Go read actual wording of the Constitution. Religion is only mentioned twice:

Okay, so there's no religious test required for public office, nothing relating to schools here.

Okay, so congress cannot make a law about the establishment of a religion or prohibit people from worshiping their religion.

That's it. There's nothing else in there about the separation of church and state.

How then does this translate into public dollars not being able to be spent by parents on religious schools if they so choose? The government isn't establishing religious schools or enforcing the use of religious schools. They aren't even directly funding religious schools. How is this any different from someone taking their economic stimulus check and deciding to donate it to a church? or using state-funded insurance at a religious hospital?

By the way, I'm an atheist. Though I do live in the southeastern US, so almost everyone around me is Christian.

I'm disinclined to agree here. Literacy tests for political participation have a very nasty history. Even if they could be administered fairly, they still disenfranchise people who need representation within the system.

Here's how I'd do it. Scrap the current system and replace it with an acyclical directed graph for each individual decision to come before the government.

Now, if I like, I can decide for myself whether my vote will be in the "yay" or "nay" column. Or, I can point my vote toward some other person or organization. If a million people want the ACLU to represent them in all their votes, they would effectively be a voting block unto themselves. If your neighbor decides to give you her vote because she doesn't care about politics, but thinks you can be trusted to represent her convictions, then she can.

You could elaborate the system by allowing multiple pointers based on the type of issue. I might assign my votes on copyright law to Cory Doctorow, who might assign his votes to the EFF. The trick would be categorizing things in a concrete way, since many bills might touch on multiple subjects.

The system is much more flexible and responsive than the current American system, where all our votes are assigned to whoever won our congressional district, for a set period of 2 years. Under my system, if your representative isn't going to vote your way, you can immediately nerf them.

I haven't really thought about how legislation actually gets created, or how the decision is made to bring a particular bill to a vote at a particular time. But I'm imagining that bills could be created by anyone; you could put your vote(s) on the pile at any time, and a formal vote might be triggered whenever the yea votes reached some threshold (say, 40M votes).

You could argue that this will give too much power to those who are too lazy to get involved and study the issues. Perhaps. But I think that knowing that you can put your decisions into effect immediately would make it more rewarding to be involved in the political process.

You could also argue that Glenn Beck would be swinging a million votes around. I have no answer to this argument, as it is absolutely devastating. Seriously, though, it's possible that some dangerous forms of populism would emerge. But I'm intrigued by the idea of letting coalitions emerge and dissipate.

Hmm... I haven't really given much thought to ballot secrecy either. That could really put a spanner in things.

The earth's magnetic field protects us from charged particle radiation, not from electromagnetic waves (which are 99.9999% the cause of solar heating). Thus, your entire theory was just shot down in 1 sentence.

The greenhouse effect is indisputable; earth would be at least 20C colder without it. The drastic increase in carbon dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) over the past 150 years is indisputable. You could possibly dispute mans effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but my guess is that it has been studied and verified already (I am not a climatologist). Thus, if man has an effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, man has an effect on the greenhouse effect, which has a major effect on the global average temperature.

If we could stop wasting our time trying to convince all the people incapable of logical thought, maybe we could use our ability to control the global average temperature to our advantage.

Who knows, in the few days that the Great Firewall of China crossed the Pacific, the kind of damage that could have been done, or perhaps even already been done?

This should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, and when it had, it shouldn't have been allowed to persist for a few days before being made public and taking action.

People who are good at math tend to be good at logical thinking.

Similarly, people who are good at logical thinking tend to be good at math.

Relevance? To be a good programmer you need to be really really good at logical thinking - without it, you'd take way too long to "crack" a problem or devise a new algorithm or plan an inheritance hierarchy, etc. A strong background in math is therefore advantageous, but is not an absolute necessity.

It boils down to what exactly you are coding. If you are writing a specialised statistical tool or engineering software or..... no doubt math skills are essential. Otherwise, as several others have already pointed out, there's probably already a library that does the basic things for you.

Case in point: Let's say average Joe programmer is working on a GUI that displays statistics in the form of fancy looking 3D charts. Someone with really good mathematical knowledge of graphing techniques (not to mention the math involved with the 3D bits) created a library that has all the graphing functionality in it. Joe programmer comes along, with a relatively rudimentary knowledge of math, plugs the library into his GUI, and has to figure out how to use its API - overall, the task is quite easily accomplished.

