Delta1212

Better to stay in the frying pan than jump in the fire.

 

Hilary's not so pristine having her own server. I think there would have been a 'something-gate' with her as well if she'd won. Obama's like our queen compared to those two, on reflection.

He had literally the most scandal-free administration in at least a generation.

Not that you'd know it from the way some people go on about him.

You're sort of halfway correct on both counts.

Later generations of stars are "born" with higher concentrations of elements other than hydrogen and helium than the earlier generations of stars. (And I guess some trace amounts of lithium and beryllium, too).

However, new elements naturally accumulate in the star as byproducts of the fusion process of the course of its life. What elements a star is capable of producing depends on the mass of the star. Heavier elements require more energy to fuse, so more massive stars have the energy to fuse heavier elements before they run out of viable fuel and the fusion process breaks down.

The hard limit on this is iron. Fusing elements lighter than iron releases more energy than is consumed in the fusion process, which is what drives the stellar engine. At iron and above, this is no longer the case, and fusing it robs the star of energy rather than generating more. So once a star starts accumulating iron in its core, it is running out of fuel, no matter how large it is.

As a result, other than some small trace amounts created during the course of normal fusion processes, pretty much all elements heavier than iron are only created as byproducts of supernovae once the star runs out of enough fusable material to maintain the reactions that keep it stable.

So there is an evolution of stars based on the previous production of elements, but since the elements generated by a star have more to do with its size than its starting composition, this doesn't have much impact on what elements it produces, and stars can be born with elements other than hydrogen (although they're still mostly hydrogen because matter is in general is still mostly hydrogen by a considerable amount) but there is a hard limit restricting them to using lighter elements as a source of fuel even if it isn't exclusively hydrogen.

 

Great. Then we'll have Pence, who seems to be very strongly driven by his religion, and more than ok with imposing those values on everyone else. Can't say I'm a huge fan of that either. Hopefully there are adequate checks and balances to keep that from being too severe.

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure whether to be happy at the thought of an impeachment or not. Is Lawful Evil better or worse than Chaotic Stupid?

In my city, the closest thing we have to a science theme park is the Franklin Institute. From my youth, I recall multiple hands-on science exhibits, a planetarium, a walk-thru heart, and even a ride through our digestive system. It was always and continues to be a thrilling visit for both children and adults.

I went there, I think it was last summer, to see a Pixar exhibit they were showing. Neat place.

I'm not really a fan of the "there were no good choices on Election Day" argument, because even if you don't think there were any good choices, there was clearly a better choice.

I don't want to harp on this too much, because at this point the details of the particular case in question are rather moot. Things happened as they happened and we have to deal with it.

However, I think this election holds a rather valuable lesson for all of us going forward into future years, but it's a lesson that's not going to stick properly if we fail to acknowledge the choices that got us here, even when they aren't especially comfortable.

I did not vote for Trump, but I also kept quiet with various people about exactly what I thought of Trump as a candidate in order to keep the peace and because I thought it ultimately wouldn't matter in the end.

Now I hear a lot of "I don't like what's happening, but there just weren't any good choices!" from most of those people, and I wish I'd said something sooner.

On the subject of leaking intelligence I heard on the radio today that the US had released details about who Salman Albedi was before the British secret service was ready to disclose anything about him. It said that the secret service requested discretion from the US as to the ID of the bomber until after they had finished a certain line of enquiries and had released the info themselves to the British public - but the Americans just went ahead and released all of the info they had on Albedi anyway without any regard to the request from the British not too.

 

It was probably a clerical error or some kind of incompetence rather than a fingers up to the British.. but it is still pretty dumb.

A government that gets gutted and then only partially restaffed by in-fighting idiots doesn't always do the best job?

Wow, I thought this fresh new approach would do better than that.

I love the idea. Here in St. Louis we have a Science Center that is similar to what you are describing, but without all the rides. There are many interactive features that let you try out science for yourself. For example, in one location there are dozens of soft blocks laying around where spontaneous groups of visitors can work together to build free standing arches. An enclosed bridge over a nearby highway lets people use radar guns with the cars below and learn about that technology.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Louis_Science_Center

 

Another local place is called the Magic House which includes hundreds of hands-on exhibits and games introducing children to science and learning.

