John Cuthber

One question is would you be able to afford as much? If so the problem goes away because the US currently spends roughly twice what you would expect it to. Anyway, odd as it may seem, the countries where nationalised healthcare systems are in place have addressed this sort of problem over the last 50 years or so.

"Would you consider Israel as being a puppet government of the US, or anyone else? Saddam was pumping Scud Missiles into that country "wholesale', as a trecherous reminder of just how powerful he was at the time.. Israel is a friend of ours, not a crazed bunch of lunitics wanting to assail everyone outside their borders." A quick look at Wiki tells me that "42 Scud missiles in total were fired into Israel.[25] They killed one Israeli directly and one Saudi security guard. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scud#Scud_attacks I heard, but can't verify, that the net death rate in Israel at the time of the scud attacks actually fell. Because people didn't want to go out during a missile attack, they stayed home and so the number of road accidents fell. This more than offset the number of deaths due to the scud missiles. Saddam's attack was ethically inexcusable, but not actually very effective. That's how "powerful" he was. Do you remember who put Saddam in power? Anyway, Israel is not part of the US. Also, you seem to be going on about Gulf war 1 which was relatively well morally based as a counter to Saddam's attack on another state which was a signatory to the UN and so on. I'm going to keep asking about the second Gulf war.

" My only intent was to explain that training and cooperatrion are good examples of how to improve ethical and moral fortitude," In any war there are two sides. Both have training and cooperation, but (at best) only one side has ethical and moral "Right" on their side. It is clear to me that, for at least one side, their training and cooperation have demonstrably failed to improve morality and ethics- or they would simply refuse to fight. If the training and cooperation do improve these things, why do we have wars? My guess is that people go to war if they think they can gain from it either because someone is seeking to harm them (which isn't plausible in the case Gulf War two because Saddam's alleged missiles couldn't reach the US. Their range was short by about two orders of magnitude) or because they want to wield power. That may be directly, or via a a puppet government, or other means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-bid_contract

Are the inside threads on nuts forged by well-trained ants with little hammers?

"Hence, GPS needs "manual" upgrading every " I think" every 15 minutes or so," http://xkcd.com/285/ Now let us be quite clear about this. That idea ( that GPS needs tweaking every 15 min) is a prediction based on your hypothesis. If the prediction is false then the hypothesis is false. If you cannot demonstrate the accuracy of that assertion you need to accept that your hypothesis is simply wrong. Similarly, you ask "If it is a dimensionless number, this means it has some type of hidden unknown value right?" and the answer is simply "no". It's value isn't unknown or hidden at all. The Wiki page you cited makes it perfectly clear that "The current recommended value of α is 7.2973525698(24)×10−3 " At best this thread should be moved to "speculations"

The good Captain beat me to it. I'd also add that law is the codification of morality and the invasion of Iraq was illegal. Guantanamo was also illegal and immoral.

You seem to have missed the point. In Gulf war 1 the UN invaded with, obviously, a lot of contribution from the US. Nobody finished the job so Saddam was left in power. In Gulf war 2 it was essentially the US (and the UK as the 51st state) who got all the oil and rebuilding contracts. If the reason for the invasion was to depose the dictator then why not do some of the others? Mugabe would seem like an excellent candidate for regimen change. I think the second counts as a counter example to "But never ones of malicious hate or a quest for power. "

And I pointed out that any change in viscosity would be tiny.

If there's enough nitric acid and enough time the iron will be oxidised to Fe(III) but there will be a lot of NOx generated which isn't nice stuff. Also, unless the solution is strongly acid the hydrated Fe(III) ions will tend to form basic species which are a brown colour rather than the violet colour of the hexaquo ion.

Of course it's possible. It has been done by quite a number of people. Here's a video with some references.

"And, this nation that I love clearly fits into that catagory quite well. Yes, we have made mistakes since WWII. But never ones of malicious hate or a quest for power. " I think the invasion of Iraq, might be seen as a counterexample to that.

This isn't dusty. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_absorption_spectroscopy

OK, so this would be a ludicrous plot for a bad porn movie but imagine a planet where the women really were unable to say no because they have such a high libido. Sex isn't rape as long as it's consensual. The two parties' motivation(s) are not part of the equation. If he wants it for power and she wants it for sexual excitement, that's not rape. There is the issue of her saying, "I''m desperate, but not that desperate." to an unattractive bloke, but that's just a failure to have such a high libido that she really doesn't care. I said it would make the definition tricky.