However, let's say that Joe programmer was just a GUI that merely displays the statistics, but one which actually understands it and even does some highly specific detailed analysis of said statistics - then the situation would be completely different - Joe programmer would need to acquire the necessary math skills, before even being able to competently code the application.

I work for a foreign corporation. They don't care whether or not I have a SSN (I'm an LLC as far as the US gov't is concerned). If I didn't have the magic ID card, they wouldn't give a damn. I do the work, they pay me. Staying out of US tax court is my problem, not theirs.

I'm starting to see more people in my profession (engineering) working for overseas bosses because of the onerous tax and other regulations placed on contractors in this country. I'm sure more will follow.

By your definition, everyone has shitty insurance.

Heh. You said it, not me. I just thought it really loud. By definition, everyone on average has shitty insurance, as, on average, they have to be paying in more than they get from it. ;)

But, seriously. You want to assert that people who have medical bills totaling over $10,000 who pay them are a 'minority', find something that says that.

Well, strictly speaking, of course they are, as uninsured people themselves are a minority. As are people who have private insurance and people who have government insurance. None of those groups are over 50% of the population.

But I assert that uninsured people pay the amount of the medical bills in this country roughly equivalent to their use of medical care. (This is a default assumption of proportionality, so I don't need to prove that.)

And I'm not letting you get away with that $10,000. I'm talking about on average, the entire thing. Oh, and you don't get to insert 'on time' in there. You know who else doesn't pay on time? Insurance companies. Except they usually demand the right to not pay any penalties.

I suspect, statistically, that the uninsured are less likely to pay, but pay much more when they do, and it does balance out. If you've got some evidence otherwise, I'd love to see it.

And good luck finding those statistics. For some public discussion-distorting reasons, almost all discussion about the cost of health care in this country pretends that paying for health insurance is somehow paying for health care, and no one actually calls up hospitals and say 'How much money did you collect from private individuals vs. insurance companies last year for how many patients?'

I may have been mistaken, but I thought that the AMA had oversight into the certification process for medical schools, and thus does have power over the number of new doctors.

I honestly don't know much about this, but checking, yes, the AMA does have half control over the LCME, who is in charge of accreditation of medical schools.

The rest of the control, however, is the hands of the Association of American Medical Colleges, which seems a much more logical group to blame for restricting openings into the medical field.

While doctors might vaguely benefit from not having as much competition in their field, at this point it's almost moot. They're still working the same amount and being paid the same amount...they're just seeing thrice as many patients, and nurses are doing the rest of the work.

It's hard to imagine they actually want this, or that a doctor's union would actually see 'providing almost no qualified people, so people have rig the system to use as much non-union workers as possible' as a good idea. (In fact, they clearly don't see it as a good idea, as the creation of PAs indicate.) At some point, 'union scarcity' turns into 'We're going to have to figure out how to do without those workers as much as possible'...and we hit that point around 1995. If it's the AMA doing it, it's mindbogglingly stupid.

Medical schools, OTOH, can keep upping their price if they don't have competitor schools. If there are 10,000 slots, and you have 1500 of them, you can charge a lot more than if there are 60,000 slots and you have 1500. Medical schools have no downsides, or at least not until they blow up the entire system.

So I have to blame the restrictions on medical schools.

But the reason I disagreed, I thought you were blaming them for restricting the number of doctors via their union, which didn't make any sense and is standard anti-union nonsense. But I was incorrect, you were asserting they are leaning on the accreditation committee, that makes more sense and is possible, although I'll keep blaming schools instead, or at least some combination of the two.

We both agree that the number of doctors is being kept criminally low by reducing the number of medical schools, and size of said schools. And, be it either the AMA or the AAMC doing it, it's not at the demand of the majority of doctors. (As the majority of doctors aren't even in the AMA.)

Of course, it's perfectly valid to bitch about the AMA inexplicably being in control of that accreditation at all. The AMA has six people on that board, it's hard to see why other unions shouldn't have some of those slots.

Or, for that matter, why a school needs LCME accreditation at all for people to take a license test, which I think you mentioned above in combination with foreign doctors. That's clearly a deliberate trick.

Instant wire transfers aren't really instant. Like in the example above. The lawyers sent a wire transfer, the check then bounced and the bank was still able to stop the wired money from reaching the scammers.

I bet the wire transfer showed up in the scammers account instantly, however the money lags that information in much the same way cashing a check works.