From the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary: science - noun
1 [U] (knowledge obtained from) the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical world, especially by observing, measuring and experimenting, and the development of theories to describe the results of these activities.
How is political science not a real science, then? It is the systematic study of the behaviour of people making decisions on political topics and in candidate elections, among other things.
Let's add a check box to the IRS form. Check it if you want some of your tax dollars used to fund this kind of research, don't check it if you are opposed.
That's a fun little idea to one day "stick it" to people who didn't support this sort of research. However, government doesn't work that way -- we all contribute to the pot, and the government funds basic infrastructure, systems of social order, and ventures that may be helpful to society but not necessarily profitable for private investors.
The bad date or club cockteases have made plenty a man hate women, if only for a bit. Killing a whore in GTA lets you get the release and satisfaction without actually hurting a human being.
Right, and I'm sure it's not at all problematic to make a direct connection between being spurned by a woman at a club and simulating the murder of a woman on a video game. Get rejected by a woman? Kill some women on a video game, it's all good.
For some reason, that doesn't seem like a valid response chain. How about: Get rejected by a woman? Reconsider getting smashed on Bud Light and hitting on girls who aren't interested in you.
You're right, but for different reasons -- the twisted economics of private health care in the U.S. are such that insurance companies run like hell away from anyone who is sick.
When you see health plans marketed here in the States, it's done by showing healthy, happy people, not showing sick people receiving good health care. That's because insurers want to recruit customers who are in good health and leave those with diabetes or other chronic conditions for some other company. It's like a game of hot potato: who gets stuck with all of the diabetics and their lifelong health problems?
As for health care being a societal issue, that's right on. Some people can take action to be healthy and remain that way, and others may take action but still wind up getting heart disease or diabetes because of family history, etc. The people who live healthy lives and stay healthy, as well as the people who live less healthy lifestyles but still wind up not getting diseases -- these are the people who "pay" for the people unfortunate enough to get sick. The healthy peoples' low costs subsidize the costs of those who wind up getting sick. In a nationalized health care system, those costs are spread out over the entire society, and it's a wash overall.
In a private system, it's in the interests of insurers to seek out only the people who don't get sick -- also known as people without pre-existing conditions (those who haven't already been sick). Those with pre-existing conditions (diabetics) or those at risk for health problems (smokers, older people, etc.) are passed up, or charged far higher premiums, essentially locking them out of health care coverage if they aren't covered through their employer.
Here's an interesting factor that would be very, very difficult to isolate, but that may be having an effect on health in the U.S. vs. the U.K. -- how many Americans are staying in stressful, underpaid, overworked jobs because they don't want to lose their health coverage? Seriously, that's one of the top priorities for basically anyone here, whether they can keep their health coverage or not. If big employers like General Motors or Ford or Boeing start to phase out health coverage because of the cost it adds to their products, it's going to start to get even worse for us.
Not that it isn't already bad -- this is National Cover the Uninsured Week here, which is a good time to remind everyone of the following:
* There are 46 million people in the U.S. without insurance (about 20 percent of the population).
* The country spends more than 20 percent of its GDP on health expenditures.
* We spend more per person on health care than most industrialized nations, and despite our "top of the line" care and technology, we have significantly lower indicators or health than most of those nations.
* Hospitals (emergency rooms in particular) that provide charity care are becoming the first point of contact for many people who are uninsured, which is making it hard for some hospitals to stay financially solvent.
It's not at all an exaggeration to say our health care system is in a crisis right now.
This award is just a Daytime Emmy. More specifically, it will be given out at the "Creative Arts" Daytime Emmy awards ceremony. This is like getting an Oscar nomination... in the Scientific and Technical awards. Which no one watches. And no one outside of the Scientific and Technical award nominee community pays much attention to.
Oh, and for the record, the award is officially "for Outstanding Original Programming
Created for Non-Traditional Delivery Platforms."
Read that comment one more time. It was from a market analyst at Caris & Company, an investment banking firm. The guy has a lot of experience in the computing industry, but he's a market analyst.
He's not from Google, he can't say for sure what Google may or may not do. He can only speculate on what he thinks the market may support, which is an alternative to the ITMS.
When we see a story with a blind quote from an unnamed Google VP saying they're leaning towards a subscription model, or towards a sliding-scale single-track purchase model, then we can debate on whether Google is backing away from its "Do No Evil" mantra. Until then, this is just speculation about the online music market.