This thread reminds me of a conversation I had with someone who has a son who nearly made the (past) Olympic team as a swimmer. He said to me "I'm no good at golf- and I probably never will be. Would you or anyone else sponsor me to play? I din't get much of a chance to answer before he followed it up with "Why does anyone sponsor the paralympics?" I said that as far as I was concerned they could not bother sponsoring any sport. That didn't improve his mood. He was upset that his son was finding it hard to get sponsorship even though he could swim a lot faster than the paralympians who did get sponsored. The truth is that, for example, blind football players wouldn't ordinarily* expect to beat a team who could see. They just are not as good at football. So, he asked, "why do they bother? They are, through no fault of their own, destined to be a bit crap at it." I explained that, while the idea is to win, it's unrealistic to believe that you will be the best in the world so, by his argument, nobody should take the trouble to train because it's odds on that you won't win. But people take great pleasure in winning smaller championships. I might not be the best in the world, but I might be the best in the UK- or the best in the county- or perhaps the best in town. I will find a group among whom I can compete with a reasonable chance of success. By permitting separate events for men and women we are not restricting anyone's freedom. However many sports' governing bodies will not permit mixed competitions and they are indeed restricting freedom in a way which is difficult to justify. * I said ordinarily, in the dark, they might do very well indeed.

It probably depends where you are in society too. If you are a straight man, in jail with a lot of other straight men then a high libido is just going to add to your problems. Also, at the risk of getting lynched for saying this, there is an absurd failure to notice that women have a libido too. If all women were permanently "gagging for it" then rape would be rather poorly defined and somewhat rarer. It's a very complex issue and I think the way in which the question is set seems simplistic.

"Do I need to give the whole "personal responsibility" speech again. " No, you need to understand that responsibility goes hand -in -hand with power. "Yeah, that's what this country was built on." I think you may find it was built on slavery, but that's hardly the point. "Do you have a reply for my last rebuttal on the majority of which country are black? Sorry, I can't parse that, never mind reply, but I will say this. It's fair to say that the countries with largely black populations are often poor. They have little money for healthcare and their populations suffer. That has nothing much to do with the issues of comparing the US with most of the Western world. That comparison is where the US gets conspicuously poor value for money. "The data you're talking about was being used to make an entirely different point than you were suggesting from it. I explained in my last reply to you of what I was refering to." Yes, that's all very well. But the data clearly doesn't know it is meant to support your ideas. It shows that not only as an aggregate, but individually, the united states spend more money (as a % of GDP or in absolute terms) than practically everyone else. The data was, as I pointed out several times, misrepresented. "Can you say that there are no differences in reporting when it comes to infant mortality rates? You've said so before, but I recall finding out differently." Straw man. I never said that there were no differences. I said that child mortality was one area where the differences are least likely to affect the outcome. That's why it's widely used as an indicator. There are differences in, for example, reporting of stillbirths. But most children are not stillborn- or anything like it. That means that the differences in reporting are rather less grave than you want to believe and that's why the CDC say that, to cut a long story short, you are wrong. What I said was that it's relatively simple to count dead babies. It is. That's why it's a relatively robust statistic. "Christ man, is there such thing as a good death rate." Yes, but clearly only in relative terms. So, for example, compared to the US, Japan has quite a good death rate for infants. It gets this without spending as much money as the US too. "I think by your own admission you concede to my point here. Do you even know the "BAD" figures for whites? " Not really. Because the figures for whites are bad (and those for blacks are worse) you have to accept that the figures for whites are bad. As you say, if you are comparing that to much of Europe where the population is very largely white then the best the US can do - the death rate among white babies- is worse than the typical figures for Europe- largely the death rate for white babies. Do you understand that if your best figures are bad then, on the whole, your figures are bad. Oh, BTW I freely accept that I don't know what those "bad" figures are but since your own source says that are bad you can either agree with me or argue against yourself. If the figures are not "bad" then the source of your information is incorrect and so you just shot down your own argument. Why are you so keen to defend a system that costs you much more money to get worse care?

I think that a lot of people here will worry about giving advice about cyanides to people who can't even get the chemical formula right. Anyway, that reaction goes practically to completion.

