Elective or cosmetic surgery isn't necessarily a natural monopoly: unlike, say, emergency care where you tend to go wherever the ambulance takes you, or GP care where quality is difficult to judge without spending years with a particular service, or even insurance where you suddenly find out that the service sucks when your life, or at least your quality of life and your employability, is on the line and they drop you or screw up your coverage. People getting cosmetic and elective procedures have plenty of leisure time to shop around, and because they aren't things that you need to have to live, they do marketing and directly compete on price. It's part of why lots of countries with nationalized care (single-payer or otherwise) make exceptions for those services and they are covered by out-of-pocket, private insurance, or maybe only a partial subsidy.

Eye care (and sometimes dental) are often caught in the middle ground between true electives and the core system. I wish they were better covered here in Canada, because they seem necessary enough to me, but I recognize that not everyone agrees with that—and that in both cases there are lots of tricky aspects that shade between necessary and elective, like when your orthodontist is trying to upsell you to “improve” your jawline when really you just want your gums to the healthy.

He's interested in researching the topic that he is in fact researching—how damning. What?

I'm not sure what kind of detail you read the article in then, because it describes the students being given an essay-question test. And if you read the links given you'll find out how the test was blindly scored looking for certain specific techniques as evidence of critical thinking: “observing, interpreting, evaluating, associating, problem finding, comparing, and flexible thinking”. They even built in a test for their system, having separate researchers score overlapping samples so that they could make sure they were producing consistent results.

And here's a little bonus:

A large amount of the gain in critical-thinking skills stems from an increase in the number of observations that students made in their essays. Students who went on a tour became more observant, noticing and describing more details in an image. Being observant and paying attention to detail is an important and highly useful skill that students learn when they study and discuss works of art. Additional research is required to determine if the gains in critical thinking when analyzing a work of art would transfer into improved critical thinking about other, non-art-related subjects.

I'm not sure why the summary doesn't include a direct link to the study, as is present in the NYT article, but there you go. There's more detail in there about what they mean by empathy and tolerance (specifically including a measurable decrease in the student's support for government censorship).

I would assume that the theory here is that other things affect the demand for books as well. By protecting publishers, authors, and local booksellers with connections to their community, they are hoping to create cultural value on books that will encourage reading despite the prices. Those seem like reasonable goals to me.

OK good thing that the person you are arguing with said exactly that and nothing else. Certainly not anything about unclipping his pedals on an almost completely different topic.

I guess you must be really are annoyed by some cyclists who run red lights sometimes and since you can't argue with them on the streets you want to do it here.

Did you not understand the comment? The annoying thing is that the author has already stopped at the stop sign and has to awkwardly stand there waiting for the driver who has right of way before eventually determining that the driver is waiting for him. Cars thinking that cyclists are unpredictable is annoying at best for the cyclists, at worst dangerous. But at least they see us, which is more than I can say for lots of drivers.

Yeah, you are assuming that the poster is making excuses for breaking the law when in fact they are going out of their way to explain to you that they don't approve of doing so. It's not a false equivalency to point out that two people running red lights are both running red lights. It's not an excuse, it's an observation.

As it happens, walking is more dangerous per-mile than cycling.

This is one reason why dedicated trails and sidewalks are more dangerous for cyclists than the road. I know that the most dangerous place on my commute is similar, whether I stop or not before the road, visibility is poor and more importantly many drivers just aren't looking (never mind that the cars have a yield sign while I have a stop sign so it's wonderfully ambiguous).

Recently opened bike network is probably a sign of increasing ridership—between it being built for increasing numbers of cyclists and its presence encouraging more. So no wonder the accidents are growing faster than population, if more and more people are starting to ride.

They are perfectly qualified to speak about their own, personal, user experience. No one better.

What does keeping a straight face have to do with art?

Please don't try to educate me about conceptual art. Maybe instead of telling us about your magic power to determine what art is objectively the best, you should educate yourself about why many people who love art disagree with you.

Some art is bad. Doesn't make it not art.

I understand that many people don't like projects like this. That's fine. Others might disagree. But no matter what—there's no reason to insult the entire discipline because you don't like one project.

As an artist whose work is very different than this, I still can't help but be disgusted every time I see someone talking about "artists" in quotes, or with an extra "e" on the end (as they do elsewhere in this discussion), or making silly comments about blank canvases and reductive caricatures of conceptual art and uneducated statements about what art "has" to do—that's actually the position that the onion comment is making fun of: the conservative assertion that inauthentic "crap" art and artists are damaging society (in a classic moral formation as "sicko painters" and in a contemporary misguided-fiscal-conservatism way).

Even if those imperative statements were unproblematically true, they still wouldn't answer the just-this-side-of-trollish questions at the top. Why not drive around for half a day collecting random crap, then toss it all in a public square? What if that was beautiful?

That's the same problem: reducing public subsidies to educational institutions encourages them to feel desperate and start trying to maximise their other income. It leads to them treating students as customers, where tuition payment becomes a simple transaction which pays for an entitlement to a degree title.

Better public funding is absolutely part of the solution to declining academic cultures and performance standards.

The new CGI effect example in the article is terrible. The article notes that the animated ship looks noticeably different from the model in the rest of the episode, but it also looks like junk on its own merits.

1. On the 95% number, the actual quote from Ron Paul's 1992 newsletter is: "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/12/ron-pauls-shaggy-defense/250256/

So, "at worst...disingenuous, but still true"? There's also some good stuff about how Paul's longtime staffer and likely ghostwriter of these articles is famous for saying that the only thing wrong with the Rodney King beating was that it was videotaped, etc.

I don't know what you're defending with your comments about my statements being unsourced, given that I just critiqued the linked article for being a bad example and even went on to suggest ways that you might find more of the content (given that we're talking about years of newsletters, it's a bit much for a random comment). But I posted simply to correct any misperception that that may have caused, despite your rather high expectations that I was going to instead offer an encyclopedic counter-example. The content of the newsletters is public knowledge; you don't need me to google for you. But when I said before that the sources were a few clicks deep into the post's references, I wasn't kidding, I clicked a link in the first paragraph, and scrolled down to where the second author was recommending excerpts and commentary, and clicked on that. It took maybe a couple of minutes.

2. Moving on to your fight: "Once these kids are adults out in the world, how does [giving them access to the sytem] help them?" Well, it means they are qualified for jobs based on the piece of paper that they now hold. This is another matter and despite your attempt to bring it up here it is not really what Paul's newsletters are about except in a passing "look what else they are doing to us!" way. Despite your long explanation and justification the reason why you disagree with people about it is because the idea that giving the underprivileged access to the educational system is the same as "lowering standards" or "artificial equivalency" is in fact the part that is in question—your paragraph is a classic example of begging the question, leading with the conclusion couched in a quick, easy statement and constructing an argument based on tautology.

Worse than that, you wrap it up with "...instead of dealing with the underlying problems..." which is a flat-out insult to the people you seem to think you are arguing against, because in your effort to fight off their imagined attacks you are telling them that they are denying reality and that they haven't done anything useful. Because their personal experience and their own efforts to fight social problems are getting in away of your imaginary objectivity, "the ability of society to properly assess the matter and move forward" which I'm sorry to say doesn't have a very good record of eliminating oppression quickly in the US or anywhere.

Again, I'm not sure what you are defending. Maybe, given your eagerness to bring up your white-with-a-conscience cred you are protecting your privilege and sense of righteousness by loudly declaring yourself to be not racist. Maybe you just really really love Ron Paul. In any case I doubt that most people who are seriously working on solving racial inequality care about you and the way that you write off their efforts, because they know that white people do that all the bloody time.