And a huge chunk of it [NASA's $13 billion annual budget] is spent on bureaucractic bullshit. Paying admistrators, and their secretaries, and their benefits, and their health insurance, and remimbursing transportation costs, and federal audits, and enviromental impact surveys, and nasa.gov, and PR, and...
This sounds like one of those Libertarian arguments about how much we spend on public schooling (~$10K per student per year) and how a couple of us could get together and spend half that much to teach students. Sounds like a great idea until you start asking questions like:
- How do the kids get to this undetermined location to take classes? Will you pay for transportation?
- What do the kids eat for lunch?
- What happens if one of them gets sick during the day? Does one of you have any medical training?
Etc., etc.
NASA spends a good deal of its budget on bureaucratic costs because any large organization has to do so. You start distributing money to thousands of scientists and engineers at 10 different centers and labs around the country, and accept bids from aerospace and engineering companies around the world, you're going to need to hire a bookkeeper or two, I'm thinking. And maybe having some technical people on staff who can judge whether construction/design/whatever bids from contractors are viable or not.
Oh, and PR and a Web presence aren't that important either, when you're one of the nation's largest science and engineering administrations and you're also the first stop for just about anyone who wants to learn about astronomy, planetary science, and aerospace technology. Goodness knows you don't want to attract any future scientists and engineers to this line of work, so shut down those public outreach efforts.
Any organization larger than three guys working out of the garage starts to have some overhead associated with it that takes up a significant percentage of an operating budget. That's just how it goes, unless we want NASA to be three Slashdotters sending up Estes rockets with cellphone cams strapped to the side.
...And that was Jimmy Wales and John Seigenthaler Sr., giving us the only two possible sides to this issue.
Next on CNN, in keeping with our binary debate format, we'll hear from the Rev. Jerry Falwell, telling us how secularists are trying to kill Christmas, and from Michael Newdow, who thinks all Christians should "shut the hell up."
Join us later this evening, when Anderson Cooper will oversee a cage match to the death between a pro-life activist and her pro-choice counterpart. All on CNN...We set up false dichotomies, you decide!
Slashdot Mirror
From the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary:
science - noun
1 [U] (knowledge obtained from) the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical world, especially by observing, measuring and experimenting, and the development of theories to describe the results of these activities.
How is political science not a real science, then? It is the systematic study of the behaviour of people making decisions on political topics and in candidate elections, among other things.
lucrative, a.
1. Yielding gain or profit; gainful, profitable.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Let's add a check box to the IRS form. Check it if you want some of your tax dollars used to fund this kind of research, don't check it if you are opposed.
That's a fun little idea to one day "stick it" to people who didn't support this sort of research. However, government doesn't work that way -- we all contribute to the pot, and the government funds basic infrastructure, systems of social order, and ventures that may be helpful to society but not necessarily profitable for private investors.
The bad date or club cockteases have made plenty a man hate women, if only for a bit. Killing a whore in GTA lets you get the release and satisfaction without actually hurting a human being.
Right, and I'm sure it's not at all problematic to make a direct connection between being spurned by a woman at a club and simulating the murder of a woman on a video game. Get rejected by a woman? Kill some women on a video game, it's all good.
For some reason, that doesn't seem like a valid response chain. How about: Get rejected by a woman? Reconsider getting smashed on Bud Light and hitting on girls who aren't interested in you.
You're right, but for different reasons -- the twisted economics of private health care in the U.S. are such that insurance companies run like hell away from anyone who is sick.
When you see health plans marketed here in the States, it's done by showing healthy, happy people, not showing sick people receiving good health care. That's because insurers want to recruit customers who are in good health and leave those with diabetes or other chronic conditions for some other company. It's like a game of hot potato: who gets stuck with all of the diabetics and their lifelong health problems?
As for health care being a societal issue, that's right on. Some people can take action to be healthy and remain that way, and others may take action but still wind up getting heart disease or diabetes because of family history, etc. The people who live healthy lives and stay healthy, as well as the people who live less healthy lifestyles but still wind up not getting diseases -- these are the people who "pay" for the people unfortunate enough to get sick. The healthy peoples' low costs subsidize the costs of those who wind up getting sick. In a nationalized health care system, those costs are spread out over the entire society, and it's a wash overall.
In a private system, it's in the interests of insurers to seek out only the people who don't get sick -- also known as people without pre-existing conditions (those who haven't already been sick). Those with pre-existing conditions (diabetics) or those at risk for health problems (smokers, older people, etc.) are passed up, or charged far higher premiums, essentially locking them out of health care coverage if they aren't covered through their employer.
