How about a fact-check of a statement by theHUD secretary?

I had to look up Cabrini Green, and have to say 'not really'. The individual housing areas would be much smaller in number. The housing project you mentioned was originally aimed at low-income people, not the outright homeless.

Put unstated 'on average' in there and you most certainly can. We've long passed the point of efficiency. Heck, compare our success rate with nordic countries and it shows that despite longer sentences we have worse outcomes, and that's after you control for crimes committed and everything else. Long prison sentences for stupid shit(like drug use) don't work, especially when the expense of the long sentence means that you end up not treating, rehabilitating, and training the prisoner.

If anything, I was being conservative about the benefits. Nordic countries manage to have 1/3rd the recidivism with 1/3rd the prison sentence(on average). Given how much we pay to incarcerate somebody for a year, how could this NOT be cheaper?

As for 'dumping recidivist offenders back on the street' - that's the POINT of making prison about reform - so they AREN'T nearly as likely to re-offend the moment they get back on the street. A 20% recidivism rate after 5 years of prison means LESS CRIME on the street than a 60% recidivism rate after 15.

Ahem, original post: "help with the federal deficit". Besides that, I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I was ignoring our debt load when proposing 3 major policy changes all centered around saving money. Fortunately our deficit is down below $500B this year, which means that with only a minimum of extra belt tightening(see my proposals) to actually balance the thing. Then we can start paying off the debt.

Of course, attacking me as opposed to a strawman wouldn't let you do a good rant, now would it?

You need to work on your reading comprehension. I'll restate: The federal and state governments combined already spend more than enough on healthcare to cover everybody in the USA under a system that reduces healthcare costs in the USA to the median of developed nations. Indeed, since the Federal government alone could cover 90% of the bill with CURRENT spending, on average individual states would experience SUBSTANTIAL SAVINGS.

That's an excuse to do nothing about anything and you know it. We're not going to fix the problems we face doing nothing.

...Boy, you don't know me at all.
100% participation - Why do I need this? 100% participation in what?
No recidivism - 'less likely to come back(to prison)' is certainly not 'No recidivism'. In the case of the reforms I'm looking at, it's more like reducing the current 60% return rate down to 20%.
Nobody abusing the system - Not writing a book, but I always figure on a certain level of abuse. That's what auditors and such are for, to keep that to a minimum.

If you note in the article I cited, there was research that concluded this after reviewing data for 20 years.

If you disagree with the position, the onus of proof is on you to show how the interpretation is wrong.

you don't get an easy out.

The pedant's pedant antecedant was to see the point, but fail to read it.

Since your pedantry has you all tied up in knots, let me break down what others are so desperately trying to get you to realize.

1) Yes, The people casting the votes for legislation are indeed the elected officials. HOWEVER, the laws being voted on are often NOT PENNED BY THESE PEOPLE. Instead, they are often first penned as proposals by interest groups, which then get run through an approvals and support process, and get folded into larger bills, which then eventually get voted on. This is known as a "Christmas Tree Bill"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

2) While anyone may theoretically petitiion congress, many studies have been conducted which indicate that congressional members (used generically for both house and senate) do not give any weight at all to such petitions, and give all their attention to the lobbyists that show up with suitcases full of money, minivans full of hookers, and dumptrucks full of blow.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

These things are the elephant in the room my friend. It has been fucking PROVEN that the popular vote and popular issue created interest groups have practically no power to influence US policy, and yet you cling to the "VOTE!, IT'S THE WAY!" statement.

Somebody here is being delusional, and it isnt the people you are arguing with.

You won't pay much. We're now buying them as our default monitor because reasonable ones are down to about £300 - if you're using the machine for work, that's a negligible cost.

Even a whiff of critical thinking skills would allow anyone to see that Obama's purely political stunt is the only nonsense in question. If he gave a crap about the illegal immigrants he wants to "bring out of the shadows," he'd have wave the same magic wand months ago, or years ago. But he knew that it would wreck his party's chances of hanging onto legislative power. But - to his shock, no doubt - his party got completely spanked in the election. So he's done what he just did entirely to poison the well for the upcoming election. That is all.

How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefox?

I mean, seriously, help me out here?

He answered this question on August 6, 2008 in Elkhart, Indiana during the 2008 campaign, when he was asked the question by a 7 year old girl, and couldn't deflect her into talking about oil prices. He said: “America is , uh, is no longer, uh what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children.”

He failed to indicate what date "what it once was" applied to.

Here's the youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

I would say that he's been about as successful at this as he has been in keeping his campaign promises to get us out of the two foreign wars, start no new foreign wars, and close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which he promised to do in the first 90 days of his presidency. In other words, not very successful.

Not that anyone is actually keeping score, but...

