People not only had affordable and cheap health care in USA, they had affordable and cheap health insurance. 50 years ago the most commonly sold health insurance plan would only cost $25 per year per family of 4 with a 500USD deductible, covering up to 50,000/year, which was more than enough for 2.5 years of stay in a hospital in a year. So it was catastrophic insurance, which and people paid for most of their expenses out of pocket and it was not a problem whatsoever.

Even before that, around 1920s, 1930s, a family with 2000-3000USD income would spend around 108USD in health care a year, closer to 261USD with hospital stay in a year.

Yes, insurance and health care used to be very cheap in the USA before the fucking piece of shit collectivist, and yes, socialist/fascist government destroyed the free market capitalism.

Do you even realise that it is not supply of money that is limiting people's wealth, it is supply of production, or do you not realise that? Money is a measure stick, the wealth is not cash, it's what you can produce and savings that are based on real excess production that is exchanged for other goods/services/investments/savings.

You can't use 'technology of money creation' to do anything except to create inflation (expansion of the money supply) thus reducing the relative value of money and destroying its worth.

It's like you have 1 ton of steel that you mined. You can use 1 dollar to measure its worth or you can use 1 Trillion dollars to measure its worth, that number is irrelevant to how much steel you have.

Providing the entitlement of the so called 'basic income' creates a situation where the currently idle population simply procreates to consume all of the resources allocated to them for free. So as an example the idle population of 1,000,000 becomes population of 1,000,000,000 and where the 'basic income' was enough to sustain 1,000,000 comfortably the new 1,000,000,000 are so poor on it, they are now demanding the entitlement to be increased proportionately to their numbers.

Well, so where does that extra excess productive capacity come from to feed the new 99,000,000? Well, the 1,000,000 would have had to WORK to create enough WEALTH to sustain the new 99,000,000 (who also would have to work).

Providing the so called 'basic income' is a recipe for greater and greater, bigger and bigger more and more massive levels of poverty among larger and larger idle population.

There are plenty of jobs that need to be done that cannot be done today because people are doing all kinds of other nonsense (including nothing, for those sitting on welfare), we need to build more shit, we need underwater cities, greenhouses, underground cities, space cities and space farms, space mining, robot training, biogenetic programming, who knows what else.

This is pure crapola, it doesn't matter, but if we could eliminate 99.9% of jobs tomorrow so that those jobs could be done by machines cheaply, quickly and ubiquitously and we would have new jobs created but of-course with that kind of disruption we have to disrupt the political system. Out of the 99.9% of jobs, 99.9% of politicians and other government officials also need to lose their jobs so that the free individuals not encumbered by rules and laws and taxes can start thinking of satisfying all of the untapped desires that people have that are not even close to being satisfied.

Until nobody else wants to own a yacht, a green house for their own vegetables and fruits and whatever artificial meat you want and your own private space station there will not be unemployment unless it is created by government. Unemployment is created by government rules, laws, taxes, nothing else. Absent rules, laws and taxes designed to stand in your way, when you are trying to build a new business, all you are limited by is your imagination.

- no. Stupid people need to be insulted, there is no other way around it, they have to be told how fucking stupid they are. Health care was extremely affordable and cheap in the USA before the socialism/fascism fucked up the country. In fact people came to the USA for best and cheapest care before the government got its dirty murderous hands on it.

Free markets are the only real economic driver and health care is just as much about economy as any other good or service, you can't have health care if there is no wealth generated and wealth is only generated by individual entrepreneurship and collectivism is the antithesis to the individual freedoms required for individuals to be entrepreneurial. USA today has NOTHING TO DO with free markets, it's a corrupt socialist/fascist state without any free market, a collectivised nightmare.

OMFG, you are just so dumb, I did not say America HAS a cheap medical system, I said that America BUILT a cheap and accessible system when it still WAS A FREE MARKET CAPITALIST COUNTRY back in the 19th century and that the socialism/fascism of the last 100 years DESTROYED that. The rest of your argument falls right on its stupid face because you can't read apparently.

You haven't lived until you've seen a centerfold spread out over six feet of multiple strips of punched paper tape. :/

What's the point of a fancy SDR on the lower bands though? At least in the States most of the amateur bands with any kind of useful propagation are so narrow that one of the brain dead simple sound card SDR rigs can cover the majority of your band of choice.

