March Unemployment Rate: 4.7%

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
Irvine511 said:

continue to drink the Kool-Aid; the administration is nervous that no one else is anymore. it's much easier to regurgitate what the military and the administration tells you and quote misleading, out-of-context statistics.

STING, reality has bodyslammed you, continuously, on this issue. from WMDs to the danger SH presented to the wording of 1441 to Abu Ghraib to the reality on the ground to the strength of the insurgency to the brewing civil war.

but you're tenacity is commendable.

again: start another thread.
Given the declassifed documents from the regime itself that are point towards terror links, the existence of WMD programs that were in breach of UN resolutions, renewed dealings with Niger to reactivate uranium procurement, the vast sums of ilicit money flowing to the regime from Oil for Food and the political situation before 2003 with the rise of the Saddam Fedayeen I don't see how it is wrong to defend the removal of Saddam.

This administration is deficient, it has not been able to adequately enunciate the case for war and has failed to highlight what we know now, post-bellum, about the type of threat Saddam Hussein posed (it is not a simple, no-WMD stockpiles - no problem). Removing Saddam has removed a persistenct threat and has resulted in less people dying than if he was allowed to stay in power. It should have been done in 1991 sparing the world a decade of mass death and troops in SA.

Numbers of casualties in Iraq, attacks on coalition troops and civilians are important. Political developments in the country are also very important. It would be very true to say that when casualties are low with a downwards trend then it becomes more useful to focus on the delays in the political process to show a country on the very of all out Balkanisation.
 
Last edited:
AliEnvy said:


nbc, that comment demonstrates to me that you don't know about a) analyzing comparative statistics and b) how HDI is calculated.

Contrary to what you may think, size does not matter. :wink:

Actually it does matter and Alan Greenspan in fact has stated this very point. The United States does not have the highest per capita GDP in the world. Luxembourg, Ireland, and Norway all have higher per capita GDPs. In addition countries that , have favorable trading conditions, and abundent natural resources relative to population size, benefit in ways that a large country like the United States will not. Canada is dependent on the United States for its higher standard of living with 40% of its GDP coming from exports to the United States. In addition, many of these smaller countries with higher standards of living are also heavily dependent to a lesser degree on exports to the United States.

We should all remember that these rankings have changed over the years with countries going up and down relative to each other.

Here are the top 10 countries every 5 years since 1975:


1975

1. Switzerland
2. Denmark
3. Canada
4. Norway
5. United States
6. Netherlands
7. Sweden
8. Iceland
9. Japan
10. France


1980

1. Switzerland
2. Norway
3. United States
4. Canada
5. Iceland
6. Japan
7. Denmark
8. Netherlands
9. Sweden
10. France


1985

1. Canada
2. United States
3. Norway
4. Switzerland
5. Iceland
6. Japan
7. Netherlands
8. Denmark
9. Sweden
10. France


1990

1. Canada
2. United States
3. Iceland
4. Norway
5. Japan
6. Switzerland
7. Netherlands
8. France
9. Finland
10. Belgium


1995

1. Norway
2. Canada
3. Australia
4. United States
5. Belgium
6. Sweden
7. Netherlands
8. Japan
9. France
10. United Kingdom


2000

1. Australia
2. Sweden
3. Norway
4. Belgium
5. United Kingdom
6. Canada
7. Iceland
8. Switzerland
9. Finland
10. Netherlands

11. United States


2005

1. Norway
2. Iceland
3. Australia
4. Luxembourg
5. Canada
6. Sweden
7. Switzerland
8. Ireland
9. Belgium
10. United States



To all you Reagan bashers, note the United States HDI ranking in 1985 and 1990 right after the first and second Reagan administrations!:wink:
 
No more posts focusing on Iraq, please. I'm willing to let the occasional one-line side jab slide, but there are way too many posts in here fully devoted to things that have nothing to do with the thread topic.
 
