Building factories (and especially power plants) that don't pollute costs considerably more, and takes longer. If the Chinese want to industrialize as fast as possible, they may not be willing to accept the extra costs, both in time and money, that it would take to do it the clean way. Think of it as a form of instant gratification.

I'm sorry that you had a very bad experience. However, you need to remember that any government department with over 280,000 people in it is going to have a few that don't belong there. I don't want to start an argument, but do you have any evidence that this was more than an isolated case? If so, I'm sure that the people running the department would want to know about it.

I've used the same technique when editing /etc/fstab. In one shell, I make may changes and save, without exiting, then use mount -a in the other to see what happens. If there's no output, fine; if there is, I simply go back to the other shell, correct whatever I did wrong, save and try again. Works great for editing any config file that can be easily tested.

No. I was referring to the fact that most of the veterans using the VA either aren't disabled or are getting treated for conditions that have nothing to do with the service, and if it weren't for us, 90% of the people working for the VA would be out of work.

Somewhere else in this thread I mentioned that I had cataract surgery done by the VA. There's a very small chance that I developed cataracts because I worked on CW radar in the Navy, but if so, there's no way of proving it. I never set foot ashore in 'Nam, so there's very little chance that my Type II diabetes has anything to do with Agent Orange. And yet, I get medical care for these and other conditions from the VA, and because I'm on a very limited income, I'm not charged. If the VA didn't provide that kind of care and only dealt with conditions that were directly related to the service, it would be far, far smaller, and that's what I was talking about.

Agreed, and that's why I've been careful to make it clear that it's my own personal experience, and that of my friends. I only know what the quality of service is here in the Los Angeles area, because that's where I live and where I get my care. Yes, there are some bad apples, and possibly the management at some facilities encourages that attitude, but I can't testify to that because I haven't seen it. And, I still find it hard to believe that people are being blocked from getting proper care in this case because of malice, because I've not seen the slightest suggestion as to what reason there'd be for VA management to have such an attitude toward total strangers.

No, or at least that's not why I need hearing aids. I have what's called an artillery notch: a loss of hearing acuity at certain frequencies caused by mechanical damage, but the loss isn't high enough for compensation. I get my hearing tested every two years, but it hasn't degraded enough as yet to change my rating.

I don't know if they've invented the microwave equivalent of a laser...

As it so happens, the maser was invented several years before the laser, and the laser was originally called an "optical maser."

Ah. I'm now priority six: broke as hell, but with a zero-percent service connected disability. I have hearing problems that can be traced back to being exposed to too much outgoing shore support back on the Gun Line in '72. It's not enough for compensation, but I do get my hearing aids and batteries for free, and get pushed ahead of people like you when I need access to a limited resource. I'm not sure, but I may have gotten a benefit from this once. After I had my first cataract surgery, I was told that they couldn't schedule my second for six months, so they put me on a waiting list. My second eye was taken care of only six weeks later. I can't be sure, of course, that I bumped somebody else, but I've always wondered about it.

The VA folks you have encountered are all rank-and-file types and none of them top brass, correct?

I won't say that I've ever encountered any of the top brass, but I have had a number of interactions with managers of various levels. In one case, a manager apologized to me for slow service, explaining that although he was authorized to have twelve clerks, upper management had only given him five, and he'd not been able to pry the other seven loose from whatever else they were doing. And once, I was complaining about how far behind a department had gotten, I was asked by a suit to discuss the issue. It turned out that this department was under investigation for exactly that, and they needed my testimony to help find out just what was happening and why. I even got a call, once, from the manager in charge of a small community clinic because I'd complained about a complete lack of common sense in their phlebotomist. (He'd insisted on taking blood samples from orders that were several years old but not signed off, even though I had paperwork with me showing exactly what tests I needed.) The next time I came in, the phlebotomist told me how sorry he was and that it wouldn't happen again.

Did you all use the same VA hospital?

Not all VA facilities are hospitals. Yes, some of us used the same VA hospital, but others get their care at a clinic that's closer to where they live. Depending on what I need, I use both, giving an overlap and a broader perspective. Although they're both in the Los Angeles area, neither one of them has any authority over the other. What happens in other parts of the country I don't know, but I have no reason to think that my experiences aren't typical.

All I can say is, what I reported is not just my own personal experience, but that of every vet I know who uses the VA. I'm sorry that you ran across a set of bad apples, and that they did your father's condition so much damage. And, I'll agree that the psych departments are probably the worst; I needed help from them at one point and I had to fight with the person doing the original write-up to get her to describe my complaints as I told them to her, instead of re-writing them to fit her own pre-conceived ideas. (She simply couldn't understand that I could be unemployed, broke and depressed without being violent and/or suicidal.)

I'm a 'Nam vet and I get all of my health care from the VA. With very, very rare exceptions, everybody I've dealt with over the last several decades has understood that if it weren't for people like me, they wouldn't have their government jobs. Once in a while, I'll grant, there's a paper-pusher who's more interested in making sure that the forms are filled out than in giving good service, but almost everybody who is involved in caring for veterans and their dependents gives good, prompt, cheerful service. If the VA has been denying that dioxins in C-123s is a hazard, there are many possible reasons, but malice is the least likely of all. As in everything else, ignorance is always a much more probable reason.

The oil and coal industries will make lots and lots of money regardless of what the climate does. Maybe they won't make quite as much if things get hotter, but they won't be hurting, either. However, grad students in various climate-related disciplines and post-docs have to worry about whatever grants are paying their expenses, and nontenured instructors have to publish or perish, and that means writing what their supervisors want to see and/or getting past the peer review process to get published. Now, if the students are under the impression that their work won't be accepted if it doesn't "toe the line," or the instructors believe that buying in to AGW is the only way to get published, can you blame them for writing that type of paper? It doesn't need a vast, global conspiracy, just large numbers of people looking out for their own best interests and writing what they think is expected of them.

There's another way that "predicting" old data is important: if you're designing a model that's supposed to predict what the climate will be in twenty years, it's a good test to give it data from twenty years ago and see how close it comes to predicting the present. If it can't do that, you probably shouldn't trust what it says about the future.

One thing I'd like explained is how do climate scientists calculate the Earth's average temperature? I know that it can't be a direct measurement, so I'd expect them to take what they consider an appropriate number of measurements, from various places, and calculate the mean. However, I've never seen the process described, including how they decide which locations to include, which to exclude and why. I'd like to think that the information is out there, but I'm only a layman, with limited time to spend on researching matters of this type. If anybody out there has an appropriate link, I'd be happy to look at it and try to learn from it.