I think you mean high probability of occurring here, surely?
A flu pandemic *will* occur. It might not be H5N1 but there will be a pandemic some time soon.
And building a city below sea level in a hurricane zone does not yield a low probability of something disastrous happening.
"The world is, a dangerous place. As with Sudan and Iran, the UN is no deterrent to aggression. Enlightened self-interest directs us to investigate these types of systems for the same reasons we investigate lethal pathogens. Surviving them requires understanding them even if we never intend to use them."
Sudan? It's NP-hard to threaten a state that only tenuously exists.
Iran? Have we tried yet? I was labouring under the delusion that the deadline had only just passed and the UN was considering its options. As for aggression: Iran is building a nuclear bomb. While that has the potential to make a right mess it stops short of being an actual aggressive act. Iran's behaviour is aggressive - very aggressive - but "aggressive act" would involve some violation of someone else's sovereignty. (There is of course the side case that Iran is actively meddling in Iraq, rather unsurprisingly given that they pulled off the intelligence coup of the post-Cold War period in persuading us to fight their war for them...)
And I like the "even if we never intend to use them" codacil: one can never intend to have a slice of chocolate cake, or that cigarette or slip into bed with that intern but these things...just...happen...somehow.
"War on Terrorism: France, keeping in mind its recent history, surrenders to Germans and Muslims just to be safe."
Germans? GERMANS? That'd be the dread Das Qaeda at work again, presumably. And as for surrendering to Muslims, that would a> presuppose that the french were actually at war with an entire religion and b> hadn't actually recently enacted laws that those of us who are Shoulder-to-Shoulder with the great Satan daren't for fear of offending our muslim population (cf, hijabs)
Yes, because they wanted to compare apples-with-apples. As you may have noticed on monday, the USA has a different ethnic make-up to the UK. There's also a side-effect of the methodology in that it effectively removes a huge chunk of poor people from the american data. This may or may not be defensible, but the fact that the US scored so badly even without the poorest section of society is extremely depressing.
Comparing an African American from Detroit with an African from Nigeria wouldn't be a fair comparison. The Detroiter lives in the richest nation in the world, which has the highest per capita expenditure on health services per person. 13.2% of the US GDP goes on health. And still the non-white stats are appalling:
Infant mortality is always a useful measure of how broken your health system is.
http://www.cdc.gov/omh/AMH/factsheets/infant.htmhttp://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/hea_inf_mor_ra t - US figures aren't in the Nation Master data set, for some reason. Embarrassment, possibly.
6.9 deaths per thousand is at the bottom of the industrialised nations: (Between Cuba and Croatia). African-American infant mortality runs at 14.1 per thousand however: below Jamaica ffs!
70 laptops, why that's nearly $100,000-worth. Who'd have thought crime in San Francisco was such big business? Knuckles and I will be hotfooting it from Chicago as soon as we've got some decent gats.
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I think you mean high probability of occurring here, surely? A flu pandemic *will* occur. It might not be H5N1 but there will be a pandemic some time soon. And building a city below sea level in a hurricane zone does not yield a low probability of something disastrous happening.
Jewish penicillin would probably be more expensive that tamiflu if bird flu struck for real...
"The world is, a dangerous place. As with Sudan and Iran, the UN is no deterrent to aggression. Enlightened self-interest directs us to investigate these types of systems for the same reasons we investigate lethal pathogens. Surviving them requires understanding them even if we never intend to use them."
Sudan? It's NP-hard to threaten a state that only tenuously exists.
Iran? Have we tried yet? I was labouring under the delusion that the deadline had only just passed and the UN was considering its options. As for aggression: Iran is building a nuclear bomb. While that has the potential to make a right mess it stops short of being an actual aggressive act. Iran's behaviour is aggressive - very aggressive - but "aggressive act" would involve some violation of someone else's sovereignty. (There is of course the side case that Iran is actively meddling in Iraq, rather unsurprisingly given that they pulled off the intelligence coup of the post-Cold War period in persuading us to fight their war for them...)
And I like the "even if we never intend to use them" codacil: one can never intend to have a slice of chocolate cake, or that cigarette or slip into bed with that intern but these things...just...happen...somehow.
Touchy? Touché!
Perhaps what I should have said is that everybody practises protectionism, and here are some examples from a supposedly free market country.
And of course the US *never* practises protectionism:
t icles/Boeing.html
http://www.buffalo.edu/reporter/vol35/vol35n40/ar
http://www.freetrade.org/issues/steel.html
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004619.php
"War on Terrorism: France, keeping in mind its recent history, surrenders to Germans and Muslims just to be safe."
Germans? GERMANS? That'd be the dread Das Qaeda at work again, presumably. And as for surrendering to Muslims, that would a> presuppose that the french were actually at war with an entire religion and b> hadn't actually recently enacted laws that those of us who are Shoulder-to-Shoulder with the great Satan daren't for fear of offending our muslim population (cf, hijabs)
Yes, because they wanted to compare apples-with-apples. As you may have noticed on monday, the USA has a different ethnic make-up to the UK. There's also a side-effect of the methodology in that it effectively removes a huge chunk of poor people from the american data. This may or may not be defensible, but the fact that the US scored so badly even without the poorest section of society is extremely depressing. Comparing an African American from Detroit with an African from Nigeria wouldn't be a fair comparison. The Detroiter lives in the richest nation in the world, which has the highest per capita expenditure on health services per person. 13.2% of the US GDP goes on health. And still the non-white stats are appalling: Infant mortality is always a useful measure of how broken your health system is. http://www.cdc.gov/omh/AMH/factsheets/infant.htm http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/hea_inf_mor_ra t - US figures aren't in the Nation Master data set, for some reason. Embarrassment, possibly.
6.9 deaths per thousand is at the bottom of the industrialised nations: (Between Cuba and Croatia). African-American infant mortality runs at 14.1 per thousand however: below Jamaica ffs!
70 laptops, why that's nearly $100,000-worth. Who'd have thought crime in San Francisco was such big business? Knuckles and I will be hotfooting it from Chicago as soon as we've got some decent gats.