It's Encyclopaedia fucking Dramatica. You must be new around here. As far as links to never click at work go, that ranks somewhere between kiddie porn and goatse.

Well, given the subject of the article:

YANI: Being punished increases chances of successfully reading a spellbook. ;)

Well, in a mathematical sense, emacs is strictly superior to vi--you can implement vi in emacs, but not the other way around!

Who says it has to be tax-financed?

In the USA, much health care is funded by insurance companies that essentially serve the function of averaging medical expenditure among a group of people. The net result of this is that an individual with insurance has every incentive to spend as much as the insurance while let them, because the costs will distribute to all policy holders. When everyone does this, insurance policy costs keep going up. The insurance companies, trying to get costs back down, have incentive only to pay as little as possible, not prioritize approved treatments by QALYs or any other similar metric.

Then, due to all that, you end up with people who are uninsured or otherwise unable to afford health care ending up with emergency conditions, receiving expensive treatment, and being forced into bankruptcy. This also drives up cost (as the hospitals are forced to absorb the cost of treatment) and harms society (a financially ruined citizen accomplishes less and pays less tax).

And thus, we come to this, the worst of all possible worlds.

It's well-established that Americans as a whole pay far too much for health for far too little benefit, compared to other first-world nations.

Can some of this discrepancy be explained by high availability of essentially useless or even harmful "treatments"?

Medicine is more like some unknown mixture of actual science and cargo-cult pseudoscience, both using the same tools and terminologies.

Separating the two is a nontrivial problem.

You may be interested to read about this case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_search_prank_call_scam

No 13 year olds were involved but I think the events are rather telling, regardless.

I'm not deciding the value of life. I'm pointing out that, all else equal, two lives are worth more than one. Anything else is incoherent at best.

If you choose letting a hundred people die through inaction over killing one person directly, your lack of action is not noble--the blood of those hundred people is no less on your hands than if you'd killed them directly.

None of which is even considering that a blob of embryo cells isn't even remotely of the same value as a living, thinking human.

You seem a little unclear about how scientific research works; there are no fixed time-tables--that's why I'm not the one making the claim that something definitely will or will not happen. I'd put maybe even odds on a previously-untreatable medical condition being rendered tractable via methods dervied from stem cell research within my lifetime, say the next 70 years.

No, that's not a very strong claim, but given that the only arguments against stem cell research are from people with absurdly skewed moral priorities or delusional ideas about economics, it sounds like a pretty clear-cut case of something worth funding for long enough to see how it pans out.

So government paying for things directly is bad, but the government meddling in the market by granting monopolies on ideas is fine?

What's the difference, here?

Embryonic stem cell research isn't necessarily about actually using them. Aside from the cancer thing, they'd also have the same rejection problems that organ transplants have.

The purpose of the research is to learn more about how to work with stem cells so that we can eventually culture and work with adult stem cells from individuals who need treatment. As it stands, adult stem cell research is still mostly in the state of "how do we even make these things", and would have continued in parallel with embryonic research regardless.

Do you, now? Precisely how much are you willing to bet? Put your money where your mouth is.

But I expect you won't, because you know there's far too great a chance you'd lose. Your shouting is about ideology, not science, and you know full well that reality only cares about the latter.

Oh, for crying out loud. The concept of sacrificing one life to save countless others is "chilling" "moral relativism"?

I'm sorry to say it, but if you prefer letting many living, thinking people suffer and die rather than accept the death of a few lives that weren't even concious thinking beings in the first place, you are morally bankrupt beyond all belief.