> Fix welfare; and by "fix" I mean "nuke from orbit" and start over from scratch. Welfare is hopelessly
> broken, because it is no longer the temporary assistance program it was intended to be but has
> become a system which ensures people remain a slave to it.

Somewhat curious as to how the changes to what you term "welfare" which were put in place by the Clinton Administration and Congress specifically to address the concerns you note have been undone? Because I have seen no sign of such undoing either in Congress or the state governments; just the opposite if anything.

> I know multiple people who are struggling financially and are receiving assistance, want to get off
> it but because their industries are dead, or are unable to perform their old jobs, have sought
> alternate work, but taking a lower-paying job as a temporary stepping stone results in losing all
> assistance, including food stamps, which leaves them in a worse predicament than they started out in.

That's an entirely different problem from that of "welfare" you started out with, and one which is far less tractable (particularly given the social constraints imposed on the US by its 1%).

sPh

> he F-111 may have failed

It certainly failed against its original spec, but as a medium bomber it had no equal. The RAAF just retired their last batch and there is nothing in the arsenal (the non-Russian arsenal anyway) that comes even close to replacing them for Australia's sea control requirements.

sPh

> I believe weapons development of this type was always done by contractors. NASA never built rockets, the Navy never
> built ships and the Army/Air Force never built planes.

Both the US Navy and the Army built airplanes in the 1910-194x time period, and did so in part so that they could stay on top of manufacturing technology and costing to allow better management of contracted production. I believe the Navy has also built its own ships from time to time for the same reason, and it certainly maintained very large design bureaus through at least the 1970s which did much of the research, engineering, design, and project management of ship construction.

sPh

> If Gardacil prevents 90% of those cases (it's a very effective vaccine), then vaccination
> has an effective cost of approximately $157,000 per case (assuming we amortize the initial
> 14Bn hit over 20 years).
>
> I understand there are other public health benefits than simply prevention of cervical cancer,
> but let's hope we get a biosimilar quickly to drive the cost of vaccination down significantly.

Even on a pure cost/benefit basis the key is that cervical cancer hits women around the 20-25 age range, which means their value-of-life is in the $3 million range. Very much a win by public policy analysis alone (not to say a human suffering analysis given the young age at death).

sPh

> You don't have to use Google if you don't want to.

That's really not true. It is becoming essentially impossible to get a job, deal with a hospital, open a utility account, enroll in a school, etc etc etc without having a solid accessible e-mail address and using a variety of web services. You might be able to escape one of the big providers (e.g. Google) but you essentially cannot function in a modern society and escape them all.

sPh

In other words, CERN studies lack of connection between cosmic rays and climate change.

sPh

> The ability to sell all a company's IT needs from datacenter to desktop was
> actually a non-trivial advantage over IBM for a lot of procurement situations,
> this means they will forfeit that advantage going forward and lose server sales.

As long as the master vendor takes ownership of the commodity product (specs, warranty, service, etc) does it matter what the name is on the box? Historically IBM would (re)sell you almost anything except Amdahl, and I have purchased plenty of non-IBM stuff from them over the years as part of larger contracts. Same thing should apply to HP, and eventually they will have greater flexibility to offer other brands besides the ex-HP PC units if it makes sense to do so.

sPh

> An awful lot of people the world over, especially in the US, do not
> fetishize anonymity to anywhere near the extent that you do.

Perhaps you could expand a little on why you chose the word 'fetishize' in that sentence instead of, say, 'value'.

sPh

Does anyone really like 3D, particularly in the home environment? One or maybe two 3D movies per half-decade is OK, but I don't hear (or see in line at the theater) any great demand for 3D other than among Hollywood marketing execs.

sPh

> To be fair, Facebook had to customize both PHP and MySQL to get
> "serious" throughput out of them... naturally this is an example of the
> OSS model triumphing, but it does suggest that there was some truth to the idea.

Also to be fair, Facebook's business model does not require transactional integrity and a 95% or so success rate in committing updates is acceptable to them, so with that model the advantages of an Oracle or DB2 are not necessary. If Facebook guaranteed commits to its customers the situation would be different.

sPh

Not every nation/culture on Earth uses the concept of the fixed "Legal Name" as used in the US. Even in the US there are many situations where it is generally believed that one "must" provide some sort of government-issued ID showing one's "legal name" where that is not actually the case.

sPh

George RR Martin has 2 pages on his web site of people who named their babies after characters in Game of Thrones (and not just the relatively good characters either!).

sPh

Throw TrackMeNot in there too to confuse the sniffers installed at your ISP.

sPh

Better Privacy + Cookie Monster + separate browser just for Facebook. Seems to do a fairly good job in total.

sPh

Or you could go here:

http://www.sap.com/solutions/business-suite/erp/index.epx

sPh

By the way, my posts in no way constitute an endorsement or anti-endorsement of SAP; purely informational ;-)