The important thing to remember is that if it was so easy for him to get these documents, then that also means that there are about a million other people with the same clearance level as him who would find it equally easy. What's the betting that none of those are Chinese agents? Especially given how many Russian agents we've learned were working for the NSA and CIA during the cold war.

People focus on Snowden's disclosure as if it's possibly giving information to America's enemies (or, at least, not-so-friendly friends), but any of them that doesn't have a completely inept intelligence agency of their own will already have the information he's released. It was only secret from the people to whom these agencies should be accountable.

My main complaint is the seat backs. They seem to be the exact opposite of the shape of an ergonomic chair, so they push forward at the base (restricting leg room) and then have no support for the lower back. You could easily make the seats thinner and more comfortable, if you took a quick look at the shape of a human before designing them.

Why? If the person in front of me in a flight pushes their seat back, then it moves the bottom forward very slightly, so I get about half a centimetre of knee room, and it moves the (small) screen of the in-flight entertainment system closer to my eyes. The seats are designed not to be made more uncomfortable when the person in front of you leans back...

Universities do a lot of early work on various kinds of treatments, but the big cost is doing the big trials needed for getting FDA approval. That's out of the budget of most universities, and even if they come up with a revolutionary cure someone still needs to do that work before it can become widely available.

The UK can't run out of GBP, but can run out of purchasing power. If the government keeps printing money, then the value of the money goes down (which is great for exports, for a while, but it makes buying things made abroad difficult). Unless all of the medical supplies, everything that doctors buy, and all of the raw materials for making them is produced in the UK, that's not a sustainable strategy.

You might want to check the renewal terms. Prior to ACA, it was entirely legal to charge someone for insurance, then refuse to renew their insurance (or jack up the price to make it unaffordable) after the first year where they make claims for something that is likely to require ongoing treatment. And then they have a preexisting condition, so they couldn't get insurance from anyone else either.

You (and other posters in this thread) are making several assumptions that are not necessarily warranted:

• That the person needing the care will negotiate for it at the time when they need it
• That the person needing the care will negotiate individually, and not via some collective bargaining mechanism

The second point is why socialised health care and insurance companies have advantages over individuals in negotiating for care. An individual probably won't need to go to hospital in any given year, and very few of the ones that will need to can predict what treatment they will need in advance. In contrast, you can statistically work out roughly how many people in a country will need what kinds of treatment, with quite high accuracy. Negotiating to pay for them all together puts you in a much stronger bargaining position.

The big problem with this debate is that it conflates a whole range of choices in a single socialised medicine vs private medicine debate. In reality, there are a lot of points on the spectrum, depending on:

• Are hospitals owned and doctors employed by central government, local government, or private enterprise?
• Are medical services bought individually, as a private collective, at a local government level, or nationally?
• What mechanism is in place for judging the quality of care and for the payer to select between providers?
• Is payment by individuals based on need, ability to pay, or something in the middle?

The question of what role the free market plays is complex. Obviously, you can't have people who have just suffered a heart attack shopping around for the best value ambulance to take them to the best value hospital. But you can have, for example, a central government buying medical services for all citizens (which typically counts as socialised medicine in these debates), but having different medical centres competing for the business, especially if they're allowed to take private patients as well so that they can stay in business when they don't have the majority of the government contract.

Well, you can, apparently. They're going to be reelected, you know. Most of them.

I just want to quickly point out that the government did NOT "promise to pay you back at some indeterminate time in the future". After the shutdown was over, they decided to do it, just as most people thought they probably would (based on a similar decision 17 years ago) but during the shutdown there was no such promise.

Just because you have a contract that says you can be screwed, doesn't mean you're not getting screwed.

Sure, but it's a blank check to pay the bills those same politicians have already incurred. The debt limit doesn't stop Congress from spending too much money, because by the time it gets to that point, it's already far too late.

further

verb
[with object]
help the progress or development of (something); promote:
he had depended on using them to further his own career

Origin:

Old English furthor (adverb), furthra (adjective), fyrthrian (verb)

oxforddictionaries.com

Unfortunately I don't have access to the OED any more so don't know places where I can get dated citations of use, but it's a good thing you don't have to believe in facts for them to be true.

Technically, the USB2 support is a personal / evaluation use license, so you may not be allowed to use it without paying Oracle in some situations.