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I've been doing quite a bit of reading on Medicare Part D (the prescription drug entitlement), including that recent costs are actually below projections, and there's a "donut hole" wherein recipients get a certain amount of drugs free, then must pay for the costs themselves, then they receive full coverage (awfully reminiscent of my HSA). My opinion has changed since posting this and I'll get back to you once I better understand the situation.

To be fair, I have seen some genuine libertarians express equal amounts rage for Bush and Obama, but as far as I can tell, that's a rather rare occurrence. This rage didn't start until Obama took office (unless you count the Republicans who showed up to rallies more because they were expressing rage at the idea of Obama being president, more than to support McCain) Agreed

This was not the reaction I expected from you, given your past concerns over entitlement spending. The Republicans increase entitlement spending by $1.2 trillion over 10 years and they just get a bye from you, especially on a program that could've been considerably cheaper had it not been designed as a government handout to big pharma? Would you at least agree that this piece of Republican policy needs to be changed?

Oh come now Pangloss, that was not the sentiment of either my post or Bartlett's article. Where exactly are you getting the idea that I'm in favor of a bunch of angry Republicans venting rage? Many Republicans have practically been throwing a temper tantrum since Obama got elected and the Democrats gained control of Congress. Bartlett's point is that such tantrums would be properly directed at the Bush Administration, not at Democrats.

There are RDP and VNC clients freely available on most mobile platforms already.

Incorrect. Opiates are a central nervous system depressant. Take too many and you will die. Mixing opiates with other depressants like alcohol will also increase risk of death. They're also highly addictive and require larger and larger doses due to tolerance developed because of compulsive use, thus increasing the risk of overdose. Opiates also induce nausea and vomiting, which is exacerbated by the intense drowsiness they cause. This places a user at risk of dying because they choke on their own vomit, even if they didn't overdose, simply by passing out in a position where you're lying on your back. Many people have died because of them.

A very interesting article from conservative economist and historian Bruce Bartlett, who served as a treasurer under George W. Bush and a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-12/the-gops-misplaced-rage/ Lots of comparisons are drawn between Bush, Clinton, and Reagan, noting how there are many more parallels between the economic policies of Reagan and Clinton than there are to anything Bush did. The article blames the present economic problems pretty squarely on Bush, and that the rage exhibited towards Democrats and Obama at the town hall meetings should really be directed at Bush. This section was particularly interesting: Certainly deflates the sails of the teabaggers. He also discusses the importance of healthcare reform in curbing federal spending: What do you think?

Medicare is a single-payer system, albeit not a universal one. Thus it is relevant to the debate as to whether the US should consider a universal single-payer system. Yes, Medicare is not doing well. Not well at all. This graph from the conservative Heritage Foundation illustrates the problem nicely: So navigator is correct (about Medicare, not Medicaid). Medicare spending is set to increase enormously over time, to unsustainable levels. If that's the case, why would we consider a universal single-payer system? Wouldn't it suffer from the same explosive growth in costs? You might notice that Medicare's explosive growth doesn't match the previous trend. So why happened? Why did Medicare become so much more expensive? The answer is that Bush and the Republicans created a new entitlement program with the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act. This program massively increased Medicare costs by offering Medicare recipients a prescription drug benefit, however the program prevented Medicare from buying prescription drugs in bulk, instead having the government foot the bill for full retail price as charged at a pharmacy. It was effectively a huge handout to the pharmaceuticals, and one America cannot afford. It would seem the costs of Medicare have little to do with it being a single-payer system and much more to do with the Republican prescription drug entitlement program. Other single-payer systems in other countries, such as Health Canada, do not have this problem as these organizations are able to negotiate bulk discounts with pharmaceuticals. It's for this reason that we used to have seniors flocking across the borders to buy cheap Canadian drugs, but now they can get drugs at expensive retail prices on the government's dime instead. When talking about Medicare in the context of the larger healthcare reform debate, it's important to keep this in mind.

I think you're conflating disease with infectious disease. Disease is the state of having impaired bodily function, plain and simple. It doesn't matter what the causative agent is. Is black lung a disease or not? Is asbestosis? Neither coal dust nor asbestos are organic, yet the conditions they cause are both classified as diseases.

I don't know what the WHO's methodology in making the assessment was. Do you? I don't think you do. Can you find a definitive (i.e. better than an op ed) source to support this statement: This seems to be a big problem for you. You make many claims and provide no supporting evidence of them. You should try to work on that, supporting your claims with evidence. So far the syllogism for your argument reads something like this: Premise 1) Different countries use different criteria in determining their infant mortality rate Premise 2) ?????????????? Conclusion) The WHO assessment is inaccurate

If you're going to claim the WHO and the CIA are both wrong about their infant mortality rate comparisons, can you find something better than a tabloid op ed to back it up? That's not exactly a definitive source of information. You pasted the definition the WHO uses for a stillbirth. Can you even demonstrate that the WHO's statistics are not based on that standard? We live less long because we're more free than those other countries! Zuh? The #1 killer in the US is heart disease. I think it's safe to say we have lower life expectancy because Americans are generally more obese.

