There is also http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/ and http://thelotteryfilm.com/ which is a look at charter schools in DC & NYC as well as the problems in the system itself.

Part of the problem is that people (such as yourself) keep framing the charter/voucher issue as an "attack" on public education when its nothing of the sort, people are not advocating for shutting down public schools and the only way charters & vouchers will "take money away" from public schools is if they perform better. What people are advocating for is choice, if the current system really is superior then it won't face any problems with charters or vouchers, if it is endemically broken then reform will be forced or the system will simply die.

For people who claim we can reform the current system what evidence is there that this will even happen? Reform has been promised for decades but every year the system gets more and more expensive while delivering poorer results, this is absolutely no evidence the system is even capable of being reformed. Administrative overheads in schools are absurd, and absurdities such as the fact it costs $300k and 11 months to fire a teacher in NYC (assuming it is not blocked by one of the dozens of boards and comities involved), to the extent that the average cost to send a child to a single year of K-12 is now $13.2k, the average private school costs $8.7k.

Since the politicians and unions who run the school systems are unwilling to fix the problems charters and vouchers are the best option.

Try living in Massachusetts. Carrying a gun outside the home is almost impossible now.

No. The liberal reading of it started with the FDR administration, when SCOTUS started ruling parts of New Deal unconstitutional he proposed to expand the number of justices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Procedures_Reform_Bill_of_1937) and while this bill ultimately failed SCOTUS got the message and stopped getting in Führer's way.

It wasn't until the late 90's where SCOTUS started getting some teeth again and stopped agreeing that pretty much everything the federal government is permitted to do is covered under interstate commerce.

Based on that absurd valuation the average Facebook profile is worth $225.

The average cost to market for a new drug is now $1.4b (using the aggregate of all developments method) and 7 years from patent to commercially viable drug. This gives them 3/4 years to recoup their original investment so, as you mentioned, having such a small user group has a massive impact on price point.

You are confusing cost and exposure. Total TARP exposure was about $413b of an authorized ~$700b spend. As of a week ago $318b of this has been repaid (either through returning cash or sale of stock) leaving $95b outstanding.

Out of the $95b outstanding ~$41b is outstanding cash loans that either need to be repaid or converted to stock, the remainder ($54b) is stock the Treasury still owns and has yet to dispose of.

Net profits of the program stand at $58b, number is current state assuming no other stock sales or loans are repaid so will end up being significantly higher than this, so didn't actually cost tax payers a penny.

See CHIP and WIC.

That isn't the question, the question is does the US healthcare system do better or worse in treating illness in general (so for an average person) and the answer is it does better.

Dealing with the gap in treatment options between rich & poor is a different issue entirely and one that shouldn't focus on changing a system that maintains such a high average. The focus should be on costs and what influences them; hospitals are already mostly non-profit (less then 8% of hospitals with general admittance are for-profit), drug costs can be brought down by removing the import restrictions and ending the over-regulation of the approval process, primary care prices can be brought down by not stopping doctors from offering health subscriptions etc etc.

Here is NiH on the issue with real data rather then crap from a WHO study based on a few bits of census data like the two links you gave, it shows US as leading the pack.

Perhaps in future check the sources on the crap you link to.

The metrics that actually matter to the people making use of the system, how more/less likely you are to die of ailment x in country y, shows quite the opposite. If you are diagnosed with any form of Cancer in the US you are more likely to still be alive after 5 years than anywhere else in the world (in some places, such as the UK, the survival rate is half of what it is in the US) and the numbers for almost every other medical problem shows the same pattern with the US being first or top three.

Other metrics such as accessibility the US is a leader in too. Access to doctors is 2nd only to South Korea, wait times for a hip replacement is 1.4% of what it is in the UK and 22% of the OCED average and on and on and on.

The crisis in US healthcare is that people are delusional enough to believe that insurance should cover regular medical expenses, such as doctors visits and the odd prescription drug, and as such pay absurd amounts of money for coverage they don't need; 25 million of us understand this and make a conscious choice to not buy it. If you are under 60 and not chronically ill you can save thousands every year by making use of a HSA & extremely high deductable policy but apparently if you suggest insurance is the problem not the cure you just hate poor people.

Extradition orders are only honored when the action a country is seeking to extradite for is illegal in both countries. This is why they will be in front of a judge today/tomorrow who will rule if the "crimes" they are accused of meet the dual criminality requirements.

Monopoly? Microsoft has a 0% market share in tablets and 5.8% in mobile.

Streets are wider, cities are more spread out and the distances are longer; as a result trenching is economical in Europe but not so much here.

> But that's what happens when you base your whole economy on slavery and blame other people because you can't compete with free market mass industrialization.

Actualy somewhat the inverse is true. The South traded their cotton with Europe and brought back technology and other goods with them. In order to protect the industrial cities in the North the federal government imposed heavy import duties on almost everything the south was buying up. Ultimately this was the sticking point in discussions; The south agreed, in principal, to end slavery on the condition that the economic protectionism of the north was also ended at the same time but this was ultimately rejected.

Neither side had a free market and both wanted some form of protectionism be it slavery or import taxes.

> This sounds great and all, but it seems a shame that they've got to bribe people into developing such a device. A portable, multi-purpose medical diagnostic tool isn't sufficiently desirable on its own? You'd think something like this would have been in development for years already.

It has been. The x prizes are about encouraging startups and outsiders to the fields in question to become involved and so both bring fresh eyes to the problem and provide an influx of tallent in to a specific sub-sector of an industry. With publicly funded efforts (NiH) and alike things get even more murky with various restrictions on how resultant technologies would be used.

An existing multinational funding a project like this internally would be mired in beurocracy and would be competing with internal politics where people have established their careers supporting and selling older forms of diagnostic equipment. A startup doesn't face these, can be run on a shoestring, and in addition the prise money and the massive publicity winning would bring provides a massive boost in their attempts to recieve funding.