 

https://www.magichouse.org/exhibits/

The one I grew up with was Liberty Science Center.

HB of CJ: Your arguments imply that our goal is the strengthening of the species over evolutionary time periods. In that context "just letting natural selection work" is indeed the right strategy. But I for one am very glad we aren't pursuing such a "eugenics like" approach to operating our civilization. Instead, we've chosen to have compassion for individuals of the species. I could not be more happy that I've had the opportunity to immunize my children against diseases that previously wracked our societies. The genetic fitness of humans living hundreds of thousands of years from now just does not matter to me as much as those five girls, and for that matter not as much as any living human.

In actual fact, the best strategy for keeping a species evolutionarily strong is to keep as many individuals alive as possible, not to let them be weeded out by selection pressures.

Every individual that dies without reproducing represents the loss or reduction in frequency of some genetic information from the overall gene pool, and while the individual it was found in may not have been fit according to present conditions, they may have been extraordinarily if, or may have had some genes that confer major advantage in a future situation where a new pressure that we can't control presents itself.

Genetic diversity strengthens a species overall fitness and helps to "future proof" it against changes in the environment. You increase genetic diversity by pushing back against existing selection pressures that tend to whittle down the diversity of a population in order to make it fit the current environment better. Many species go extinct because pressures caused them to become overfit for environmental challenges that proved transitory at the cost of flexibility to handle future challenges.

Eugenics-like belief in allowing natural selection to "strengthen" the species is not just problematic morally in how it views inviduals in the present, but is also fundamentally mistaken about its central premise in terms of the overall long-term effects on the species.

 

One would think that, but evidently not.

I know enough people who work in the medical profession that I would not, in fact, think that.

Private supplemental insurance is pretty common in countries that have national healthcare. I think that is something that gets glossed over frequently in these discussions.

The desire for single-payer isn't driven by a desire to ban insurance as a practice. It is driven by the primary concern that healthcare is not an ordinary commodity. It is quite literally a "your money or your life" situation.

You can't choose to budget around future healthcare expenses the way you can around a big purchase like a car or a house because you don't know what those expenses will be. And while you can go to an open house, decide the asking price is too high and go check out another one the next town over, that option isn't really available when you show up at the hospital while having a heart attack. Sometimes it's literally unavailable even if you were so inclined to risk your life wasting time trying to find a good deal on emergency surgery because you get carted to the hospital while unconscious and then get billed for services you didn't consent under the presumption that you would have because the alternative is dying.

The only way to mitigate these problems is with insurance, which does provide a cost that can be planned around, but unfortunately, there are tons of people who it is simply not profitable to insure, either because they don't have the money to pay for their calculated share of the risk or because their calculated share of the risk is so high that almost no one would reasonably have that much money. Ironically, leaving these people uninsured winds up driving costs up for everyone anyway because it means they can't afford to do basic maintenance lik check-ups that catch things when they can be treated early and cheaply instead of when they are an emergency, thus landing those people in emergency rooms where they are guaranteed service but at a much higher cost to the healthcare system and placing greater strain on our emergency resources.

An optimal solution provides a base level of healthcare to everyone regardless of income or health that includes emergency room visits, hospital stays for anything that is threatening to life or long-term health and basic health maintenance that keeps people healthy and overal costs down like an annual check up, recommended exams as people get older, vaccinations, that sort of thing.

If you then want private insurance to cover extra things like braces, or a nutritionist, or extended private care for additional recovery time after you leave the hospital or cosmetic surgery or what have you, then yeah, have at it.

We're talking about making sure that the system keeps people alive without bankrupting them and driving up overall medical costs, not advocating free nose jobs for everyone or the abolition of insurance as a business sector if people feel they would like to supplement a basic level of care provided to everyone.

Except that's not what I'm saying. I'm not trying to defend the status quo; I've been trying very hard to talk about new things we could actually do to make healthcare available to everyone. It's how I feel about poverty-related issues in general; I truly believe that a nation as rich as ours could lift everyone above some meaningful poverty line if we implemented the right sort of approach.

