Cuba has some of the worst healthcare in the world. Here is a lecture by Yuri Maltsev, an ex-soviet economic adviser, describing one of his many trips to Cuba with some of his students. I've linked it to the relevant part of his lecture, it lasts about 5 minutes.

I read another one of your comments and you state something completely different, namely that for the amount they spend healthcare they have low infant mortality, low maternal mortality and relatively high life expectancy. This say nothing about the quality of their healthcare which is what you seemed to be saying in the comment I'm replying to.

I live in Canada near it's capital city and when my friend got a severe concussion and his head was bleeding it took him 12 hours in the emergency room to get help, they thought my sister had an aneurysm and it took 6 months before she got testing and it took my ex-girlfriend 8 months to get tested for cancer. There is a saying we have here: "There are those Canadians who love socialized medicine and there are those who have used it."

Austrian economics teaches that value is subjective. It also advocates ordinal utility as opposed to cardinal utility. Now it's nearly impossible to know what everyone's subjective valuations and were it sits on their ordinal scale. But if people are discussing a product it means that's it's important to them, chances are that they place a higher value on it and place it higher on their value scale.

The top-down approach hasn't served us too well when it comes to predicting so this bottom-up approach is actually kind of exciting. If they can get good at predicting the data, IMHO, this has real potential.

"Currently it looks like more liberal-inclined individuals are registering, but it would make for a healthier system if more viewpoints were represented." Translation: Currently we only have 20 some year olds who know nothing about economics or the world. It would be nice to get some older people in here because currently we are so far left we might as well just rename ourselves to "the communist party".

I've been an AdWords client before and it' not any better. Back in '08' they adjusted all advertising to suddenly cost 10 times the price because certain things they wanted on my website were missing. It took about a year before I got a straight answer so I could make the changes and start advertising again.

It wasn't a big deal for me, but a few people I know make their living off the products they sell online. Getting your source of income cut off because you don't have a site map or their robots deem that the content on your site is not up to par is fine, as long as they tell you about it so you can makes the changes! I loath having to deal with Google about as much having to deal with the IRS.

Other users are finding themselves locked out of their accounts without an explanation of how they violated the ToS.

Google being Google.

A similar thing happened to me back in '08 with my AdWords account. They just made all advertising suddenly cost 10 times the price because certain things they wanted on my website were missing. It took about a year before I got a straight answer so I could make the changes and start advertising again.

I don't know if it's the strong engineering culture, but Google have always been terrible at client services. I love their products, but whenever I have client relationship to them (a.k.a. giving them money), I'm always left severely wanting. It's too bad, because not only do I love their other services, I really appreciate their contributions to the world. I would much rather spend money there then Bing or Yahoo if only they didn't make it so frustrating.

If he creates a game that sells millions of copies it's because he's created experience that people want. It may not be re-inventing the wheel, but if people purchase it, it's because they want the familiar experience but in this new and creative perspective. It's precisely this bizarre sense of entitlement, of him needing to cater to your view of what he should produce or what you believe would give the industry "artistic legitimacy", that he's saddened by. Each time a new ID game is released, millions of people show they appreciate the creative direction his company is taking whether it fits your own narrow minded notion of creativity or not.

I personally love ID games, they are fun, thrilling and they games they produce have a better and more polished feel each time around. It's amazing that they can take the same concept, FPSs, and continuous reinvent them that they blow you away each time.

> Visuals are a solved problem, and the days of the tech demo are over.

Who wasn't blown away by the new Battlefield 3 previews? "Visuals are a solved problem" my ass!

Instead of shifting those dollars over why don't you just lower the tax burden on your citizens to help stimulate the economy and get out of your financial mess?

Government needs a certain amount of strength to protect people from economic predation and the return to a class based society where most people are virtual or actual slaves.

And the more power you give them to "protect you" to power it gives their banking/corporate friends. The left seems to think that we need more laws to protect us from economic predation which is of course created by the state through issued monopolies (patents, copyright), subsidies, unfair regulation etc. The right thinks we need protection from terrorists which is again created by the state by what's referred to by the CIA as blowback for meddling in the middle east (massive bombing campaigns, invasions, backing dictators). Advocates for both sides are asking the us government to take away our liberties to protect ourselves which only serves banking/corporate friends.

The libertarian stance is that government officials are fucking stupid and destructive (whether intentionally or unintentionally), let's give them least possible power and manage our own affairs.

But why do this, especially as there is no apparent causal link between quantum mechanics and the conscious mind?

I was under the impression that there was a link between consciousness and matter due to the observer problem. It really doesn't help that the wikipedia article has a bunch of [who's] and [citation needed].

Does someone with more knowledge about the subject care to explain?

The same can be said about most currencies nowadays. The difference is that this one can't be inflated.

... and don't want to suffer the ravages of inflation and want to hold a currency that is actually appreciating in value.

I agree that Vegas casinos will probably never use them since they are brick and mortar and can be stopped. But I can certainly see it used on the Internet for transactions between individuals, small companies that don't attract too much attention or even companies that are located in less oppressive regimes.

>What if GE got into the drug trade?

Then the money would go towards creating jobs instead of bailing out banks?

Another pseudo-economist out to tell us that an increase in productivity and a lowering living costs will be a net loss for society. Michio Kaku can you please take an economics 101 class before writing a book about the economic impact of anything. The general population is already economically illiterate and this only fuels the problem. Thanks.

And at least pretend to want to balance the budget?

I cannot imagine this taking off in any significant way. Can you imagine the sales person walking into ID Software and saying something like "What if gamers could smell Rage as well as see it? Huh? Huh? *Shrugs Eyebrows*

Don't give it away, invest it! We need jobs not temporary handouts!