My problem with "rationing" is that people pretend it doesn't exist under the present private insurance system. It just takes a different form: healthcare providers trying to maximize the number of expensive claims they deny.

For what it's worth both Intel and AMD have moved to asynchronous packet buses, namely QuickPath and HyperTransport respectively. Memory controllers are now integrated into the CPU and thus the concept of a front side bus is increasingly quaint.

For the record, I worked alongside scientists in a climate research group for 5 years, but thanks for playing. No, it wasn't, and it was never mainstream climate science. What you are describing is a strawman of the climate science community's reaction to increasing sulfate aerosols caused by pollution, which altered earth's albedo and caused more solar radiation to be reflected back into space. The mainstream climate science community at the time was not afraid that the earth was about to go into a new "ice age". *facepalm* No, this is what a general circulation model looks like: tbXwRP0CQNA Climate scientists have meticulously reconstructed the earth's climate system in computer simulations and you compare it to reading tea leaves. I suppose the standard model of particle physics looks like reading tarot cards? That doesn't change the fact that if the present warming trend continues people in third world countries who already have trouble obtaining safe water for both drinking and irrigation are going to die.

Are you implying this is because of the US's private healthcare system? Do you think this might have something to do with government agencies like the FDA, USDA, CPSC, etc?

It's because it's a statement not based on evidence, analysis, or observation of other universal single payer systems worldwide, but on an ignorant and quaint assumption that the government can't do anything right and anything done by the private sector instead of the government will be cheaper. Frankly I'm sick of hearing this nonsense bandied about, but these people are stubborn and set in their ways and simply refuse to acknowledge that there are some things that can be done better by the government than the private sector.

"Global warming" is caused by what's known as a radiative imbalance. The earth absorbs more solar radiation than it reflects back out into space. This is what has lead to an increasing trend in global mean surface temperatures. Anthropogenic heat sources are no match for solar radiation.

...and you're relegating the predominant theories of mainstream climate science to a mere "hypothesis". You're certainly wearing your bias on your sleeve. Yes, I'm sure you were intimately and contemporaneously familiar with '70s climate science before it was retroactively strawmanned by the modern climate science denial movement. </sarcasm> Did you mean AGW? Care to cite a case example of a peer reviewed scientific paper which you would consider demonstrates "very healthy skepticism"? The opinions of political scientists, journalists, and crisis junkies are irrelevant. The opinions of climate scientists are what matter.

Cheney was mad that Bush didn't pardon the fall guy? I think Bush can claim moral superiority there.

What part did you have trouble understanding? In the future I see consolidation of permanent and temporary storage. Right now RAM and hard drives are separate because hard drives are substantially slower than RAM. New technologies like MRAM and NRAM provide permanent storage technologies with speeds similar to today's SDRAM. The present trend in CPU design is towards increasing numbers of CPU cores, and in that regard it's trending towards massive parallelism and mesh interconnect.

This is a textbook example of an argument from incredulity

A stored program is physically a bunch of magnetic charges on the platter of your hard drive. A running program changes the state of your CPU, which implements the Von Neumann architecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture The programs you type into a computer are typically in what's called a context free grammar. CPUs can't understand context free grammars directly, so first the program needs to be translated into something the CPU (or another computer program) can understand. In the end, one way or another, your program will generate the appropriate machine language instructions that your computer can understand. Yes, more or less. Your CPU walks through the "opcodes", coded instructions that tell it what to do. These opcodes are fed to large structures made out of logic gates. Your CPU has "program counter" which lets it know what opcode it's presently working on. When your computer has finished processing a particular opcode the program counter is incremented and it moves on to the next instruction. There are also "jump" instructions which can change the value of the program counter and move to another instruction some entirely different place in memory.

Perhaps the fact that they're the world's leading authority on health issues, they specialize in health issues, they consist of doctors, etc. Also, the CATO analysis doesn't corroborate your assertion that America has the best healthcare system in the world. It would seem to support the assertion that the grain of salt the WHO survey must be taken with is that it factors in things like efficiency and costs. Other than that, I don't see them challenging the survey's conclusions, just how they were reported, which is always an issue.

I think the ideal computer is composed of lots of little CPUs connected with a mesh network, and high speed solid state persistent storage in lieu of RAM or even cache.

I'm still yet to see any of the people spouting platitudes about how the government can't do anything right actually presenting any evidence that private healthcare systems are better (or even comparable) to public systems. The WHO survey is topped by public systems. Believe it or not, it's possible for the government to do certain things better than the private sector.