plus having a ship that can shell 20 miles inland eliminates the need to risk any pilot lives when you are lobbing VW busses full of explosives at targets.
20 miles inland isn't so impressive when the enemy can fire back from 200 miles inland.
The ancient Greek, Egyptian and Roman navy used ramming as well.
Yes, but I doubt that they used submarines for this purpose. You'll never see _those_ coming.
to the modern... "Just ram the fuckers with a submarine" approach that we employ today... *wipes tear*
That approach was first invented by the US Navy, though. However, applying it to another submarine instead of some random fishing vessel is quite a refinement.
It can go red giant, which is already enough to toast us.
Actually, Earth is toast much earlier than that. As the sun ages, its luminosity increases, and in only about a billion years, there will be no liquid water on Earths surface due to the increased temperature, even though the sun will live for another couple of billion years before becoming a red giant.
By manipulating magnetic fields in a particular way and making the spacecraft a particular shape, it might be possible to deflect incoming metallic debris.
For something coming directly your way, the only thing you're going to accomplish is making things worse by increasing the impact velocity.
Maybe a gigantic eddy current brake might work and slow down debris enough to reenter more quickly. However, it'll also work just fine on any satellite that's out there, so it's probably only something to consider if there's so much junk in orbit that we need to clean it up no matter what the collateral damage is.
Or just launch some bombs and detonate them in orbit. Make sure the blast radius is large enough to either force the surrounding debris along with the debris generated by the bomb out of orbit or into the atmosphere.
Two points:
1. Blast radii of bombs are small (that includes nuclear ones).
2. Space is big.
The Hubble is also Obsolete due to new technologies like Adaptive optics that allow ground based telescopes to achieve the same clarity as the Hubble.
You can pull as many adaptive whatchamacallits out of the signal processing toolbox, but that doesn't change the simple fact that certain wavelengths will be absorbed by the atmosphere before they even get to your ground-based telescopes.
At the peak altitude the rocket explodes, releasing something like strips of foil which will collide with orbiting debris.
And what will this accomplish, apart from making the problem worse by creating even more debris?
putting a impact shield around spacecraft - but the kind of impact speeds we are talking about probably makes this uneconomical as the shield would need to be massive.
The spacecraft would have trouble getting off the ground. That's even worse than uneconomical.
some kind of automated space cleaner that went around removing debris - but we had no idea how that could possibly work or be designed
The problem with this is - if that "cleaner" gets hit by debris, you've just added to the problem instead of reducing it.
pre-emptive removal of dead satalites (no, not shooting them down from earth - attaching small moters to send them into the atmosphere) - maybe steering them into a declining orbit as the last thing they do before swithing them off
That would have been a way to keep the problem in check, and it's being done with some satellites. But usually whoever puts satellites up there is too cheap to worry about disposal, since by the time it becomes a problem, they're most likely not around anymore and don't have to worry. Yay, just let the following generations clean up the crap, just like with everything else.
Oh, I dunno..... Pay them a flat yearly fee, regardless of how many inmates are in the prison?
That would give them an incentive to keep real criminals out of prison with a few bribes.
It's all mentioned in the article. The Tsar Bomba created a fireball about 8 km in diameter, and the resulting mushroom cloud was 64 km high.
There have been spores tested, and the verdict is that they can survive at less than 10cm to an atomic explosion.
Citation needed.
A couple thousand degrees temperature will break up pretty much any chemical bond.
One atomic bomb can kill, at best, about 50000 people, in a dense city block less than 1 square kilometer.
Eh, what? Both of the bombs used in anger so far killed more than that (both directly by the blast and delayed deaths by radiation). And, mind you, those were small 10-15 kT devices. In todays strategic arsenals, you'll warheads ranging from a couple hundred kilotons to 1.2 megatons. And then of course, there's this little baby:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_bomba
... that is, not to have any wires or hoses connecting it to something else on the ground or in the air. Duh.
Seriously, these guys take some sort of high-output water pump and call it a jet pack?
Pretty low. Maybe both subs were using the same software to plan their routes and find the quietest spots?
"If you don't want to be found, go there." *CRUNCH*