Fragano @29 - You know, I'm not. I had a few other words in there during edit, including "prescriptive". But I had to pick a word and get on with things.
I suspect the Nobel committee is trying to define Obama as a peacemaker when he hasn't shown a lot of inclination in that direction yet.
Put me down in the "incentive" column, although I think it's more of a proscriptive Nobel.
Obama's still trying to figure out how to handle Afghanistan - can you imagine getting a Nobel Peace Prize and then escalating a war shortly thereafter? I bet the "Nobel Peace Prize laureate" will be somewhere in his mind the next time he has to decide the next step for Guantanamo or Bagram (Gitmo III: the sequel to the sequel).
Still, for one day, the Nobel committee has united the left and right of the US in a single "WTF?".
Fragano Ledgister @121 - That's a very good point, but emperors as well as kings are monarchs (although neither the Emperor of Japan nor the Monarch are ruling monarchs).
That clarifies things, I think.
There are no "ruling" monarchs. Today's "kings" are national bobble heads.
IMHO, Bashar al-Assad and Kim Jong-Il are ruling monarchs. They're heads of state with considerable authority that inherited their position of power. So Baby Doc Duvalier wasn't called a king - what would be the difference if he had been?
Arguably, the Princes of Monaco and Liechtenstein might have enough authority to be considered monarchs that rule as well as reign in their microstates. That's more of a technical objection, though.
As a general rule, monarchy has little to do with health insurance.
According to Dean Baker, the US lags behind most of Europe in a variety of small business categories. I find it extremely plausible that employment-based healthcare makes going self-employed or into a small business less likely.
It's the same logic as allowing people to declare bankruptcy - you want to encourage a certain amount of risk taking in order to push the engine of capitalism a little harder.
I suspect that this story isn't getting much play because it isn't news - this sort of thing happens all the time. I recall hearing a similar story about Wellspace, which apparently quietly stopped paying for employee health insurance near the end of its corporate death spiral (courtesy of the Harvard MBAs who took it over). Companies that pull these shenanigans tend to close by locking the doors and not answering their phones, as Wellspace did.
This, of course, puts employer non-payment of health premiums into the special American category of things that don't get reported because they're too common but aren't well known because they don't get reported. That's some catch, that catch-22.
Melody @68 - I was basing my statement on the most convincing of proofs: the anecdote I read on the Internet and now can't find again. Sigh.
Yes, the first part was agreeing that Medicare pays less than private insurance. One way of looking at it is cost control, another way is forcing private industry to subsidize health care, and the third way that I was going with was that Medicare is less hassle than private insurance.
As I recall it, the anecdote was that at Miskatonic General or wherever, it required one admin to support three doctors working for private insurance. When dealing with medicare/caid, the ration was one admin per ten to fifteen doctors.
I certainly could be wrong; this isn't my area of expertise, and my personal experience with health issues has primarily been with socialized government-run health care. No argument that there's room for improvement all round, but it does seem that private insurance in poorly regulated states is profoundly underperforming.
It's frustrating that so much of this discussion is anecdote-driven. The numbers must be out there, they just aren't public.
David Manheim @45, I don't think your math works the way you think it does.
Medicare admits that it has a 7.5% fraud rate, and most believe it is actually much higher, as much as 10% (so that the actual winner in overhead costs are private plans.)
That's only true if fraud is 0% for private plans, which does not seem to be the case. The noirishly-named Prescription for Peril has a variety of statistics about prescription drug diversion and the secondary cost impact of doctor-shopping. There's other insurance fraud information on the site, and even though the stats aren't broken down the way I'd like it seems like private insurance is hit for about 1/3 of the total health insurance fraud. Since government is already paying slightly more than half of US health care costs, the private fraud prevention seems to be cutting fraud down by a fair chunk but that's still a lot of fraud left on the table. Including fraud by the insurance companies themselves. And you are familiar with Blue Cross, Blue Shield's distinguished record of recission?
Also, according to that Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, $2 million spent on fraud prevention stops $17 million worth of fraud. So it's not $1->$1; relatively little of that overhead is going to fraud prevention. The rest is going to minimize loss - i.e., to try to get someone else to pay for health care. That's the global impact to the system that SamChevre is talking about: the staff at insurance companies that processes claims, and the staff at hospitals, doctor's offices, and private companies that has to feed them paper. You seem to have missed that part of the argument.
You are right that Medicare pays less than hospitals, but many believe that the reduced paperwork hassle for hospitals makes up for the cost. It takes far fewer admins to support government billing than private billing.
Another missed topic is profit; a 6% benefit on Medicare's side. All things being equal, I would prefer that 6% in profit over 6% in fraud, but all things are not equal.
Hm; I don't see that as an error, I see that as the current system working as intended - trying to keep from paying for health care. It's true in private industry and with Medicare, and less frequently in other facets like TRICARE. This does tie into what I see as a major Republican argument against government health care: "You don't want it, because we'll shit in it." I don't see it as an argument against government health care, but instead an argument against trying to keep the undeserving from getting health care. I do see your point, though.
On the subject of Stephen Hawking, I don't know if you saw that the TPM folks sent him email and he responded "I wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high quality treatment without which I would not have survived."