This is going to be long-winded; there's quite a bit to cover. Sorry. :)

Cover, yes. Cover well, no. You need lots of bit depth for adequate dynamic range without filters, bit depth almost no one offers, and if you don't have adequate bit depth, then you really need front end filtering and probably a stepped attenuator as well. You need EM protection because HF antennas tend to be large and prone to large induced voltages. You need good frequency linearity if you want to use the SDR to get accurate measurements (even the s-meter.) For the ham bands, it's also nice if the SDR supports a sample rate of 400 khz or better, which is tough for a sound card SDR. Then there is frequency accuracy and stability, not to mention external reference sources (there all kinds of cool things you can do with a very stable SDR, like this AM graveyard band carrier forest), and then we get into multiple front ends for diversity reception and noise reduction. If you want to remote the SDR for any reason, you really need ethernet, and if you need ethernet, you need some smarts. And you need ethernet anyway, because USB bloody sucks (speaking as a cross-platform developer.) So If you want a good SDR, you just don't end up with a "brain dead simple" SDR.

As to narrow ham bands in the HF range, well, not really. 160 meters is 200 kHz. 80 meters is 500 kHz. 20 meters is 350 KHz. 15 meters is 450 kHz. 10 meters is 1.7 MHz. The WARC bands are all pretty tiny. Also, for SWL, some of those are quite wide, and even more so if you include the out of band regions where the pirates are. Pirates being quite unpredictable, you want them in the spectrum so you can see them when they pop up, so bandwidth is quite relevant if they are of interest (personally, I find them fascinating.) Come to that, if you want to see what overall prop/activity is looking like, you need 30 MHz of bandwidth to do it live.

I will grant you that someday, we may be able to put a 48 bit, multiple Gs/s A/D on a chip with a full ethernet interface cheap enough for anyone to own; but not right now. Until that day, good SDRs will not be "brain dead simple."

More on frequency range: If you want to use the SDR for a panadaptor for an existing receiver (very common use), then it has to cover one of the IF frequencies and associated bandwidth of the receiver, which tends to be in the HF range (not always, though.) Then there are cray-cray folk like myself; among other things, I use my SDR to monitor bats in our attic. To do that, the SDR has to be able to do a good job with the first 100 KHz, also true of experimentation with sonar and other audio ranging and detecting tech.

I'm not saying there isn't stuff up higher than HF; of course there is. Some of the really cool stuff (wifi, for instance) is as high as 5 GHz. Satellites, public utilities, etc. Any motion video needs to be up pretty high (but it also needs very significant bandwidth.) But HF has a huge amount of interest, it's where most hams actually hang out, and as it's a very challenging reception environment, higher end designs are of great interest. So are hackable designs one can get at. For instance, if you built yourself a multi-stage filter bank for the various HF bands, you could have them switch automatically as you tune. Likewise you could control add-on attenuators, RF preamps, and switchable transverters (which can give a nominally lower freq range SDR excellent access to higher bands.)

I have a variety of SDRs, and switching is simply a matter of prodding a menu. I have access from about 1 Hz to 3 GHz across the group, with varying features as described above. In the end, as HF is so very active, that's where I usually end up listening. Although I'm an extra and have a full station, I do a lot more listening than transmitting. In the day, I lurk on 20 meters and up, though again as the sunspot count drops, that'll go back to only 20 meters. In the evening, 40 through 160 come alive, as well as many of the SW bands, and it's DX time, trying to catch the low power African and South American stations.

I think it's fair to say that most hams are, to coin a usage, "HF hams" first, and "VHF and above hams" second, if at all. VHF never offered much in terms of DX contacts or reliable prop events, so it was always about just communicating. With cellphones, that hook went away, and I'm guessing that's what accounts for the dead 2m and 70cm bands. But the HF bands are busy, and the number of hams keeps growing... so that leads me to think that an SDR aimed at hams can really use low band capability.

PS - I have VHF and UHF in the car and several units at home, plus an HT I carry in my man-bag (ie, purse.) I have a 14 element 2m beam. I can hit about eight repeaters from here, covering thousands of square miles. I hear *nothing* at home. I'm not hearing any VHF packet any longer, either. My lonely packet BBS beacon squirts out there by itself, no visitors and no digipeating and it has been that way for I don't even know how long. Trips to the cities nearest me result in dead silence on the calling frequencies and local repeaters, though I have to admit I don't make any calls myself -- I'm just curious so I listen.

Anyway, it's just one guy's opinion / anecdote, it isn't data, you have to listen to your own area and draw your own conclusions. Perhaps it's just Montana and surrounds. It certainly won't hurt anyone if I don't use a particular SDR. It'll have an effect if I don't support it, though, so hopefully, frequency range of 50-1000 or not, it has a protocol-compliant ethernet interface or some kindhearted person writes a USB-to-ethernet server on at least one platform so I can do so. :)

By the way, you may be confused on what 'cooperative' is. Cooperation cannot be achieved by threat of violence, that's called coercion, you see language is important, words have meanings and I do not cooperate under the barrel of a gun but I may be forced into slavery under it and unless you are making the argument that slaves 'cooperated' with their masters then you can't use that word to describe what the collective does.

