You seem to have an odd view of government contracting. It's not as if a contract entails little more than passing big bags of money back and forth and laughing maniacally all the way to the bank. A company would not place a bid on a system they knew was impossible. They have to be very detailed in their bid or they get reamed big time. The basis of estimates are very often questioned - how did you come up with these numbers? What are your assumptions? How can you justify this schedule, etc How could any company answer those questions if they legitimately thought the whole idea was impossible? They'd get caught with their pants down.

You do realize that most of the time the profit only comes when they deliver something right? As part of successful tests. Naturally, the company gets paid to do the work, but the profit margins are rigorously whittled down. You don't make billions of dollars just designing and testing these things - unless you actually deliver the product you're more likely to lose money - the equivalent of marking time until you run out of cash. And trust me, if the government doesn't see SOME results they will pull the plug.

I don't know why people always assume when they hear headlines like 'Billion dollar government project fails to work!' that they think the companies somehow pocketed one billion dollars of profit and ran off saying 'Hahaha, I KNEW it wasn't going to work all along SUCKERS!'

This argument only holds if all of these services are offering basically the same product. They are not. Tax preparers range from good to bad just like any other service. Due to a lack of a baseline service (which the government might offer, still for a set fee) the basis of comparison between all of these services is absent or difficult to find. If there was a government alternative that you were certain wouldn't land you in jail and maintained a certain cost, then the other services would either have to compete on price or quality more transparently than now.

I'll assume you mean life on Earth. On Titan there are hydrocarbons without a bunch of dead dinosaurs, so it's a different story there.

See, I'm just not convinced of this. In the long term, yes, the cartels would go away. But in the short term let's say we open it up: drugs are legal - all of them, period. And anyone can make them, grow them, buy them, sell them or whatever. But not without a license of course. There's no way the US is going to treat things that can legitimately kill you more leniently than alcohol (which can kill you pretty easily). So the market gets opened up and anyone who wants to get into the (legitimate) drug dealing business needs to get the license, get the supply, and then set up a successful shop or whatnot to sell the stuff. But that takes time. It won't happen that the week after pot or anything else is legalized you'll be able to go down to your corner dealer and get legitimate drugs - those are still illegal! Those are still coming from the cartels and there's no way they are going to get the licenses and pass all the tests to import the stuff. The US doesn't look kindly on killings, kidnappings, and all of the other nastiness the cartels have been propagating for all these years - they still won't be allowed to sell drugs in the US. So in the short term - the absolute short term - the situation stays the same - shady drug dealers and money flowing to the cartels.

And where are we going to get our supply when we do get around to setting up legitimate supply chains? South America. True, you can cook up meth anywhere and grow pot anywhere, so we won't need to worry about that. But for some things you'll have to go where the supply is - right in the cartels back yard. And are the cartels going to like that? No - they hate competition and they have guns. This will bring the war to a head where legitimate drug suppliers want access to the growers that the cartel has under their thumbs so THEY can have their cut. In 25 years after legalization the cartels will be gone, but in the short term they won't go away because they have a stranglehold on the supply and don't want to give up their cash cow.

In short, even if we legalize drugs the cartels aren't going to pack up and go away. They aren't an advocacy group that disbands when their goal is achieved. Even if we legalize drugs they will still be a criminal organization with extensive supply and delivery operations that were just as illegal as the day before drugs were legalized. They don't benefit from the US legalizing drugs in any way. We still will have to deal with them no matter what changes we make to drug policy.

Via statutory rape. Basically, any sex someone under 18 has with anyone is illegal - they can't legally consent so it's always rape. Two 17 year-olds consensually having sex? Illegal. a 40 year-old and a 10 year old? Same kind of illegal.

So the DA trots out 'contributing to the delinquency of a minor' because (with a little bit of ignorance and a little bit of legal sleight of hand) he figures that there's no legal method for a minor to use birth control, so they're instructing the students on how to commit illegal acts.

It's a hell of a reach and it seems the only reason he's doing it is to prevent sex ed from being taught because he has an agenda. I'm assuming he couldn't get himself elected to a body that makes laws, so he's modifying the definition of the job he has to include interpreting laws he doesn't like out of the books. And Republicans whined about 'legislating from the bench'. Only when it works against them I suppose.

It's anthropogenic climate change. It doesn't like it when you say it's anthropomorphic.

Ugh, sounds like every homeowner's association here in Florida. Old people patrolling the subdivision looking for minor infractions and arguing endlessly at meetings about pointless and small issues because they have nothing better to do. Committees doing everything they can to write new rules to regulate how people live in their houses. A subclass of people who live in the subdivision but only rent and therefore have no say while their owners two states over don't care at all.

No. Thank. You.