 

I just believe it's at least possible that we could do so with a minimum of government intervention outside of the tax code.

The major problem is that the only way that 1 works from a cost efficiency stand point is if everyone who chooses not to buy health insurance at all is simply refused service in an emergency unless they can cover the expense in full or qualify for a loan ahead of service being performed.

Requiring hospitals to provide expensive services to non-paying customers drives up costs considerably and prevents efficient allocation of resources.

The point of insurance is to pool risk. If there's a 1/100 chance of me needing $100,000 care, I can get together with a group of 100 people and we each pitch in $1,000 and now I know exactly how much I have spent on health care and can plan around that much less burdensome amount. I probably won't end up needing it, but all of us get the peace of mind of knowing that we're on steady financial ground no matter what.

If, however, someone who didn't join our pool gets sick and the hospital has to perform the procedure and can't recoup the expense, then suddenly the $100,000 procedure for one of us becomes a $200,000 procedure and now we each need to kick in $2,000 to cover our own costs and the cost of the other person.

But now the risk pool has failed, because we're paying higher rates than our level of risk would dictate, and the risk itself is much reduced because not being in the pool still allows me to have my costs covered by those remaining in it in the event that it ever becomes an issue.

And then even if hospitals simply straight up deny care to those who can't afford to pay through insurance or otherwise to keep costs down for those who can, you have the issue of pre-existing conditions. Because if my pool allows someone to buy in who is already sick, it comes out to being the same as the above example. Statistically, one of us is still likely to need the $100,000 from our pooled resources, and now there is an additional person who is guaranteed to need it, so we need to increase the buy in to $2000 to cover that cost.

So if you want to control overall costs, you need to figure out what to do with people who are already sick and are therefore a losing bet for private insurance to cover, and people who choose not to get insurance and therefore aren't paying into cover everyone's costs.

Those are two of the primary obstacles to the distribution of healthcare through private insurance.

Insurance also covers some percentage of the bill, exclusive of the deductible. You have to account for that as well.

Not if you're comparing the end user costs of the system. Any money paid out by the insurance company has to be paid in by customers unless the company is in the red, so you're already accounting for that amount in the monthly payment figure.

What you need to compare to see relative expenses of private insurance healthcare vs government insurance is how much people spend on their insurance payments + how much they spend themselves on healthcare, and then compare that to the total tax figure used to cover all of the people on government health insurance + anything they spend on healthcare.

I can't say you're wrong exactly, but it seems like you think your insights are more profound than they actually are and are therefore overstating their importance.

Strange is right, I haven't seen anything in this thread so far that isn't pretty basic knowledge in the fields of just the general sciences or linguistics. At least, basic beyond a high school level where they tend to teach facts moreso than getting into philosophy of science or language.

I don't think it's clear that Medicaid is "better." Just the light research I did since yesterday revealed concerns, such as many doctors declining to accept new Medicaid patients, and at least some claims that Medicaid patients in general experience lower quality outcomes. Clearly with the deck stacked the way you just stacked it (it's cheaper, it's better, it wins on every possible criterion), then your conclusion is inescapable. But whether those claims are all true or not is a matter of debate.

 

I certainly agree with you re: the business motivations of insurance companies - I leveled the same complaint about them earlier in the discussion, and expressed support for close government oversight of the industry for that reason. Promises should be kept, and legal prowess shouldn't be used to take advantage of customers. I see guilt on both of those fronts in the insurance companies. In addition, I do not think "arrangements" and collaborations between the insurance companies and the actual providers should be allowed. If I total my car, the insurance company doesn't get to tell me who to buy my next car from. Not a perfect analogy, but hopefully you get the point. I question the whole concept of "networks" that limit your access to providers, etc. A doctor's motivation should not in any way connected to the financial goals of the insurance company.

 

I'm ready to let this go now - I wasn't craving a debate on this to start with, and I can tell that we just have very different fundamental beliefs about preferred societal structures. I do want to show compassion for the unfortunate, and I believe government has to be involved with that in some way (since wealth has to be redistributed somehow). That said, if we have methods A and B that will get us there and A involves entrenched government micro-management and option B involves a "light touch" by the government, then I prefer B. Generally speaking I think "large entities" become bureaucratic, inefficient, and driven by their own internal agendas - and I apply that to large government, large businesses, large churches, and large everything else.