There is no market failure, market is a combined desire of individual participants. There is market manipulation by governments. Governments that stand in the way of companies trying to bring products to markets.

IF there is such a huge need for antibiotics people should be able to make money by satisfying that need and if that means that a large amount of money first has to be gambled with, it's possible to achieve even that by raising that money in the free market the way kickstarter does it.

Of-course there is no free market in drugs, government is all over it, so don't talk about 'market failure'. There are perfectly valid FREE MARKET solutions to it, but the government PREVENTS free market from existing in the drug industry. You could start a company tomorrow and try and create new antibiotics if government wasn't standing in your way and all you would have to do is start a money raising campaign for that purpose. Try it, see how fast the government stops you from doing whatever it is you think needs to be done here.

But instead you want the slave owner State system to steal money from people to run your pet project and you want most of that money to be stolen from people who have more of it than you do, thus 'progressive income tax' and such.

Most hams (including myself) are interested in HF (and others are interested in SWL and the new below-AM BCB ham frequencies.)

50 MHz means 6 meters and above -- basically, nothing that has any regularly occurring usable propagation modes. Many of these upper bands are almost dead -- I've not heard anyone on 2 meters or 70 cm around here in the last year -- but 10 through 160 meters (28 MHz through 1.8 MHz) are busy as heck, and of course all the SW spectrum in between.

Worse, we're almost certain to be about to slide down the sunspot curve, making the already mostly dead-by-choice bands completely dead-by-nature, propagation-wise.

RFSPACE's upcoming new unit is .009 (9khz) through 50 MHz. That's a lot more attractive to me. Both to use, and to support.

Then there's funcube dongle pro plus... 50 khz through 1.8 GHz, albeit without adequate filtering up front. But it's reasonably cheap, so there's that. (and I already supported it, PITA though it was, so it's not subject to the no-more-USB-devices rule.)

Well, whatever they end up with, I sure hope it's ethernet-connected and uses the standard SDR protocol as do Andrus, AFEDRI and RFSPACE. I've supported my last black sheep USB device (every darned OS has radically different USB interfacing and requirements... building my free cross-platform SDR software is most tricky with regard to USB issues. Ethernet, by comparison, is almost identical on all platforms -- the same SDR protocol / interfacing code works fine across linux, Windows and OS X.)

- right, slept through history class... at home, where my family members told me actual history about expropriation of land. My actual history class IN USSR schools was worthless though.

Market is regulated by itself, by individuals making individual decisions on every day basis and no, con people shouldn't be killing people, but that's beside the point. Maybe you believe there are no con people in your 'regulated markets'? Ha!

No, I am not interested in gray when we are talking about SLAVERY. There is no minimal amount of slavery to justify that gray area.

You don't like the industry and think you can do a better job than the industry, start doing it, build your own company and sell your own solutions. FDA is a murderous government organisation, just like all other government organisations.

Keep the Jehovahs and Mormons from getting in the house. Bonus if it can hold off people pushing meritless products. But I repeat myself.

As for serving drinks or drugs, the damn things should do what they're told. I don't need robots to take agency from me. Lard knows the frigging government is spending more than enough effort on that already. For me personally, all I have to say is "I already have (had) a mother, and her last bit of authority over me expired in 1977."

First time a (non-conscious) robot refused to do what I told it to, presuming only it was within its comprehension and skill set, I think I'd take a hammer to it.

- a bunch of made up nonsense that covers up the simple idea of government control and destruction of individual liberties and yes, we had 'it', when we destroyed private property rights, stole land from people who were working on it (and yes, they actually owned it as individuals, which is the only way to own something), stole and destroyed all other businesses as well, factories, stores, whatever.

Again, I have 0 interest in the superficial differences between definitions of collectivism where the actual true life consequences are very simple: destruction of individual liberties, destruction of individual freedoms, oppression of the individual by the collective.

Are you sure you want to go down this route? France, Germany, Russia, everybody was taking note of the Mayo Clinic from late 18 hundreds while in Soviet Russia we were busy declaring that genetics and cybernetics are 'prostitutes of the bourgeoisie' and promoting Lysenkoism instead of real science.

Or maybe you think that only free market creates con artists? Or maybe you think that socialist/fascist control over individuals actually provides people with more individual choices in the market and lower prices? Hmmm, I have a bridge I want to sell, interested?

You only have yourself to blame for your shitty life experiences and generally speaking to fuck something you have to have a cock first and the only one you've got is the one growing out of your neck that you are eating into.