Immigrants are not the same kind of people as those that stay in their country, so it's not a sensible comparison to compare Japanese in Japan and Japanese in the US. Otherwise for example we'd be forced to conclude that people from India are a whole lot more intelligent than Americans on average, but that's not the case, even if it is true of the average Indian who shows up in the US. Thus the stereotype of Asians being more intelligent.

I agree that it is a complicated question that is it difficult to reduce down to a single ranking of who gets more bang for the buck. I will say that I didn't cherry pick this link - it was the first I found that directly addressed the question. The fact that it is difficult to do, and that there are plenty of studies saying that American health care is not efficient as evidenced by the other posters in the story, indicate to me that you don't really know that America is particularly efficient, and that you instead assumed it must be because you already believe that governments are inefficient. In any case it would be weird if America were efficient at health care when evaluated as a whole, because many poor people have no or little health care, while many rich people have a great deal of health care. You could argue that this skews the numbers since the poor people are inappropriately counted even though they shouldn't be as they aren't actually receiving much care - though I think making that argument might give you pause and cause some reflection on your position?

I raise you this study saying that Americans pay twice as much and the outcome is just average among the rich countries compared. Your move.

That's not how patents really work, though. They are often written in legalese so that no technical person will gain much from reading them without considerable effort. Beyond that, technical people are usually advised/ordered in the strongest terms not to read patents for any reason ever because it's impossible not to infringe on some patent somewhere and if you have read the patent you are inevitably infringing, then damages are higher if you get sued. It is conceivable for an improved patent system to serve the function of dissemination of research, but the current patent system does the opposite. The obvious changes to make would be to require patents to be plainly understood to an average practitioner of whatever field the patent is in, and to remove the connection between reading a patent and higher damages for infringing on it.

How about on first boot on a new motherboard, Linux tries to set PCIE on, then runs tests that are going to result in the locking you mentioned if PCIE isn't actually available. Is that possible?

Then we all have to work anyway to afford our now much more expensive plumbing.

They could just get some crackheads to do it for them. They need the money now and don't care about the future. Even if the police come by, buying IP addresses isn't illegal and the crackhead in question probably has no notion what nefarious purposes an IP address can be used for.

I think it depends on what you mean by a decent standard of living. In the Nordic countries, you will be consistently living very well without a job compared to most places in the world. No one there fears starvation or homelessness due to losing a job, as long as they are mentally capable of understanding what a budget is so that they understand that unemployment means a reduction in their standard of living. Yet obviously living off well fare like that isn't all that comfortable where going to a cinema is an investment you have to budget around. If that's what you are talking about, I'm all for it. If you are talking about a situation where not working gives as much respect as working, and the people who don't work live in a style similar to those that do work, I think you'll see some necessary but unpleasant jobs unfilled. For example, I don't really think that the paper shufflers really enjoy making sure that tax form 53-5C is filled out in the correct way, and if we didn't have such people, how would taxes get paid to pay for all the people not working? I also doubt that you are producing enough food that you could sustain yourself off of that alone all year - and if you do, then consider how much more time you have to spend doing that compared to a farm worker using specialized equipment and who benefits from large scale production. Moving food production from centralized agriculture to dispersed personal gardens is great as a hobby, but it is not a good way to feed the world.

Let's take you up on your suggestion and extrapolate into the future. You won't need an education unless you think it's interesting enough to do for its own sake. For example I am guessing that not many people will choose to get a plumber's education just for the joy of making shit flow. Who's going to fix your toilet if no one needs to work and it requires a skilled plumber to fix it? Who's going to build new buildings? Grow food? I think you suggestion requires robots to be able to do all the jobs for us, and we aren't at that point yet.

E=MC^2, M is mass and C is the speed of light, E is energy. Light is very fast, so that is a WHOLE LOT of energy in just 1g of nickel. The reason we don't normally think of 1 gram of mass as having all that much energy is that we don't know a good way to extract all of it. I don't know what the exact right number is for the energy equivalent of 1 gram of mass, but 517 tons of oil (if burned regularly) doesn't sound unrealistic to me. Of course, the interesting part is if he can actually convert that 1g of nickel into energy, which isn't likely.

It took 50 years of wasted effort to build the pyramids. The pyramids do exactly nothing useful, except now people can go look at them and say "cool". I'm with you about the point you are making, but the pyramids are a terrible example. The Great Wall of China took a lot of effort too, and it actually did something useful, so that might be a better example.

That does make sense, it's just obtusely written. Completely clean combustion creates CO2 and H20, so you are moving around hydrogen, even if you never had pure hydrogen in the from of H2 stored anywhere. There's a reason it's called *hydro*-carbons. To be more precise, he could have said something like "burning only the energy-carrying molecules that have hydrogen on them to create CO2 and water". He's probably expressing himself in this confusing manner to make people associate pure hydrogen and coal, but he's being crafty enough about it that what he's saying isn't false, just misleading.

You are confused about what makes "scientific sense". Science is about facts, not about decisions. Science doesn't tell you what you should do. Science only tells you what the facts are. So Science might tell you that group X of people are not productive. Science could never tell you what you should be doing about that, if anything. Science doesn't tell you what you should do about global warming either, Science just tells you that there will be global warming if we keep releasing CO2 and it tells you what some of the consequences of that are. What you do about that is up to you.

Democracy is not based on the assumption that most people will be very intelligent and have everything figured out. That's never going to happen. The value in democracy is first of all that it gives a non-violent outlet for what would otherwise become revolutions. For a revolution to work out well for you, you need lots of people on your side, but if you have that many people on your side, they can all just vote for you, so violence becomes illegitimate and in its place there is an orderly and non-violent coup every so many years based on the election. That's a huge improvement right there and in itself already makes democracy the superior form of rule. The second benefit of democracy is that power corrupts, and people in power are always the target of influence mongers, yet officials in a democracy must at least pretend to be accountable to the voters and even so, the people in power get changed out every once in a while. So the benefits of democracy is less violence and a stronger resistance to corruption and tyranny. Making very good decisions is not a benefit of democracy, though I will say that I wouldn't expect a tyrant to make decisions that were good for the whole either.

It's not about the being offended itself, it's about why those people were offended. If they had a good reason to be offended, perhaps that good reason actually should not be allowed to occur. If they had a bad reason for being offended, then their taking offense doesn't matter. So saying that being offended is not harmful is completely besides the point - it's not about being offended, it's about something being offensive, and those are not the same thing. The interesting topic here is whether the poster was offensive - it doesn't matter if someone was offended by it.