Wait a second where were you during the 'W' years? Fox News Channel was pretty much an extension of the White House Press office during the reign of 43.

Well that situation still sucks. The solution is to get rid of the pre-existing condition nonsense. In theory all of the health care reform proposals on the table do this, but of course the wet dream for the insurers is to make the insurance mandatory and then give them a slew of excuses they can use for not paying claims. (oh see you switched jobs and we exclude pre-existing conditions for 24 months)

Yes and no. Both crude oil and natural gas is being used up faster than new sources are being discovered. While the tar sands in Canada and Venezuela hold a lot of potential feedstock, extracting it is both energy intensive and expensive.

True there is a lot of coal and coal-to-liquids is a possible solution to the problem of replacing liquid fuels it produces far more CO2 per unit of fuel tha current production does. Even discounting CO2 emissions the energy returned on energy invested isn't nearly as good as conventional oil and gas (the same holds true for the tar sands)

In short energy is going to get a lot more expensive for the use cases most people care about. This is going to make everything more expensive including still relatively abundant coal, building nuke plants and making the fuel, and building infrastructure to make greater use of renewables.

We really need to fund the US Public Health service like we used to before the 80's. Communicable diseases are a real threat and the nonsense with the health care system is breeding more and more drug resistant strains (not to mention what a good influenza virus might do).

Depends on how you look at it. To someone used to good private insurance Medicaid sucks. However for all it's flaws it is still better than no insurance.

There is no reason a universal single-payer system has to suck either. Take a look at Medicare or the VA for contrast.

Depends on the state, some don't allow insurers to exclude pre-existing conditions in group plans. Mind you the conservatives all screamed this was a bad idea in every state that has done this, but considering the number of people with chronic medical conditions I'd rather pay a little more than force them to go through the hell of dealing with the pre-existing condition crap.

Another thing that can help is if you or your employer has a large group plan they can buy into. For example most of the tech companies around here get their insurance through the industry trade association's group plan. This is a pretty good deal given the large pool size, relatively young age of most members, and because a couple of big fish buy from the group plan rather than negotiating directly with the insurance companies.

Well while I haven't been screwed to the extent some people have, my experience with a crappy insurance company has convinced me that health insurers need to be right behind financial company executives as the first motherfuckers up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Having them initially deny every single claim (office visits, prescriptions, blood work, etc)until I spent a huge amount of time fighting them on it did not endear me to for-profit health insurers.

The point is fabs are crazy expensive and highly specialized. There are huge economies of scale in electronics that means most production tends to be highly centralized even if the design is not.

I'm pretty sure all of the major engine manufacturers have a pretty good idea of whats going on with any of their competitors engines that are in production. I mean worse comes to worse they just have to convince someone to let them observe during a C check.

Making a modern jet engine takes a lot of specialized production facilities. New engines are also incredibly expensive to develop. There is a reason there aren't many jet engine makers out there and why the ones there are tend to specialize.

That isn't always possible. At some point you have to do a certain amount of triage.

For the simple case consider the aftermath of an earthquake. You have more casualties than the available medical resources can reasonably treat before it is too late. At some point you have to decide to save as many people as you can which often means letting the most severely injured die.

Well I for one think it is a good thing that in most countries 90% of the population isn't forced to work in substance agriculture just to keep from starving to death. Not to mention what a major undertaking threshing wheat, milling flour, or baking bread was 500 years ago.

Several products come to mind:
advanced ICs (CPUS and the like)
jet engines
large transport aircraft

In each case there are only a handful of plants and companies producing each. Though it could be argued that the problem isn't so much that these products benefit from large economies of scale so much as the cost of capital for new product development and plant construction is so high.

More to the point the free market fundamentalists believe in some mythical rational economic man who always makes the most economically rational choice for himself. We find though that people are anything but rational.

Behavioral economics comes to a much different conclusion than the classic model. People do "stupid" (stupid in the sense of not seeking the "best" result from an economics point of view) things for emotional reasons. Some of those "stupid" things are harmful to society at large and the individual, some not so much.

I kind of wish large pension plans (such as CALPERS) had the option of opening themselves up to outside investors. Sure I know there would be a fee involved but I know the fund is being invested with retirement funding in mind and I believe pension funds have a bit more flexibility as regards hedging or going short.

At the very least GE should probably still be around by the time anyone here retires.

Then again if you told people even as recently as 10 years ago that GM would go bankrupt in 2009 they would have looked at you like you were crazy.

I'm pretty tolerant of various whole wheat products but the commercial whole-wheat pasta is just gross as are most commercial attempts at whole wheat pastry.

That said, one issue with pre-made whole wheat products is they tend to be made from coarse ground flours from hard red wheat with a high bran content. This makes the texture very different than the same thing made with white flour and adds a very strong "whole wheat" taste.

That said you can get whole wheat flour made from white wheat which has a milder flavor, that is more finely ground, and has a low bran content. Supposedly you can do pretty much anything with these flours that you would do with white flour and the results are as good or better than with white flour.

It might be worth trying to make homemade pasta from some white wheat whole grain flour.

Yea, if the good, kind-hearted bankers hadn't been forced to give loans to those dirty, lazy, shiftless niggers and spics the financial crisis would never have happened.