Phi for All

I've never seen public works turned over to private companies work out any other way. Whether it's roads or utilities or prisons, it either ends up costing more or there are conflicts of interest or both. Good rule of thumb: if you want your opportunities to grow and make a profit for investors, a private business model is usually a good bet. Do we want our disaster relief opportunities to grow? Do we want investors to profit from disaster relief? This is so clearly better left to public funding.

I think if all you want is speed, like going from 0 to 60 in a straight line drag race, automatic is probably the way to go for regular cars (though iirc, top fuel dragsters don't even have a transmission). But racetracks with other cars on them have a lot more variables that a manual transmission can help a driver deal with better.

To address the privatization part of this thread, there are definitely times when private business models work best, but disaster relief is definitely not one of them. Like healthcare insurance, having to negotiate for rates and coverage when you're vulnerable is horribly inhumane and barbaric. Why is it that so many people are unwilling to acknowledge that living in a large society that wants to keep pace with other societies needs to guarantee certain distinctions for its citizens? We can all acknowledge that having the state do everything for us is bad, so why is it some folks think leaving everything up to the free market would be good? There needs to be a smart balance, and I think if it were put that way to the entire populace, the vast majority of the populace would agree. Unfortunately, half the populace is informed by FOX News, and FOX seems bent on isolating the US, making us fear foreigners, fear progress, fear science, and fear other news sources. It's stunningly insane to try and get legitimate information from such a vapid, mob-appeal, profit-hungry non-source like FOX News. At a time when we need meaningful discussion among engaged citizens, half of them are choosing to stick their heads in the dirt.

Logic relies on untainted information. When we get our news solely from the perspective of an outlet that wants us to feel a certain way about it, logic can't be trusted. I think we make a mistake when we seek "Truth" instead of information. It's too easy these days for people with hidden agendas to claim what they tell us is "The Truth". In much the same way science seeks supportive evidence instead of "proof", we should seek information so we're always looking for better explanations rather than assume we know "The Truth".

Shouldn't the media be neutral instead of positive or negative? And just so you know, "liberal media" is another bit of spin you've swallowed whole. The media, even FOX News, isn't liberal OR conservative. It's not even real journalism, it's a for-profit business, interested in keeping you from switching channels or turning it off. They aren't there to inform you, they're there to keep you there so you'll watch the stuff their advertisers pay them for. Period. That's why you should NEVER have just a single source for your news. You can piece together what's really happening if you look at multiple sources. A really good source is the one outlet that doesn't have commercials so it doesn't have to please advertisers. It's called National Public Radio. Now you know why Mitt wants to cut its funding. He'd much rather have everyone listen to Clear Channel radio.

Oh, please. Are you seriously blaming Obama for Big Business sending jobs overseas? They promised they would create jobs if he extended the Bush tax cuts, but 3 out of 4 jobs Big Business created were overseas. And that's all Romney did when he was with Bain, fire Americans, downsize companies, transfer jobs to China, India and Mexico and skim off the profits before saddling them with debt and selling them off.

We have medical marijuana outlets in Denver, and from what I gather, it's actually more expensive than buying it illegally off the street.

Any smoke contains carcinogens. Tobacco of any kind also contains carcinogens. Chewing tobacco simply means you're more likely to get oral cancer, esophageal cancer and pancreatic cancer from chewing as opposed to lung cancer from smoking.

My idea was to change what's bad about what you currently use (itchy, subject to wind) rather than trying to find something else. The rolls are cost-effective and let you determine the lengths you need (batts are pre-cut to about 8 feet for use in walls, rolls are 30+ feet in varying widths). If you could use cheap rolls of butcher paper to glue onto the un-faced side to make it double-faced, that would take care of most of the itchy part. Could you rig a two-wheel or four-wheel dolly for use as a roll dispenser to make it easier to work with in the wind? I'll bet a clever guy like you could probably fit some kind of blade to a rig like this so it measures and cuts the rolls as needed. Rigid sheets can pose their own problems in high winds.