While it's true that CO2 is about twice as viscous as air, there's not a lot of it and the change in concentration is fairly small. The direct effect of rising CO2 levels on air viscosity will be tiny (though the effect by changing the temperature might be bigger).

Once I see a lot of replies like "I can't agree with you. You haven't given me anything that can't be disputed. " when the data I used was that cited by Justin himself or "Now keep in mind these are economists talking so who knows..." and even just "Bah" in reply to the observation that people without healthcare insurance don't get healthcare I start thinking I'm not involved in a discussion, I'm talking to a troll. That would certainly explain the otherwise absurd choice of a right-wing group's bad statistics over the report from the World Health Organisation and the insistence that differences in reporting are the major reason for the poor infant mortality rate in the US. By the way, the source you cite for the difference between death rates of black and white babies (which I accept is a real difference, and worrying) also says "Colorado’s numbers closely follow the national statistics, which are not good even for white babies. ". So, once again your own source supports the exact opposite of your contention. Even for white babies the death rates are bad. The larger number of black people in the states compared to, for example, England will emphasise the difference. But since the figures are bad for white babies you can't say that the overall bad figure is due to racial factors (whatever they may be).

Yes, there are detectors that can count single photons in the visible range. Though 200 to 1100nm is an odd definition of that range. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomultiplier#History

I think that the women concerned would find that easier if the Republican party threw out the people with a perverted interest in other people's private lives; or at least tried to distance themselves from them. As it stands, they vote them in to power. The fact that they do not realise that this is wrong is, in my opinion, enough grounds to vote against them even if you agree with, for example, their view on government spending.

"Biologically, all humans will forever be 31-years-old. " Bollocks. Nothing about any of the suggestions you made will make me less than 46. Among the many aspects of my biology is my memory and I have more than 31 years of memory. In any event, wiping out our ability to increase our population is dumb, given that some future circumstance may reduce our population to a point less than that needed for sensible biodiversity.

OK. Lest have a look at the graph again It's roughly in the middle of this page http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/redefining-health-care-debate-part-1.html It's the one that follows this text "Our next chart takes our first chart showing the 2005 OECD Nations' Health Care Expenditures per Capita vs GDP (PPP) per Capita, and simply adds some fifty data points for the individual U.S. states " And it shows just what it say it does. It's a plot of cash spent as a function of total cash available. If it were a case of "we spend more because we have more" then that would be true for individual states within the US and it would be true for other countries. So , for example, most of the US states are to the left of the point marked as Norway. That means they have less cash than Norway. So most of them would be expected to spend less than Norway. But they don't. They generally spend more than Norway does. Now, Norway is on the "trend line" it's expenditure is generally in line with most countries. The more they have, the more they spend. That's what the line on the graph indicates. The point that I made and that you entirely missed, is that almost every state in the US is above the line. The line is "normal" expenditure. The US as a whole might have more cash, but individual states don't, yet they spend more. It's quite clear form the graphs on that site. They explicitly say " it has been observed that the economic output of each of the U.S. states is comparable to that of other nations. " which I accept is fair enough. And it's obvious if you look at the graph that follows that assertion that relatively poor countries like Turkey have a small GDP and a small healthcare expenditure. Fairly rich countries like Luxembourg or Norway have quite a lot of more and spend quite a lot more. But the point is that the proportion of GDP spent is comparable. The real eye wateringly obvious fact is that the states of the US , though they have incomes comparable with other countries are all "above the line". The spend a lot more of their GDP than other countries do. This is true, even for states where the income isn't that great. I have said it before, and I'm saying it again. Based on the information that you have provided. The US spends roughly twice as much on healthcare as you would expect, and they don't get as good a service for it.

Sorry for the delayed response. My mother died last Friday, and I have been a bit busy. The watchdog concerned is the CDC- Have a look at post # 75. Anyway what I said was "It's quite a long and complex page and I really don't have time to rubbish each part of it in turn. I might come back to it when I get bored " However you may note that I had already taken the time to point out that the page you cited was full of errors. And, in respect of "You remember, the ones with all the little dots that you thought were price comparisons. " The text related to the graph says "We can see from this chart that the linear regression no longer does such a good job in describing the relationship between total health expenditures per capita and GDP (PPP) per capita for the set of data." Now, from my point of view as a consumer of healthcare the per capitum expenditure on it is the same as the price I pay for it. Were you trying to imply that I had misunderstood it?

LOL