Sisyphus

Let it be known: I hereby declare that I will drive the President around anywhere he needs to go for HALF that amount.

I can't say whether or not we're better off now. Or rather, I can say that NOW we are decidedly worse off, but it's too early to say what will happen in the long run. I, for one, am optimistic, but the outcome is far from decided. On a side note, Libya is obviously good news, but their history is also a political lesson in not needlessly pissing people off, something it seems like the current powers that be have not really learned, or are learning very slowly. "Speak softly and carry a big stick" OUGHT to be the most obvious maxim of foreign policy, I'd say. Note: I said needlessly offending people. There is a difference between refusing to be bullied and being a bully yourself. The former helps matters, the latter makes them worse. American animosity has probably kept Castro in power, and membership in the "Axis of Evil" has made North Korea and Iran justified in pursuing pursuing whatever weapons they can to deter American invasion. After all, they can always point to Iraq...

I never said we shouldn't pour as much money into research as we can. We should, for all the reasons you said. But right now we are spending absurd amounts on stuff we aren't using, and not enough on stuff we actually are. You are absolutely right about the destabilizing effects of new technology. But such occurences require us to innovate in turn, yes? In other words, making the old technology useless. I'm reminded of the U.S.S. Monitor vs. wooden ships, the H.M.S. Dreadnought vs. traditional battleships, the machine gun vs. Napoleanic-style massed troops, etc., etc., etc. In other words, if anything, the acceleration of changing technology is an argument NOT to invest hugely in forces that are not immediately useful. Of course, if it really is true that our large military is keeping potential rivals from bothering to build their own (and I can see how that might be), then I'm willing to concede that the situation is unenviable but necessary. Hence the sigh.

It's not just a face-saving term. It's a way to end sectarian violence and put all the Iraqis fears to rest. Honestly, right now, it shouldn't be fully unified. "Giving up" on a foolish plan is hardly to be criticized. I think the analogy to post-Revolution America is a good one. We had Georgia cotton farmers and new England Puritan merchants and everything in between. Obviously they would never have agreed to give up their independant ways of doing things, and they didn't. Only another decade or so down the line did the advantages of a more unified state become more apparent, hence the new Constitution (which was still a big compromise between the two views). The situation in Iraq is only magnified, if anything. If your only real problem is with the oil revenues, then I don't think it's really a big one. Nobody is getting totally shafted, and the combined benefits of ending a violent power struggle and ensuring that they won't, in fact, be ruled by their enemies after all has got to be worth a great deal. And no, it's not like nobody had said anything like that before, but it is an actual, realistic plan, which, frankly, is necessarily an improvement.

So we're spending all this money so that nobody else does? Sigh.

I like the idea. And, more importantly, I think the Iraqis would like the idea. They're much too at each other's throats and far too worried about being dominated by the other groups for a national state to be stabile for many years to come. This seems like a very workable and stabile intermediate step. Cheers to Biden. I wonder what Bush thinks about it.

Yeah. Sure, a puma as smart as a human would probably have some advantage over other pumas, but not nearly as much as the advantage we would have over a human as dumb as a puma. But our intelligence costs a whole lot. Our brains eat up nutrients like nothing else, and our complex minds take so long to develop that human children are dependant on their parents for far longer than any other species. There has to be a BIG advantage to being smart for it to be "worth it," (that is, to help us survive and produce children), and we just happen to have the peculiar physiology that allows that.

I'd have to know more about the actual observed phenomenon. For example, you said it was unlikely that equipment failure or operator error would all happen in exactly the same way. But how do you know they were exactly the same? What they have in common, as you describe them, are that they are unknown objects behaving strangely. It seems like any number of glitches could cause that, and staring at a radar screen for hours on end is bound to have common human errors. I agree that anything which moves very straight and very fast is probably a meteor if it isn't an aircraft. The remainder I think could safely be assumed to be military aircraft or missles or something. Or, for that matter, even intentional phantom signals. You say there couldn'y be such things as early as the 50s, but again, are you sure the UFOs from then and now are the same?