Or, there's always the "Which pandemic would you want to be in: the one where everyone has sick leave and health care, or the one where a large chunk of the population has neither?"
Deamonte Driver, of course. Gah. Brain skip, multiple windows.
Terry Karney @275 - I recall the case, but not the name, sorry.
I did see (via Jezebel) a reference to the Deamonte Brown case, where a twelve-year old died of a brain infection because of the paperwork, delay, and hassle involved in Medicare dentistry. A lack of an $80 tooth pulling caused a $270,000 emergency room stay that ended in his death.
I'm not sure why dental care isn't a larger part of this debate - dental insurance is arguably worse than basic health insurance. It's expensive and maxes out pretty quickly.
David Dyer-Bennet asks @124 Just what did "bomb making equipment" actually consist of?
Google says:
A car he was driving on April 16, 1996, was stopped by a Shawnee County sheriff's deputy, and law enforcement officials found a one-pound can of black powder, a crude electrical circuit, an electrical blasting cap and a fuse in the vehicle.
Officers also found a military rifle, a gas mask, mask canisters, two boxes of rifle ammunition, 20 rounds of pistol ammunition and a sheath knife.
I am not aware of any lawnmowers that run on black powder. There's probably at least one out there somewhere, but I wouldn't recommend using it. The abuse of police power against protesters is, I would say, entirely separate from pulling over some guy with a customized NUTJOB license plate, what could safely be described as "bomb-making equipment", and the odd gun & ammo.
If the FBI had access to the information about Roeder's overturned conviction, they might have taken the vandalism seriously. But they should have taken it seriously anyway, given the history of violence surrounding abortion clinics in general and Tiller in the specific.
skzb, I've seen the issue of the polls on Talking Points Memo and on Juan Cole's blog. 42% of people contacted about the poll refused to participate; of those that participated, 26% were undecided and only 34% supported Ahmadinejad. Additionally, during most of one of the phone poll periods, Mousavi wasn't a candidate and Khatami was.
As for the questions about who's fighting over what and why, and what impact that will have on Iran's future - that all seems rather opaque from the outside.
David Harmon @ #648: I was curious about how rice cookers worked, so I figure you might be as well. You were close; as long as the water is boiling, the rice is at a constant temperature. Once the water boils off or is absorbed (and steam is no longer produced, as a side effect), the temperature rises and the termostat inside tells the cooker to shut off.
The three rice cookers I've had have also had the non-standard cup size. You might want to figure out how large your rice cup is in real (or Imperial) units, in case you lose it.
abi, if you have a mix of material from different editions, and experience with the older editions, you should take a look at the retro-clone movement. These are people who've taken the partial opening of D&D intellectual property with 3rd edition to re-create retro versions of previous editions.
For your basic adventures, Goodman Games has produced a wide variety of "kill people and take their stuff" old-school adventures for various editions of D&D.
There are a myriad of twisty little free games out there, but I'll run into a URL limit if I start a list. One that I haven't played but that looks fun and kid-friendly is Inspectres (Ghostbusters: the roleplaying game meets some reality TV conventions).
Kristen's post @16 about old-school cannibals reminds me of reading Dream Park and learning about the cannibalistic Fore and kuru, a disease apparently linked to prions and similar to Mad Cow. Moral: don't eat brains, and don't eat animals fed brains. (Is brain-eating a zombivoric diet, or is 'zombivoric' a diet composed of zombies? Either way, not recommended.)
On an upbeat note, there's a YouTube video of "A Tale They Won't Believe" by Weddings, Parties, Anything. It's a musical retelling of the story of Alexander Pearce.
The CIA world factbook says:
Ethnic groups: mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%, Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian 30%, white 9%, other 1%
These numbers are vastly different in South American countries like Argentina (97% white), Brazil, etc. Because of the difference in environment and history, I don't think you can generalize on South America any more than you can generalize on North America (where Mexico is, as I am positive Marilee does in fact know. I always need one more preview myself.).
Not that I know what this has to do with the alleles in question. For me, air pollution / altitude / under-reporting suffice to explain the apparent difference in lethality. This is definitely an argument against letting census takers have meetings with each other during flu season. I wonder if it'll change how the 2010 census is carried out.
Linkmeister @141, I think the threshold for the ICC and other universal jurisdiction is "unable or unwilling". There's an Amnesty factsheet that supports this, but I couldn't find more specific cites. It's pretty clear that the US is in the position of being unwilling to investigate credible allegations of torture.
The argument's not about avoiding partisanship, it's about avoiding justice. There's a reason why the Bush administration spent time and effort sabotaging and discrediting the ICC - that reason is Pinochet. Many of these guys want to be able to go on European vacations without fear of arrest.
Raphael @98: I think this is a case where they're choosing "some" + "easy" over "all" + "hard". The Mexican swine flu variant is already on several continents, but if they can limit the number of vectors, so much the better.
It does seem like it would be possible to make single-use swipes that turned colors in the presence of flu virus, to detect viruses being shed by the asymptomatic. Probably "possible" in the scifi sense, though.
Maybe we've got a dual use for all that explosive-sniffing technology?
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