 

You deny any such method B exists, and I disagree. Neither of us is going to change the other's mind.

 

From here: http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/total-medicaid-spending/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D

 

Fiscal year 2016 total Medicaid spending: $553 billion.

 

From here: http://kff.org/health-reform/state-indicator/total-monthly-medicaid-and-chip-enrollment/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D

 

Medicaid enrollment: 74.6 million

 

Dividing, annual cost per person: $7,413 = $617 per month

 

From here: https://resources.ehealthinsurance.com/affordable-care-act/much-health-insurance-cost-without-subsidy

 

"Platinum" level coverage plan monthly premium: $498

What is the average deductible for those platinum plans?

Given your obvious passion for our constitution (helll, you even capitalize it like one would the term god), I'm surprised you're not more aware of the concept of implied powers, specifically the "general welfare clause" and the "necessary and proper clause" which give elasticity to the constitution and flexibility to the legislature. The founders knew the constitution was not all encompassing so inserted ways for us to address needs of this type.

 

Plus, as others have already noted, that ship has long ago sailed...

The Constution is used as a proper name to refer to the founding document if the US governmen.. It is the same difference in capitalization that you get when you refer to the Declaration of Independence, which was a declaration of independence, or the White House, which is a white house.

The United States has a constitution and it is called The Constitution. That's not a religious thing. It's just its name.

The answer is that the classical solution has a major failing that is addressed in relativity. In the frame of someone at the starting point, the separation rate of the two spaceships would indeed be 1.5c. It turns out, however, that velocities don't add linearly. This only becomes really noticeable at appreciable fractions of the speed of light, though.

For A and B, the velocity that one would observe the other as moving away at would be given their respective velocities moving away from c would be given by the following formula:

v = (A + B)/(1+AB/c^2)

So in this case 1.5c/1.5625 or they will each see the other moving away at 96% of the speed of light.

Now, the reason that we don't notice this difference in our daily lives is that, at very low speeds, the above formula very closely approximates the classical formula for addition of velocities.

So, for example, if you plug in the numbers for two cars traveling away from C each at 20mph, each car will I arc the other as traveling away at approximately 39.999999mph

Which is a difference of about an inch and a half per 1,000 miles travelled off of what the classical formula gives you.

Edit: Missed it by that much

 

 

The problem with the US constitution is that it's considered, by it's populace, as the final word, despite the amendments.

 

You do understand what 'amendment' means but refuse to acknowledge that it applies to US/us.

While some people do, in fact, ignore the fact that the document is amendable and treat it like gospel rather than a living document, not everyone who points toConstitutional problems with a given solution is doing that. From a purely practical perspective, the fact is that getting an ammendment through is extremely difficult, especially in a hyper-polarized, extremely partisan political environment.

You need very broad based support within the federal government and across a majority of states to pull that off. Even a complete inversion of the current political status quo that put Democrats in the position that Republicans are in right now in terms of majorities at the level of federal and state governments wouldn't be enough to pull off a healthcare-related ammendment. With the situation the way it currently is, that doesn't even rise to the level of pipe dream.

A better argument in favor of a national healthcare program being allowed under the Constution than saying that it can be amended to allow it is the ruling on Social Security in Helvering v Davis which allows that the government is allowed to establish programs to provide for the general welfare using its taxation power to support them.

The existence of Medicare, which received cover under the same defense outlined in that ruling, provides a blueprint for an expanded program that has a basis in Constitutional law.

 

Well thank you for your discussion example in classical Latin about electrical generators.

As I understood it the most the Romans knew about electricity was the word 'amber ' and lightning.

 

Anyway after this success I look forward to your translation into aboriginal of Bessel functions and elliptic integrals of the second kind into Australian Aboriginal language.

 

I had always understood that the Aboriginals mathematics consisted of the numebr system one, two, many.

 

Since I must bow to your superior knowledge I bow out of this thread.