Because catastrophic and non-catastrophic work differently for health than anything else. If I crash my car then yep, that's $20K. Catastrophic. However, I have choices. I can take the $20K and get a cheaper but equivalent used car, I can just not get a car at all and bank it, etc.

Health can be like that. Yeah, I'll go in for my 'maintenance' visits for physicals and my small problems like colds, infections, etc. I've got no problem with paying direct for that - I'm a proponent of HSAs. And then maybe I break my leg, oops, that's catastrophic, but it will heal. So insurance picks that one up and in a few months I'm good as new. But I don't really have the option not to fix my leg. It's rather necessary. So that comparison is broken - health insurance isn't car insurance.

But if I have AIDS, or Crohn's disease, how do you classify that? If you had a car that required thousands of dollars of repairs monthly, you'd just sell it for what you could and get a new one, or use a lemon law, or sue the bad repair man who screwed it up like that and get a new one. But of course, you can't get a new body.

So what do you do? You keep it going. If it gets really expensive, then you have to ask is it worth it? It's a big question, especially with human life.

So the question isn't catastrophic vs. maintenance because you can't just replace hardware (ie, your body) and get new. Well, not yet anyhow. It's the expensive maintenance that we have to pay for (because otherwise, someone will die) that's the problem.

Other insurances don't handle that. Flood insurance in the midwest? They got tired of reimbursing people who kept building on flood plains, so the state stepped in, bought the property and razed everything on it. That's the closest analogue I can think of and if we worked the same way with health insurance we'd just buy out the rest of the person's life and kill them. Dunno about that one.

In some cases, but in this case it's really a fix for the insurance system. You see, insurance works in most places because of the large large number of people who have signed up, put in money and take a modest amount out (based on what those super-smart actuarials say). What happens now is that some people say 'Well, I don't go to the doctor, so I won't pay for health insurance!' thus depriving the system of healthy payers. Then the insurance company says 'Screw this, there aren't enough people paying in to support the diabetics and cancer patients. We've gotta cut them loose.'

So the bill does two things: Whoever you are, you MUST buy health insurance (and you get tax breaks for doing it, penalties for not). This brings the healthy people who didn't pay in before back. Then, it forces the insurance companies to actually cover people. Pre-existing conditions? Deathly illness? Doesn't matter - the insurance company now has all of the healthy people it needs to float the sick people, so the bill takes away the ability to perform some of the more dirty tricks.

The way I see it, the whole bill brings insurance closer back to how it it supposed to work. Health insurance is a necessity in the US today. I want the whole system to get revamped, costs to go down and people to have more choice and technology. But for right now it's inhuman to deny coverage because of preexisting conditions or because you actually got sick. At the same time, it's disingenuous to only buy health insurance when you get sick. This bill ought to head both of those problems in the right direction.

Like if you were obviously drunk? He'd be well within his rights to withhold the keys in that situation - so it's not always wrong. Need a better analogy.

Sadly, they're justified. How many 'error messages' do you get, click through and you can still do what you wanted to do? The users have more to gain from just trying to click it to go away than they do stopping, waiting for IT support on hold, reading the error, trying to keep their work from being erased and fixing the error at the same. Users just want to work and there's a good chance they'll be able to do that if they just click OK.

Moral of the story? I'd say

1. Data is key. If there is an 'error' that has the ability to cause lost work, make sure that as part of an error process all open files are saved with a different extension (ie, Really Important Letter.doc.crash)
2. Don't bother the user if it's not important. If they can still do their work after swatting away dialogs like flies then they will swat away dialogs like flies. Because they just want to get their work done.
3. If the error is important enough that they can't get their work done, the error had damn well better not run until the problem is fixed. Otherwise you'll have people using a potentially unstable program, wasting their time and possibly their data.

Well, I always figured the puppy scheme wasn't to engender good feelings in the users, but instead to increase the message distance (communication theory term) between similar messages for the user. Thus a 'PC LOAD LETTER' type message is rightly gibberish to them, and who can tell one gibberish from another? But a puppy.. everyone knows puppies! Plus it's odd enough to get your attention... what does a puppy have to do with my program? They just might read it out of curiosity and fix their own problem.

True, but keep in mind that this land isn't necessarily large, contiguous tracts of land sitting idle. Much of it is 'buffer' land along the edges of current farmland. Consider a plot of farmland next to a lake: you could either farm right up to the edge of the lake or leave a buffer strip to help control erosion. A lot of the money that the government provides is for such strips to help control erosion. So it's not necessarily true that all of that land could be put to good use - it's already being used to help increase the value of the farmland around it.

Haven't you noticed that all of the Ancients advanced technology on Stargate-SG1 looks like it's made of stone? Super-advanced wormhole-creating intergalactic transportation device? Yeah, made of stone. Control panel for said device? Big stone buttons. Transport rings? Stone. Arguably, the stone and wood look has been done by sci-fi for a while.