Could you perhaps give us more detail on this part? A lot of folks talk about our becoming socialist, and I can understand that you may think Europe has gone too far that way; in some ways I might even agree. But the US on the whole, and certainly the two major parties, are far too conservative when it comes to social programs to suddenly become a "socialistic state" as you put it. For instance, healthcare is not something that works well with a standard business model. Business wants to keep customers coming back often, but healthcare customers want to be healthy and NOT come back often. It's the perfect thing to use public funds to support. Personally, I think the government should be offering healthcare insurance, at a lower rate than private healthcare insurance can offer due to profit concerns. But at least Obamacare is a step in the right direction. Romney's voucher system will only drive costs up even more. I think you assume that capitalists can't use socialism when it's smart to do so. If you like, we can start another thread about that, because I think that's a big part of our problems these days, thinking that being liberal when it's smart makes us liberals, or being conservative when it's smart makes us conservatives. The real key here is being smart as much as we can, and not letting people make up our minds for us by pressing our dumb buttons and getting us to side with idiocy, convenience and special interests. Saying that Obama is a bit to the right of Reagan isn't the same as saying Romney is left leaning. It all boils down, imo, to business interests. We gave them too much wiggle room and they bent us over pretty badly. The pendulum is starting to swing back, we're starting to see smarter banking regulations, corporations are being held accountable and the wild excesses (which a conservative person should be appalled about) are starting to be brought under control. BUT, Romney wants to roll back all those new regulations, wants us to go back to what got us into big trouble. He's a businessman, and I think he should stick to business instead of politics. We tend to have bigger problems in this country when we put the fox in charge of the henhouse. I used to think lawyers were bad, but businessmen turning into politicians has historically been horrible for us. I miss Ike.

Are you talking about blow-in type insulation or the faced rolls or batts? Would it work to put the insulation you use now in cheap plastic bagging or sheeting to keep it from getting on your skin or blowing away? The plastic would just melt once you fired the oven up but by then it will be in place.

"Read the truth as to what the civilized world three unidentified people is were thinking about him back in 2009." Fixed that for you. I really do think it's sad that ultra-conservatives in the US have this "Screw the rest of the world, we're America and you can kiss our ass!" mentality in this day and age. With China looming as a solid contender to become a superpower in the very near future, can we hope to wait till people like this are dead and gone before we start acknowledging the efforts of the rest of the world? Do they not matter to us anymore? Is that why we're maintaining such a huge military, because our goal is to stand alone against the rest of the world?

Good points. Actually, I think the main reason the GOP is so desperate to get Romney elected is because the cycle is swinging back, and the work Obama has done thus far will have a positive effect for at least another 18 months even if he isn't re-elected. This will make it seem like Romney jumps into office and the economy improves further. He may be able to capitalize on this for a while, but inevitably his policies will turn the cycle back downwards, imo. That's why it's do or die for the GOP. If Obama gets another four years and takes us back closer to a pre-Bush economy, coupled with the international respect Obama has engendered and the prospects that focus on innovation in science and technology will mean for us in the long run, I don't think the Republicans will be able to hold on to the splintered and conflicted base they have.

Intelligence gathered is not really open for discussion, in most instances, at a briefing. Briefings are for giving someone information or issuing orders. You're thinking of strategy sessions, which probably aren't part of the PDBs. I haven't ever seen an actual PDB, but I can imagine it contains what the various agencies feel the POTUS needs to know. It's not the hard data, it's what's been derived from that data, filtered and analyzed by those with the expertise to judge such things. From what I gather, if the POTUS needs something he's read explained in more detail, he has advisers he can turn to. I remember hearing that Bush II so often had to resort to such advisers and it was simply easier to have people explain things to him orally on a daily basis. He was pretty famous for not reading anything with more than three pages to it. Obama, from all reports, is a voracious reader with a wide variety of tastes in books, and reads every report handed to him.

