We don't have a moral obligation to get into a situation that most of us don't understand, and make things worse by escalating the conflict.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08...
Germany Backtracks on Tuition
By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE
Published: August 25, 2013

(German colleges are now free again, like the Scandinavian countries. Under the German constitution, the 16 state governments control finance and education. A 2005 federal court decision allowed them to charge tuition. 8 states, in former West Germany, did, but it was unpopular and they reversed their policy. Lower Saxony charged €1,000 ($1,300)/year. An economist estimated that tuition caused 20,000 potential students (6.8% of all students) to forgo enrollment in 2007. Denmark, Norway and Sweden have free tuition, although Germany, with 2.5 million students, is the largest. Britain raised its tuition caps to £9,000 ($14,000). In France, most public universities charge a few hundred euros per year, though the grandes écoles are more expensive.)

That's true. I read a classic analysis of inequality in the U.S. (sorry I can't remember the citation), which concluded that for people from the lower classes, a college degree with any major was a guarantee of a professional job. This was based on data of people who were working when the study was done, which was probably in the 1960s. So it was true in the 1950s.

Another problem is that correlation is not causation. The one factor that most strongly correlates with your income is your father's income. In general, rich kids go to college. Rich kids don't become rich because they went to college. They become rich because their fathers were rich.

So George W. Bush was right to spend his time at Yale and Harvard partying, getting drunk, and smoking pot, rather than studying business management and boring old wars.

The vast majority of public schools are run by school boards in which parents can have greater or lesser input.

Some districts have smart aggressive school boards that set standards and make sure their kids get a good education; in other school districts it's all about whose brother-in-law gets the lunchroom contract.

It's small-town democracy. If you don't have good schools for your kids, blame your self and your neighbors. It's your responsibility.

I remember one tech college, RCA Institute, that was actually pretty good. I met their graduates doing pretty good work on pretty good jobs everywhere. Bell Labs used to hire techs from RCA Institute. I met an electrical engineer from India who went to RCA Institute for 6 months to finish off his education. Then he went to work designing IC circuits for the blind. He showed me the first 8086 chip I ever saw in my life.

Then they went into decline. They were going to close down, the teachers tried to make a go of continuing on their own, and it just wasn't working out as a viable model. They changed their name several times. Last time I heard it was called TCI, Technical Careers Institute or something. They had rented a space on 8th Ave. off W. 56th St. in Manhattan, next to McDonald's.

Anybody know more about them? Are they still any good?

The Malaysian military radar showed an unidentified plane without a flight plan fly across their country and over the Indian Ocean. The radar operators didn't notice it. So they missed the opportunity to send up fighter jets to find out what the fuck was going on.

Instead they were were searching the wrong sea, on the east of Malaysia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03...
Series of Errors by Malaysia Mounts, Complicating the Task of Finding Flight 370
By KEITH BRADSHER and MICHAEL FORSYTHE
MARCH 15, 2014

I don't trust you. I trust the doctors who know their patients better than you do. And I trust researchers who have actually talked to poor people in the projects and gone over their budgets, better than I trust you.

I've been to New Orleans. It's one of the least segregated parts of the formerly Confederate south, and it's still pretty segregated. You reduced the black population to slavery and post-slavery servitude, and you complain when they don't show personal initiative.

As George Bernard Shaw said, "The American makes the negro his bootblack, and then demonstrates his inferiority by pointing out that he is a bootblack."

(I may be wrong about the "formerly.")

You don't know that they're poor. There are a lot of middle-class projects, where people have good jobs and pay market-rate rents.

There was a sociologist named Elliott Liebow who answered the question he was always getting, "Why don't these negroes get jobs instead of hanging out on street corners all the time?" His answer was, most of them do have jobs. The negroes you see hanging out of the street corners during the day have jobs in the evening (and weekends). If you go to a restaurant in the evening, you need a cook there in the evening, right?

