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Comment Re:US laws are not the best (Score 1, Offtopic) 582

You can't separate health care from the economy because the proposed changes are going to destroy the economy. Look at the Medicare system for an example of what government run health care will be like. Medicare is a gigantic Ponzi scheme that is scheduled to explode around 2018.

If you truly want to make health care more affordable, you have got to get rid insurance company lobbyists *and* trial lawyer lobbyists. We need comprehensive tort reform, and we need to promote price competition between health care providers. Consider this, Lasik eye surgery is not covered by most insurances, so most people have to pay for it themselves. Yet price competition has driven the cost down *drastically* in the past decade.

With enough competition, prices drop to the point where you don't need insurance for anything but catastrophic care. This whole concept of using insurance for routine care is part of the problem.

Space

Floating Cities On Venus 501

Geoffrey.landis writes "Some of you may have heard me talk about colonizing Venus. Well, for those who haven't, Universe Today is running story about floating cities on Venus. It's a reasonable alternative for space colonies — after all, the atmosphere of Venus (at about 50 km) is the most Earth-like environment in the solar system (other than Earth, of course). '50 km above the surface, Venus has air pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0C-50C range, a quite comfortable environment for humans. Humans wouldn't require pressurized suits when outside, but it wouldn't quite be a shirtsleeves environment. We'd need air to breathe and protection from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.'"

Comment Re:In the US no one wants to buy light cars (Score 1) 1320

Actually if you compare similar trim levels (an EX instead of an LX) to the hybrid, the cost difference is around $3000, which works out to be around 15% more, not 50% more. When I purchased mine, there was a $2100 federal tax credit which trimmed the premium to $900. I'm currently averaging 48 mpg. According to EPA, the hybrid gets 42 MPG combined. So I'm roughly 14% above EPA. A regular civic gets 29 MPG combined, assuming a driver would get 14% more than that gives a figure of 33MPG for the regular civic.

48/33 = 1.45, so the hybrid is getting 45% better gas mileage.

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