The media is all about saying the most with the least amount of words. When they can use a one or two word sound byte, it leaves the reader/viewer to fill in the blanks with all the emotional baggage those words conjure up. It's what happens when news becomes business and keeping readers/viewers from switching to competing sources is the priority rather than the information itself. Science doesn't work like that. The information science news usually has is so layered that it requires more education than most people have to really be informed about it. When they try to dumb down the science news, it becomes very misleading and open to all that emotional response we've been trained to react with. Politics has become much more "us vs them" and as such is easier for readers/viewers to deal with quickly.

Actually, Obama mostly READS the briefings, like Clinton did and Bush I before him. Bush II didn't like to read so he took up everyone's time with oral briefs.

I think the most telling point of the last debate was when Romney was asked what makes him different from Bush II. He failed to address the question right away, disrespecting the young woman who asked it by going back to the previous question about contraception. When he finally gave her question the last part of his attention, he merely said he and Bush are two different people (duh!) and these are different times (double duh!!) and that's the reason his plan is so different than what Bush would have done. The real differences between Bush and Romney is that Bush was working with a surplus and tax receipts were at record highs. Romney wants to lower taxes for the wealthy with nothing to offset it just like Bush did, and while it was stupid in 2001 it's insane to do it with huge deficits and low tax receipts. He wants to be tough on China (even though they've backed off currency manipulation for the most part) and champion small business, both of which were Bush objectives. He opposes universal healthcare and wants to mess with Medicare just like Bush did, after he trashes all the work Obama has done. Under Bush we had Enron and the Wall Street shenanigans, which forced Congress to pass laws like Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank, and guess what? ROMNEY WANTS TO GET RID OF THOSE TOO!!! The President nailed it when he countered that one of the differences between Bush and Romney was that even Bush knew that turning Medicare into a voucher system was a bad idea. I think it's pretty clear that a Romney/Ryan win would bring the worst parts of the Bush administration back, only this time we'd have less revenue to spend and a much higher deficit. We're finally getting some credibility with the rest of the world after Bush trashed our relationships with so many. Pakistan seems to be the only major country that wants Romney to win, but I don't recall Romney ever saying he'd stop the drone attacks there, so I don't think they're really thinking this through. It saddens me when I hear so many fellow countrymen dismissing what the rest of the world thinks. The US has long passed the point where we can ignore our place in a global society. It's ignorant to think we could survive long without friends around the globe just because we currently have the top spot. There are many things you could say about Romney's veracity and capabilities, about his lack of strategy and insane approach to domestic challenges, but ultimately I hope people realize that he's just not much different than George W. Bush. And I think 99% of us can all agree that no one wants another George W. Bush.

! Moderator Note You know better than to hijack a mainstream science thread with your personal, unsupported pet theories. I'm going to recommend that you be suspended again, this time for two weeks, to give you time to work on re-reading the rules.

! Moderator Note Actually, Mods have no control over the reputation system. imatfaal gave Moontanman a +1 to negate your accidental -1, and I just gave it a +1 to reflect what you wanted to do in the first place. Justice has been done, but we can't "fix" reputation. I didn't want anyone to think Staff has the ability to cheat.

Consider also why versions are attempted in the first place. The King James version was the third translation into English, and it was commissioned because the Puritans felt there were problems with the earlier two versions, which were deemed perfect by the people who commissioned them at the time. Different sects are changing the meaning with each new translation, because they didn't like the way the other guys did it. How could there not be corruptions?

STeve555 is suspended for a week for losing his mind and ranting with his vulgar filters off in multiple threads. We hope he feels better soon.

What's the difference?

Exactly. If some of the Tea Party and Ron Paulians vote Johnson, it will surely come from the Republican numbers the same way most Nader votes come from those who would otherwise vote Democrat. And I apologize for the Nazi comment. It was meant to be a little funny but not that little. QFT. +1

Actually, I hope Mr. Johnson gets better than 5%. It would simultaneously send a message that we need more viable 3rd party candidates to challenge the system, and the votes would probably come from Tea Party holdouts who think Romney would pull a Bush and grow the federal government. The Nazi comment was because I saw a picture of you with your new mustache. Bold choice.

Nazi Party. Whoops, I mean, Libertarian Party. Yeah, Libertarian.