Government doing anything in "efficient and cost effective manner"? What color is the sky on your planet?

Governemt may be the only way to organize some operations that are too costly/not profitable enough for a citizen or corporation to undertake, but unfortunately, it always causes a lot of waste and excessive cost. Bureaucratic overhead can be amazingly high and order of priorities tends to be seriously fucked.

Getting back to Finland... Nowadays the Scandinavian countries have significantly socialist tendencies. It may be shocking to you Americans but the citizens of those countries seem to be quite happy with the way the things are. And they're actually spending the tax money on something useful.

Punish the people who actually commit crimes of child abuse.

But... but... but that would require investigation, gathering real evidence and proving they did it.

BTW, it's not only UK. The disease spreads across the world. Recently Poland was also infected with this insanity (though we top UK by making the Internet illegal (not by itself, but any link such as this is up to 2 years inprisonment)).

Because it is easier and safer to drive up the statistics by arresting people for littering, making noise at night or mooning the cameras. These criminals won't fight back and bonuses are the same.

In fact eliminating too much of the serious criminals would be counterproductive, as the fear of crime allows for easier approppriations of funds for the "law enforcement" and additional legal powers. Cynical? I do read public parts of police forums, I see how they see us: as third rate beings.

War is expensive, troublesome and rarely justifiable.

You send a secret agent or five, to find the hosting company, infiltrate it and blow up the server room. Haven't seen a firewall that can stop blast from few kilos of C4...

Then you claim tourist^Wterrorist did it.

Bonus points for stealing colo's customer data, tracking down the site's author and blowing him up too.

In LAB COATS!1!

You should factor water resistance into it...

While I lack skills to do the calculations, I suppose it would tear the sail off. Still, t would be "a ride of lifetime" ;-)

It's already mixed with CO2 - just add HFCS and red #6!

But you know, animated is for kids. Adults can only watch crappy live action remakes. It's the law or something...

They spend a great deal of money on the system.

Indeed, not only UK but many other EU countries have nationalized healthcare and spend a lot of tax money on it. However, you should well understand that spending money on something does not mean that you'll get that money's worth of service.

Which is, sadly, the case with most nationalized healthcare systems.

That money just kinda evaporate on the way from the treasury to the patient. Months of waiting time for not-so-big procedures, medicines denied because some jobsworth in the ministry decided people having some disease are too costly to save (or because manufacturer did not bribe correct people)... It's slightly better than not having any health coverage at all, but far far far from being good. Hell, for the same amount that I pay in health tax I can get private coverage, where not only specialist diagnosis is next day, but also I'm treated as a valued customer instead of being considered some loser who bothers the staff.

(OK, not all this happens specifically in the UK, but I have no reason to believe it's that much different from my country - UK's healthcare is probably better as it is richer country, but still...)

No system is perfect, I hear many Americans wanting nationalized care and not a small number of EU people hating it. If you ever invent a system where everyone will be happy, you'll have a monument in every city ;-)

They still have a lot to learn. A lot! Poland has already banned any and all hyperlinks, effective Dec 18th. Can you beat that?

Uh, could you point me to where this "Free Society" is? I'd like to move there.