STING, you have still said NOTHING to justify the US's current 10th place standing on HDI.

Also, GDP is #1, per capita GDP is #4 (as I stated earlier).

If I were American, I would find the comparatively lower measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, poverty etc. absolutely unacceptable given GDP. As a non-American, I'll just call it as I see it, mediocre. We can agree to disagree and leave it at that.

Btw, if you want to get into Canada, natural resources, NAFTA and the US's typical pattern of FUCK OFF foreign policy, start another thread.
 
What is the per-capita government spending on health within the USA relative to those with socialised healthcare systems?
 
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=27348

USA Spends More Per Capita on Health Care Than Other Nations, Study Finds

Article Date: 13 Jul 2005 - 10:00am (PDT)

The United States spends more on health care per capita than other industrialized nations but does not receive more services, according to a study published on Tuesday in the July/August issue of... Health Affairs, the Los Angeles Times reports. For the study -- led by Gerard Anderson, a health policy professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health -- researchers analyzed the health care costs of 30 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=8800

USA wastes more on health care bureaucracy than it would cost to provide health care to all of the uninsured

Main Category: Nursing News
Article Date: 28 May 2004

The U.S. wastes more on health care bureaucracy than it would cost to provide health care to all of the uninsured. Administrative expenses will consume at least $399.4 billion out of total health expenditures of $1,660.5 billion in 2003. Streamlining administrative overhead to Canadian levels would save approximately $286.0 billion in 2003, $6,940 for each of the 41.2 million Americans who were uninsured as of 2001. This is substantially more than would be needed to provide full insurance coverage.
 
A_Wanderer said:
Given the declassifed documents from the regime itself that are point towards terror links, the existence of WMD programs that were in breach of UN resolutions, renewed dealings with Niger to reactivate uranium procurement, the vast sums of ilicit money flowing to the regime from Oil for Food and the political situation before 2003 with the rise of the Saddam Fedayeen I don't see how it is wrong to defend the removal of Saddam.

This administration is deficient, it has not been able to adequately enunciate the case for war and has failed to highlight what we know now, post-bellum, about the type of threat Saddam Hussein posed (it is not a simple, no-WMD stockpiles - no problem). Removing Saddam has removed a persistenct threat and has resulted in less people dying than if he was allowed to stay in power. It should have been done in 1991 sparing the world a decade of mass death and troops in SA.


if anyone wants to start another thread on this, i'm happy to participate. i think this gets at what the current situation is: there's a case to be made for the removal of SH, but the manner in which it has been done by this administration has virtually guaranteed failure.

i'm willing to start it if we can discuss things in a civil manner, as A_W has done above, and if we can get away from the cut-and-paste carpetbombing of meaningless numbers and exclamation points that has been said a million-and-one times and does little more than turn people off from discussion because everyone has heard it before, a milllion times, by the same poster.
 
Irvine511 said:




i'm willing to start it if we can discuss things in a civil manner, as A_W has done above, and if we can get away from the cut-and-paste carpetbombing of meaningless numbers and exclamation points that has been said a million-and-one times and does little more than turn people off from discussion because everyone has heard it before, a milllion times, by the same poster.

What turns people off are meaningless personal attacks on other members of the forum, not the simple expression of ones OPINION on a topic.
 
STING2 said:


What turns people off are meaningless personal attacks on other members of the forum, not the simple expression of ones OPINION on a topic.



what's personal?

i've said nothing about you as a person, and everything about your "discussion" style, which isn't condusive to discussion at all and a big reason why so many of the frequent FYM posters stay away whenever you enter.
 
AliEnvy said:
STING, you have still said NOTHING to justify the US's current 10th place standing on HDI.

Also, GDP is #1, per capita GDP is #4 (as I stated earlier).

If I were American, I would find the comparatively lower measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, poverty etc. absolutely unacceptable given GDP. As a non-American, I'll just call it as I see it, mediocre. We can agree to disagree and leave it at that.