Other campaign promises not kept:

- end tax deductions for companies that offshore
- Introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill in my first year in office
- No signing statements to nullify instructions from Congress
- No family making less than $250K will see "any form of tax increase" (ACA, we're looking at you...)
- term limit the DNI (Director National Intelligence)
- call for and support a human mission to the moon by 2020
- tax deduction for artists
- tax incentive for new farmers
- windfall profits tax on oil comanies (we could use this one about right now...)
- limit subsidies for agribusiness
- antimonopoly laws strengthened to favor independent farmers
- Scholarships to recruit new teachers
- Restrict warrantless wiretaps
- public option for the National Health Insurance Exchange
- Restore superfund so polluters have to pay to clean up their messes
- Same sex adoption equality (still state by state, and not in most states)
- require companies to disclose personal information breaches
- ban racial profiling by federal agencies
- roll back earmarks to 1994 levels
- national catastrophe insurance reserve for things like a future Katrina
- allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage terms (sister is losing her house over this one)
- work with Russia to step down nuclear defense postures (har har - that's working out)
- double federal funding for cancer research
- strengthen ADEA (Age Discrimination in Employment Act)
- low carbon fuel standard
- require 25% reneable by 2025 (guess it was based on Solyndra not being a scam)
- reinstate special envoy for the Americas
- global fissile materials production for weapons treaty
- global education fund to offer alternatives to jihadi schools
- international group to aid Iraqi refugees, including providing $2B in funding
- help resolve the Cyprus situation
- Sign Freedom Of Choice Act
- penalty free "hardship withdrawls" from retirement accounts
- annual "State of the Word" address
- all new vehicles to support flex-fuels by 2012
- health care reform to be negotiated in public, on CSPAN
- cap and trade system for carbon emissions to reduce global warming
- use revenue from above to support clean energy, environmental restoration (hard to do if there's no system, isn't it?)
- call for congressional leader consulting group on national security, and consult with them prior to major military action
- reduce the number of federal middle managers
- increase supply of affordable housing (Hi, San Francisco! Allow buildings over 4 stories without a zoning variance yet?)
- UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
- pay for national service plan without increasing deficit
- Increase federal minimum wage to $9.50/hour
- reduce veterans benefits claims backlog
- allow import of prescription drugs from e.g. Canada
- double IAEA budget so it's no longer understaffed
- double spending on foreign aid
- double the Peace Corps
- create Federal Autism Spectrum Disorder czar position
- require "plug-in" fleet at White House within one year of being elected
- half of all federal fleet purchases plug-in hybrids or all electric by 2012
- ratify the CTBT (comprehensive test ban treaty)
- double federal funding for Charter School Program (guess this was before the Atlanta scandal?)
- double funding for after school programs
- forbid bonuses to executives of companies declaring bankruptcy
- expand FMLA to cover domestic violence and sexual assault
- White house Privacy and Civil Liberties Board to get subpoena power
- end income tax for seniors earning $25K (healthcare.gov, anyone?)
- require employers to give 7 paid sick days per year
- cut typical family health insurance premium by up to $2.5K/year

Predicting the weather is interesting, it's just substantially less interesting than it used to be back when all we had was The Farmer's Almanac. The incremental value in funding a much larger supercomputer *now*, rather than having you slowly expand an existing one over time, and as budget allows, is fairly negligible.

Can you point to a paper where a new, much faster system (one that requires putting the U.S. back in the "#1 super computer" position) is needed?

How about you find out who the top 5 systems are, and run that model on their systems instead, to see whether it's going to be sufficiently better than the current system to merit investing in the equipment in a U.S. facility, because it will have that much value to have a U.S. facility dedicated to the task?

Where did he say he was convicted? Specifically.

640KB is enough for some things. Every time you increase it by an order of magnitude, it becomes enough for more things. Eventually, the set of things that it's not enough for becomes too small a market to justify the R&D investment.

The main reason for doing it with mattresses is that it lets brick and mortar stores compete with online and makes price comparisons hard. I looked at some mattresses in a shop, where I could try lying on them, and then tried to check the price online and see if the local store was competitive (I'd accept some premium for being able to try it, but not an extra 100% markup). Not only could I not find the same model online, I couldn't find it in other brick and mortar stores either. I've no idea whether the two that were priced differently were the same, or just nearly the same.

Bingo. A 'responsible' party owning 10% of Exxon could be the difference between Exxon having executives who are mustache-twirling villains and having a responsible board that has the company investing heavily into renewable technology to position itself for the inevitable decline of oil.

If we're not using it as a fuel, there's plenty of organic sources that can rather easily provide for our lubrication needs. Thermal depolymerization, for example, generates what's effectively an extremely pure light sweet crude. The processes used to make synthetic oils don't need to use fossil oil as a feedstock.

It's a bit like worrying about people getting enough drinking water when they're living in a city in the desert and thus dying of thirst. It's not the people we have to worry about so much - drinking is near the bottom of the list for municipal water. You use more washing hands. Obtaining enough water for people to keep their clothes washed is a much bigger problem in such a case. Drinking water is such a small usage that we could truck it in if we had to.

We don't have to. Let's say we pass a few reforms. Things like house the homeless($10k annually vs $40k to leave them on the street), reform sentences and prisons(1/2 the prison sentence AND less likely to come back?), and healthcare. The fed.gov already spends 90% of what it would take to provide single-payer UHC if we were paying the median for industrialized nations. The individual states more than pick up the remaining 10%. We currently spend ~$6.7k vs $2.9k. So fixing this ONE problem would enable states to put more money towards other important things without going into debt, help with the federal deficit, AND dump about a grand more into every family's pocket a month.

What does $3k a year, per person, pay for? A hell of a lot of solar panels and other sources of renewable power. We can improve our lives in a lot of other ways.

Unless you're the child of a multi-millionaire you're not going to be paying full rate for Harvard. Due to the continuing endowments and such they don't technically have to charge a cent to anybody. Yale as well.

Matter of fact, I think my state college should at least start on the same. Encourage all the graduates to donate their tuition at some point in their lives. Perhaps in their wills. Once you reach about 20 times the annual tuition costs interest in safe investments alone should keep costs controlled.