Hehe. Sorry I missed that. Sounds really, really uncomfortable. Hilarious. Also, if (like me) you don't want to download a large video clip, I found a transcript:

Such an increase would be expected, I would think, in dealing with Afghanistan, adapting to terrorism, and, most of all, the money incinerator that is Iraq. What I'm more curious about is why it's so high in the first place. I mean, yes, we have the strongest military in the world, and can project power quickly and decisively anywhere. That's great (and that's not sarcasm). But, for all that, it STILL seems way too high. I mean, we're in a position right now where all the major industrialized powers are either our long term and highly stabile allies (e.g. Europe, Japan, etc.), or at least so heavily involved with us economically that any real conflict seems more and more ridiculous (e.g., China). So do we really need all those warships and fleets of bombers and missle submarines? Those things are for symmetrical warfare, for blowing up other warships, bombers, and submarines. Pretty much all of what we're doing in the world today is peacekeeping, for which we're (somehow) apparently underfunded. Does the ability to destroy a nonexistant enemy outweigh the economic benefit of reducing federal taxes by a few hundred billion dollars a year? Note that I'm not really informed about this, so this is a genuine question. I'd really like someone to explain this to me. Because all I see from where I'm sitting is the military-industrial complex at its most malignant, absurdly overpaid contractors, bureaucratic entrenchment, inter-service politics, and big fat barrels of pork. Is that really what's happening, or is my liberal paranoia getting the better of me?

Intelligent Design. The "Bible Code."

Yikes. Where is all that money going? Is it all just wildly overpriced government contractors?

The United States spends more per capita than any other nation on healthcare, yet it doesn't seem to be working. For example, Americans spend twice as much as the British, and yet in every age group, economic bracket, and education level, Americans die sooner and are much more likely to get heart disease, stroke, cancer, and any number of other ailments. So, why? Is it diet? Do we stress ourselves out more? Is our healthcare system just corrupt and ineffective? Is it all three?

How exactly would one use WD-40 to treat arthritis? Spray it on the joints? I think skin might get in the way, there. Drink it? I think it might kill you...

So did he seem like just a normal guy before then?

As I understand it, time is just like the spatial dimensions, in that just because you're not there yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

One of the great concerns about the development of nanotechnology is the "grey goo scenario," wherein some flaw in a self-reproducing nanobot causes it to continue reproducing without restraint (much like cancer), effectively consuming everything it touches and converting them into more self-reproducing bots. Basically, it's a doomsday scenario. The goo grows exponentially and wipes out life on Earth. What occurs to me is that such a nanobot is basically a living thing. Or at least a virus, if it's inert when it's not reproducing. What also occurs to me is that such an "organism" would be subject to the laws of natural selection. Copies clearly can be made imperfectly (since that's how the whole mess started), so there will be variation which could be passed on, depending on the nature of the variation (and the mechanism by which the bots are able to "know" how the copy themselves, i.e., their DNA equivalent). Most would likely be harmful defects, just like in natural, assexual organisms. But, also like natural life, some would inevitably result in the bot producing more "offspring," making more copies of itself before it wears out. Hence there would be evolution. If these bots' consumption didn't eventually destroy their environment enough that they could no longer survive, evolution could continue indefinitely, and perhaps, in a few hundred million years, their descendants could be complex organisms, even sentient ones, who, one day, upon making a breakthrough in nano-technology...

I'm in favor of nuclear power, myself. It's more cost efficient (and could actually be made even more so), produces more power absolutely, produces no air pollution whatsoever, and is not dependant on the whims of fundamentalist psychopaths. New plants have fail-safes to the point where you could drop bombs on them and suffer nothing worse than a blackout. The only real issue is the disposal of radioactive waste, of which I can't seem to find a straight answer about how much of a problem it really is. Seems like hot rocks must be usable for something, though... On the other hand, it would be subjugating ourselves to yet another non-renewable resource, so that could be an issue, also. I think, until there are reliable renewable sources of power, nuclear is probably a better backup than oil. In other words, wind is great, but something needs to take up the slack on a still day.

They shouldn't be too hard. It is what EVERYONE has to know, remember. I would be happy if, for physics, every high school student had a good understanding of Newton's laws and the law of gravitational attraction, and some basic consequences of each. i.e., why the moon doesn't fall, why objects fly in nearly parabolic arcs, etc. Also, what causes the seasons. It's amazing how many adults don't know that. For biology, I'd say the principles of natural selection (and an ability to apply them through a hypothetical), a rough evolutionary history, the basic principle behind genetics, and the basic functions of human organs.

Mokele.

If the U.S. were merely self-sufficient, I'd imagine we'd be a lot more isolationist. However, if the U.S. was literally the only source of oil, we could pretty much make other countries do whatever we wanted.