Btw, if you want to get into Canada, natural resources, NAFTA and the US's typical pattern of FUCK OFF foreign policy, start another thread.

I think you bring out some interesting points with your post on Health Care. The United States spends more per person on Health Care than any country in the world, but because of wastes and the oversized bureaucracy, Americans do not receive the level of Health Care that they could. The problems don't stem from a lack of funding as many democrats would claim, but from failure to reform the system in order to reduce waste.

Provided the United States is able to reform its health care system, this could result in a higher HDI rank relative to other countries.

I have said plenty to justify why it is not abnormal or mediocre, for the United States to be at #10 on the HDI. Alan Greenspan, one of the greatest Economist of are times has said the same thing.

No one would ever describe Ireland's Standard of Living as mediocre because they have the 2nd highest Per Capita GDP in the world, but only the 8th highest standard of living. I challenge you to find a single source on Ireland that would express that Ireland's standard of living is mediocre because they only rank 8th in standard of living in the world, while their GDP per capita is 2nd.

The GDP per Capita chart never exactly matches the HDI chart. There are reasons why smaller countries have an easier time charting high on the HDI chart. As I have shown above these rankings change every year, and this years ranking for 2006 could have the USA per-capita GDP rank and HDI rank more closely aligned than it was last year.
 
Irvine511 said:




what's personal?

i've said nothing about you as a person, and everything about your "discussion" style, which isn't condusive to discussion at all and a big reason why so many of the frequent FYM posters stay away whenever you enter.

Talking about another persons discussion style is personal. Your talking about something that person does and not a political topic. The current thread has just as many post from different members of the forum as the average thread over the past month. It has one of the highest post totals of any thread over the past month.
 
STING2 said:

Provided the United States is able to reform its health care system, this could result in a higher HDI rank relative to other countries.

There you have it...finally. :wink:

STING2 said:
Alan Greenspan, one of the greatest Economist of are times has said the same thing.

As the keeper of the most recent bull market cycle (18 years plus or minus some hiccups) there are many fat cats who owe him a great deal of thanks. His retirement was well-timed. As a sidenote I'm not sure history will remember him as the greatest economist of our time.


STING2 said:

No one would ever describe Ireland's Standard of Living as mediocre because they have the 2nd highest Per Capita GDP in the world, but only the 8th highest standard of living.

I haven't said anyone's standard of living is mediocre. I've maintained that a large gap in HDI and GDP is mediocre.

If I were Irish I'd sure be questioning it.
 
AliEnvy said:


There you have it...finally. :wink:



As the keeper of the most recent bull market cycle (18 years plus or minus some hiccups) there are many fat cats who owe him a great deal of thanks. His retirement was well-timed. As a sidenote I'm not sure history will remember him as the greatest economist of our time.




I haven't said anyone's standard of living is mediocre. I've maintained that a large gap in HDI and GDP is mediocre.

If I were Irish I'd sure be questioning it.

So what is a large gap in HDI and GDP per capita, a medium gap, and a small gap?
 
Anecdotally I would say that for any country whose per capita GDP ranks higher than HDI, that means health and education are lacking...the bigger the gap, the more reform needed in health and education to close the gap.
 
STING2 said:


Talking about another persons discussion style is personal. Your talking about something that person does and not a political topic. The current thread has just as many post from different members of the forum as the average thread over the past month. It has one of the highest post totals of any thread over the past month.



half the posts in this thread are by you and one other poster -- an involved discussion this is not, and it demonstrates what i was talking about earlier.

but this is idiotic, and proves my point.
 
Irvine511 said:




half the posts in this thread are by you and one other poster -- an involved discussion this is not, and it demonstrates what i was talking about earlier.

but this is idiotic, and proves my point.

You'll find that the average thread over the years will usually have close to half of its post from two or three people.
 
AliEnvy said:
Do you mean enrolment or tested knowledge?