You're confusing language with vocabulary. An exotic fruit you've never encountered before is not an untranslateable concept. It's just something you don't have a name for yet. Once you've encountered it, you can pick a name or steal one from some group that has one already.

"Names for things that a language's primary culture hasn't encountered yet" are very low on the list of things that are difficult to translate. Once it becomes something that is relevant for people to talk about, things generally pick up a name.

Otherwise, you might as well say that it is impossible to translate between 1950s American English and modern American English because back then they didn't have a word for emojis.

Not being a whatever speaker I don't understand dimreaper's comment and request a translation if there is a joke involved.

 

However, more seriously, I endorse his choice of extract as it highlights what I (following my history teacher from years ago) see as a misconception.

 

 

 

 

Let us try some examples

 

Please translate electric power generator from English into (Roman) Latin?

 

Please translate the Saxon word for cow into the Norman word?

 

I think there are differences between languages and a proper linguist could no doubt come up with a myriad of untranslatable concepts.

 

How many words do the Eskimo have for snow and how many do we?

There are no untranslateable concepts, but there plenty of words that do not have a perfect 1:1 correspondence between languages and may require phrases, sentences or even paragraphs to fully explain the precise meaning especially if you want to get into shades of nuance and the connotation of the word in a particular context.

At worst, there are things that are difficult to translate succinctly. But that is rather different from being truly untranslateable.

There is no such thing as an idea that cannot possibly be wrong.

They may be at risk now that the whole world know about it! No-one needed to know that the exchange took place - if the POTUS can't have a secret meeting with a foreign head of state without the content of the conversation being publicised globally then I do despair at the state of things.

 

I am not wanting to defend him - I was a big fan of your last pres - I liked the fact he bought in an affordable health care program that helped those that needed it the most. I despise the fact that (although it wasn't perfect) it has been cynically ripped apart and thrown out as socialist or communist junk.... to be replaced with what? A total joke.

Russia is not our ally in Syria. We are both against ISIS, but the Syrian civil war is not two-sided, and we are decidedly not backing the same people as the Russians. It's a mess of competing interests, and Israel's intelligence operation being compromised by Russia puts them at risk for the future. The information that has one out points to Trump providing the Russians with specific details about a threat that would allow them to pinpoint the source of the information on the ground.

At best, that will render Israeli intelligence completely unreliable as it pertains to Assad and Russian interests in the area. At worst, someone will wind up dead. Those are both true regardless of whether the Israelis found out from us or not.

There is a reason that we didn't pass this information along even to allies, and Russia is very far from an ally, even in the region in question.

What foreign aid is, is something other than the topic of the thread. It would be like someone masking a topic about the homicide rate in different countries and then coming in and using the number of people killed by police or executed by the government as a basis for comparison.

Yes, those are types of homicides. But they are very specific types that are not necessarily related to the overall murder rate in the country.

Personally I think this recent Russian meeting is overblown. Why wouldn't the POUS share intel about ISIS with the Russians? They are supposed to be allies in the fight against ISIS no? If the POTUS deems it relevant to share military intel with the enemy of their enemies then, imo, he should do so (probably after some kind of defence meeting with his Generals though).

The problem is not just sharing intel. It is sharing Intel provided by an ally who didn't want us to pass that Intel along, and with enough specificity to allow Russia to compromise our ally's intelligence operation, an operation that, because of the fact that it is Syria based, may very well be, have been or could be used against the Russians themselves.

And the reason you don't do that is that now that ally in particular and other allies seeing this will be less likely to share information with us that they don't want us spreading around at our sole discretion and without consulting them.

 

Given that those individual choices have proven to be irresponsible, and pose such dire consequences for society, as a whole . . .

 

Yes.

 

Your scenario, even if true, would be the lesser of two evils.

In what way was life in America better under Prohibition than before or after it?

 

Who pledged that (on behalf of America) and what qualified that person to make decisions of that sort for the free people living in America?

 

I don't see how charitable individual American people are as being one itty bitty bit of the US government's business.

As was previously covered, he was mistakenly referencing foreign aid goals, not private charitable donations.