Here's an interesting factor that would be very, very difficult to isolate, but that may be having an effect on health in the U.S. vs. the U.K. -- how many Americans are staying in stressful, underpaid, overworked jobs because they don't want to lose their health coverage? Seriously, that's one of the top priorities for basically anyone here, whether they can keep their health coverage or not. If big employers like General Motors or Ford or Boeing start to phase out health coverage because of the cost it adds to their products, it's going to start to get even worse for us.
Not that it isn't already bad -- this is National Cover the Uninsured Week here, which is a good time to remind everyone of the following:
* There are 46 million people in the U.S. without insurance (about 20 percent of the population).
* The country spends more than 20 percent of its GDP on health expenditures.
* We spend more per person on health care than most industrialized nations, and despite our "top of the line" care and technology, we have significantly lower indicators or health than most of those nations.
* Hospitals (emergency rooms in particular) that provide charity care are becoming the first point of contact for many people who are uninsured, which is making it hard for some hospitals to stay financially solvent.
It's not at all an exaggeration to say our health care system is in a crisis right now.
This award is just a Daytime Emmy. More specifically, it will be given out at the "Creative Arts" Daytime Emmy awards ceremony. This is like getting an Oscar nomination... in the Scientific and Technical awards. Which no one watches. And no one outside of the Scientific and Technical award nominee community pays much attention to.
Oh, and for the record, the award is officially "for Outstanding Original Programming Created for Non-Traditional Delivery Platforms."
[Insert joke here]
Read that comment one more time. It was from a market analyst at Caris & Company, an investment banking firm. The guy has a lot of experience in the computing industry, but he's a market analyst.
He's not from Google, he can't say for sure what Google may or may not do. He can only speculate on what he thinks the market may support, which is an alternative to the ITMS.
When we see a story with a blind quote from an unnamed Google VP saying they're leaning towards a subscription model, or towards a sliding-scale single-track purchase model, then we can debate on whether Google is backing away from its "Do No Evil" mantra. Until then, this is just speculation about the online music market.
And a huge chunk of it [NASA's $13 billion annual budget] is spent on bureaucractic bullshit. Paying admistrators, and their secretaries, and their benefits, and their health insurance, and remimbursing transportation costs, and federal audits, and enviromental impact surveys, and nasa.gov, and PR, and ...
This sounds like one of those Libertarian arguments about how much we spend on public schooling (~$10K per student per year) and how a couple of us could get together and spend half that much to teach students. Sounds like a great idea until you start asking questions like:
- How do the kids get to this undetermined location to take classes? Will you pay for transportation?
- What do the kids eat for lunch?
- What happens if one of them gets sick during the day? Does one of you have any medical training?
Etc., etc.
NASA spends a good deal of its budget on bureaucratic costs because any large organization has to do so. You start distributing money to thousands of scientists and engineers at 10 different centers and labs around the country, and accept bids from aerospace and engineering companies around the world, you're going to need to hire a bookkeeper or two, I'm thinking. And maybe having some technical people on staff who can judge whether construction/design/whatever bids from contractors are viable or not.
Oh, and PR and a Web presence aren't that important either, when you're one of the nation's largest science and engineering administrations and you're also the first stop for just about anyone who wants to learn about astronomy, planetary science, and aerospace technology. Goodness knows you don't want to attract any future scientists and engineers to this line of work, so shut down those public outreach efforts.
Any organization larger than three guys working out of the garage starts to have some overhead associated with it that takes up a significant percentage of an operating budget. That's just how it goes, unless we want NASA to be three Slashdotters sending up Estes rockets with cellphone cams strapped to the side.
But that nice, older man I was chatting with the other night said he didn't have any viruses at all, so it's OK...
Oh, wait, wrong kind of virus. Never mind.
...And that was Jimmy Wales and John Seigenthaler Sr., giving us the only two possible sides to this issue.
Next on CNN, in keeping with our binary debate format, we'll hear from the Rev. Jerry Falwell, telling us how secularists are trying to kill Christmas, and from Michael Newdow, who thinks all Christians should "shut the hell up."
Join us later this evening, when Anderson Cooper will oversee a cage match to the death between a pro-life activist and her pro-choice counterpart. All on CNN...We set up false dichotomies, you decide!
'We evaluate only the characters, the dialogue, the plot, the non-linear structure, and the flow and pace of the story.'
Sweet...finally a place where I can submit all of my half-elf Ranger/deep gnome Tinker slash-fic plotlines!