I suppose you could say both as well as resources. I also don't mean just for undergraduates but graduates as well. There is a reason more people come to the United States to earn a degree than any other country in the world. Most people looking to get a PHD in a particular field are not going to Canada or Norway.
 
AliEnvy said:
Speaking of lacking in education, turns out to be Oprah's topic today.

According to OECD, US student rank 24th in math...that's behind Korea, Poland, Hungry and Slovakia.

http://www2.oprah.com/tows/slide/200604/20060411/slide_20060411_284_101.jhtml

When I was a senior in high school, in a small rural town in the south, a new kid appeared in our class. He was from Iraq. We didn't have any foreigners in our town at the time. We didn't even have any Jews and only a handful of Catholics, and hardly anyone new had moved to our town the whole time I was in high school so a new student from Iraq of all places just blew our puny minds.

He was brilliant. He was lightyears ahead of us in every subject. We were both terrified of and fascinated by his brilliance and his foreign-ness.

The only things he lacked were creativity and a sense of humor, two things I value more than math skills. I can't believe how often I've wondered about the brilliant, humorless Iraqi since my country invaded his. I imagined that if he had gone back to Iraq after that one year in our high school he would have reported that Americans were hopelessly stupid.

To this day, my math skills are humiliating. Many of the most successful, creative and interesting people I know personally never even graduated from high school. One former colleague told me that his math scores were so low that someone called his parents on behalf of the state of California to inform them that their son was retarded. He went on to become an award-winning author and editor-in-chief of one of the largest publishing houses in the world.

I did terrible on all forms of standardized testing. I wasn't interested in academia. I went on to be an average student at a state university but ended up with a great job, and one much more satisfying than most of my friends' who went to better schools and excelled academically. I'm certainly not down on education and the US school system needs a huge amount of improvement, but you can't accurately evaluate intelligence, creativity, talent, imagination, or predict success, based on high school math scores. Individuals are too unique; we don't all fit in the box.

Sorry for that little digression, just wanted to offer some hope to anyone who thinks they might not do well in life if they didn't do well in school.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for that...I think the opposite holds true as well...many people who've gotten the best education money can buy often suck at life or are successful by very shallow and vain measures.

Did you watch the Oprah show? Math scores seem to be the least of the education problem but I posted the stat here because STING has been trying to sell HDI as a magic number.
 
AliEnvy said:
Thanks for that...I think the opposite holds true as well...many people who've gotten the best education money can buy often suck at life or are successful by very shallow and vain measures.

Did you watch the Oprah show? Math scores seem to be the least of the education problem but I posted the stat here because STING has been trying to sell HDI as a magic number.

HDI is comprised of hundreds of different factors and for the purposes of what were discussing is a far more relevant number than your math statistic, Health statistic or poverty statistic or even all three of those combined.

The United States has one of the highest standards of living in the world and is obviously one of the best places to live on earth. Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands are good too, just not as good as the United States currently.
 
AliEnvy said:
Speaking of lacking in education, turns out to be Oprah's topic today.

According to OECD, US student rank 24th in math...that's behind Korea, Poland, Hungry and Slovakia.

http://www2.oprah.com/tows/slide/200604/20060411/slide_20060411_284_101.jhtml

But check out our ranking of how students think they do in math. The US is #1 and South Korea is in the 20's.

But this address far too many other issues that the drop in the unemployment rate.
 
STING2 said:

HDI is comprised of hundreds of different factors

1. Life expectancy at birth
2. Adult literacy rate
3. Combined primary, secondary, and tertiary education gross enrolment rate.
4. Per capita GDP

Hundreds? Makes it easier to understand why the math rank is so low.
 
nbcrusader said:

But this address far too many other issues that the drop in the unemployment rate.

True and on the surface an increase in jobs is good news until you pull back the layers of truth and tell the broader story.
 
What is the proper metric?

Is it the country experiencing the greatest immigration (given that people would be attracted to the best society)?
 
Back
Top Bottom