We mandate lots of things that aren't in the US constitution.

As Adam Smith said, when you benefit from a society, you have an obligation to pay the costs of running that society.

Adam Smith knew about epidemics. We have to cooperate to build hospitals that care for everyone as a last resort. It would be nice if everybody contributed those costs voluntarily.

But they don't. Some people become freeloaders. They know we're going to have to take care of them whether they pay their share or not, so they don't pay. A few freeloaders can encourage everybody to stop cooperating. Then we won't have hospitals for anybody. So if the freeloaders don't pay, we have to make them pay.

If you had a 4-year-old child who got cancer, whose life could only be saved by a $100,000 drug, you'd be demanding that the government, or somebody, give your child that drug. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

So we have to make you pay your share now of the cost of running society. You don't have any choice.

It failed.

Personal responsibility doesn't work in health care. Rich people get care. Poor people die.

People who are poor don't have the same choices you do.

They're not buying 60" televisions. They're not buying lattes in Starbucks. They don't have relatives to fall back on for money. They can't buy insurance. They can barely afford transportation to work. Sometimes they can't afford transportation at all.

According to some handouts I got at a panel on Obamacare, the entire Obamacare premium for a family of 3 earning $78,000 would be $600 a month. So if they dropped Obamacare and got Major Medical instead, they wouldn't save $600 a month.

Major Medical is fine for people who are healthy and won't get sick. Any insurance is fine for people who are healthy and won't get sick.

The problem comes when people get sick. If you develop multiple sclerosis, your medical costs will go up enormously. You could easily spend $100,000 in the first year. You could be spending $500 and $1,000 on specialist visits.You could get a dozen MRI scans at $10,000 apiece. Your medical savings account won't cover it.

Doctors don't insist. Patients ask them which contraceptives are safest and most effective. They give their recommendations.

Except for the guys who shoot abortion doctors.

While condoms have useful purposes, they have a contraceptive failure rate of about 1% a year. A gynecologist at a medical school once told me that for women who absolutely must not get pregnant, she prescribes either the contraceptive loop or the hormone implants, both of which must be inserted by a doctor. Another reliable method is the pill, which must be prescribed by a doctor. The cheapest place to get this is usually a Planned Parenthood clinic. Otherwise it might cost $1-2,000

Throughout the South, politicians have been closing down Planned Parenthood clinics. Romney said that he will do anything he can to shut down Planned Parenthood. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

They've also been trying to exclude contraceptives from health insurance under a religious exemption. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

I've also noticed that when I see a list of states with their incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, Mississippi and Alabama are usually at the top of the list.

The infant mortality and maternal mortality is pretty high in the U.S. in general and throughout the South in particular. Yes, Rolling Stone was correct.

This is what you're referring to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02...
Health Care Horror Hooey
Paul Krugman
FEB. 23, 2014
(Right-wingers convinced Americans that farms are being broken up to pay "death tax" estate liabilities, but there is not one single example. Now the Republicans are creating Obamacare horror stories, which don't hold up upon fact checking. In the GOP response to the State of the Union address, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers claimed "Bette in Spokane" had lost her good insurance and was forced to pay $700 a month more. Local reporters found the real Betty, and found out [Bette Grenier had a catastrophic plan, and she refused to look on the ACA web site.] In Michigan, Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch Brothers, is running an ad about Julie Boonstra, who has leukemia, saying that her new policy will have unaffordable out-of-pocket costs. But Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post found that she will be saving more than she will be paying in out-of-pocket costs. [The Obamacare out-of-pocket maximum is $6,350. Her premiums were cut in half, from $1,100/mo to $571/mo.])
[T]he true losers from Obamacare generally aren’t very sympathetic. For the most part, they’re either very affluent people affected by the special taxes that help finance reform, or at least moderately well-off young men in very good health who can no longer buy cheap, minimalist plans. Neither group would play well in tear-jerker ads.