Highways? How fresh do you want your tomatoes? How long are you willing to wait for that UPS or FedEx delivery to get to your door? Just because the highway goes through a lot of countryside between Chicago and New York doesn't mean that the road is there just for the purpose of the rural countryside it goes thorugh.
Housing tax deduction? I wasn't aware that this was only allowed for rural housing?
In any case, what authority are you quoting about what is and is not part of a successful society?
Ok, I do agree that phone subsidies for Ted Turner's ranch and the old small airport are silly. And some year, it might be fixed. But remember that Congress just got around to removing a luxury tax on phones that was created during the Spanish-American war. So don't hold your breath.
That sort of depends on what rockets and radar they carry. Certainly, the slow but numerous drones aren't going to get into a cannon fire dog fight, but if they can detect the manned fighters, a flood of missles might difficult for the fighter pilot to evade. I wonder how much our opponents are spending on swarm intelligence for such a plan.
Quantity has a quality all it's own.
for some definition of 'fully functioning'. I don't consider any variation on the UK NHS to be 'fully functioning'.
Yup, A lot more. When those high winds blow down your windmills by the thousands, how long will it take to fix? When those high winds break up your solar panels with tree limbs and bricks from the neighbors now busted chimney, how long will it take to replace half the solar panels in the neighborhood?
Maybe you'll be the lucky one and your power will be OK, but there will still be millions without power for weeks if they all rely on solar and wind. Now maybe if they all had a natural gas or propane driven generator, they'd all be OK too.
The same reason the Democrats do - fund raising. It's not like the Dem's don't have their own corporate favorites, like GE, who wangled waivers from ObamaCare. They now even have their own version of crooked corporate friends in Solyndra.
Time to turn in your nerd license while you take a refresher EE/power course. Peaking plants, often natural gas burning turbines, are designed to be turned on and off as needed.
There may be idle machinery, but no wasted electrical potential. What do you think all those thousands of power EEs do with their time if not make sure the grid is reasonably efficient?
Rust no, but oxidize yes.
What you suggest might happen in the emergency room is charity. And since when did any offer of charity return a right of control over the charity recipient? That doesn't happen under any set of ethics or morals I know of. Nor is forcing the hospital to give free service a charitable act.
Only a slave owner has the right to demand products or services be given to him or her as a right. There is no right to health care in a free society.
Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall