Quotulatiousness

May 13, 2011

Would you fly in a glass airplane?

Filed under: Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:24

If Professor William Johnson is successful with the new process, you may see lots of structural glass in use:

A new breakthrough in superspeed pulse mould technology will allow aeroplanes, mobile phone casings and suchlike to be made out of a miraculous type of glass which is as tough as metal, according to the inventors of the new process.

So-called “metallic glass” has been well known since 1960 and has been in industrial production since the 1990s. It is a metal alloy, but one with the disordered structure of glass — not formed into crystals the way most metals are.

The crystalline structure of metal is a disadvantage, making it weak. Unfortunately, ordinary glasses — while strong and rigid — generally crack and shatter easily. What’s wanted is a metallic glass, made of metal but with a non-crystalline structure like window glass. This won’t crack or fracture, but will be much stronger than an equivalent object made of ordinary metal.

[. . .]

“We uniformly heat the glass at least a thousand times faster than anyone has before,” says William Johnson, engineering prof at Caltech.

Using this method the metalglass is heated up, moulded and cooled to solid again before crystals have any chance to form: the new part is still metalglass, not rubbishy regular metal.

“We end up with inexpensive, high-performance, precision parts made in the same way plastic parts are made — but made of a metal that’s 20 times stronger and stiffer than plastic,” boasts Johnson.

May 12, 2011

“It should have been called The Cell”

Filed under: Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

That’s Rob Lyons and he’s talking about an eco-residence called The Cube:

I think estate agents would refer to it as ‘compact and bijou’. It’s The Cube, the eco-home that’s showing just what sustainable living is all about. It should have been called The Cell.

The tiny house, which was on show at April’s Edinburgh Science Festival and is the brainchild of Dr Mike Page of the University of Hertfordshire, has an internal footprint of just three metres by three metres, yet has all the modern conveniences. There’s a tiny lounge with a flat-panel TV. If you want to dine with a friend, you need to swap half the sofa round with the sliding table. On the next level — reachable by a staircase so tiny that there’s only enough room for one foot at a time — you’ll find the composting toilet, the walk-in shower and the kitchen. (Is that even legal?) From there, you can clamber into the narrow bed, which could only accommodate two people if they both happen to be skinny vegans who don’t suffer from claustrophobia.

Everything is extremely well-insulated, including triple-glazed windows. Heat is provided by a heat-pump attached to the outside wall while electricity is generated through solar panels on the roof. Of course, they won’t work during the night, but you’ll have made so much money flogging electricity to the grid during the day — thanks to the insane prices at which electricity companies are obliged to buy micro-generated power — that you could actually earn £1000 per year.

All this could be yours for £50,000, assuming you’ve got some land to stick it on and you’re prepared to live in such cramped conditions. Considering you could buy a far larger luxury caravan with better facilities for less money (though not so well insulated), you may wonder why you would bother. But Page isn’t really interested in building eco-homes; in fact, he’s a psychologist. What he’s really interested in is why there is no demand for such eco-living, given that we now have lots of technology available to reduce our ‘impact’ — our ‘ecological footprint’.

May 10, 2011

Birth control pills = hope for less-masculine men?

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Shirley S. Wang looks at some studies of the hormonal influences on a woman’s body when she takes hormonal contraceptives:

The type of man a woman is drawn to is known to change during her monthly cycle — when a woman is fertile, for instance, she might look for a man with more masculine features. Taking the pill or another type of hormonal contraceptive upends this natural dynamic, making less-masculine men seem more attractive, according to a small but growing body of evidence. The findings have led researchers to wonder about the implications for partner choice, relationship quality and even the health of the children produced by these partnerships.

[. . .]

Both men’s and women’s preferences in mates shift when a woman is ovulating, the period when she is fertile, research has shown. Some studies have tracked women’s responses to photos of different men, while other studies have interviewed women about their feelings for men over several weeks. Among the conclusions: When women are ovulating, they tend to be drawn to men with greater facial symmetry and more signals of masculinity, such as muscle tone, a more masculine voice and dominant behaviors. The women also seemed to be particularly attuned to MHC-gene diversity. From an evolutionary perspective, these signals are supposed to indicate that men are more fertile and have better genes to confer to offspring.

Women tend to exhibit subtle cues when they are ovulating, and men tend to find them more attractive at this time. Women try to look more attractive, perhaps by wearing tighter or more revealing clothing, says Martie Haselton, a communications and psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Research on this includes studies in which photos that showed women’s clothing choices at different times of the month were shown to groups of judges. Women also emit chemical signals that they are fertile; researchers have measured various body odors, says Dr. Haselton, who has a paper on men’s ability to detect ovulation coming out in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Such natural preferences get wiped out when the woman is on hormonal birth control, research has shown. Women on the pill no longer experience a greater desire for traditionally masculine men during ovulation. Their preference for partners who carry different immunities than they do also disappears. And men no longer exhibit shifting interest for women based on their menstrual cycle, perhaps because those cues signaling ovulation are no longer present, scientists say.

So, contrary to what the evidence of the bar scene might imply, women who use birth control pills are actually less likely to being picked up by the alpha male, as they each see the other subliminally as less appealing due to the hormonal shifts caused by the pill.

It’s not all good news for beta males, however. While they may have statistically greater chances of forming relationships with women who use hormonal birth control, once the woman stops using the pill, the natural attraction cycle starts again:

Researchers speculate that women with less-masculine partners may become less interested in their partner when they come off birth control, contributing to relationship dissatisfaction. And, if contraceptives are masking women’s natural ability to detect genetic diversity, then the children produced by parents who met when the woman was on the pill may be less genetically healthy, they suggest.

“We don’t have enough research to draw a firm conclusion yet,” says Dr. Haselton. “It is certainly possible that if women don’t experience that little uptick in [desiring] masculinity that they end up choosing less masculine partners,” she says.

That could prompt some women to stray, research suggests. Psychologist Steven Gangestad and his team at the University of New Mexico showed in a 2010 study that women with less-masculine partners reported an increased attraction for other men during their fertile phase. Women partnered with traditionally masculine partners didn’t have such urges, according to the study of 60 couples.

May 9, 2011

What’s coming up in the next set of Canada Health Act revisions

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

This is an old post from 2005, but now that we have a majority federal government, we can expect to see much or all of this program implemented fairly quickly:

As we’ve all been made aware by the constant drumbeat of media-generated panic, obesity is the biggest problem facing the Canadian healthcare system. Canadians are getting much fatter, getting less exercise, and generally imperilling their own health and, in the aggregate, the entire healthcare system — the core of the Canadian identity. The government is moving to confront this looming problem in the very near future.

Tackling Obesity

Because voluntary measures have failed, the federal government, in consultation with the provinces and territories, is going to amend the Canada Health Act, the cornerstone of the healthcare system. Poor health is no longer an individual problem: it affects the entire country. This means that the government is going to get very serious about tackling the causes of the problem, not just treating the patient after the problem becomes severe.

The current provincial health ID cards will become federalized: this is to ensure that all Canadians are able to get consistent treatment when travelling outside their home provinces. The new ID cards will carry biometric information and it will be mandatory to carry these cards at all times.

To ensure that we comply — it is for the sake of our healthcare system — the health ID card will be requested on boarding all public transit, commuter rail, airplanes, ferries, and ships. Inexpensive card readers will speed processing. No ID? No travel. Simple as that. Our healthcare system is too important to risk for minor concerns like individual rights, privacy, or freedom of movement.

It is expected that the major banks will quickly realize the advantage of integrating their ABM networks with the new universal ID card, obviating the need for them to maintain their own card issuing services. Any who do not quickly adapt will find it difficult to get government business. But it will be strictly voluntary, of course.

Once the banks have adapted, the government can phase out the production of printed money . . . there will be no need for it since you will always carry your combined ID/ATM card. This will be a boon to shopkeepers, banks, and anyone involved in handling money right now.

One of the biggest advantages of this will be that the government will be able to act decisively to combat the scourge of obesity: all food purchases will be directly traceable to show who is eating too much or too much of the wrong kind of food. Within a few years, as the existing printed “Nutrition Facts” information is encoded into RFID tags, it will be possible for your ID/ATM card to restrict the amount of food you purchase to the recommended daily allowance for your diet. Won’t that be great? You won’t even need to think about what to eat, because you’ll only be allowed to eat the “right” amount of the “right” foods, as determined by the government.

Of course, those Canadians who have allowed themselves to eat too much should not be given the same top-priority access to healthcare that their less weighty fellow citizens should have . . . overweight patients will be treated in inverse proportion to their deviation from the norm. That’s only fair, and fairness is nearly as important an aspect of Canadianness as Universal Healthcare.

There may be some bleeding hearts in the civil liberties movement who decry this extension of government power, but we can safely ignore them. The only thing that makes Canada the great place it is today is universal healthcare. This has been repeated so often that most of us accept the concept without any doubt or uncertainty.

Universal healthcare is Canada; Canada is universal healthcare.

Universal healthcare matters more than anything else, again as uncounted public opinion polls and government surveys have discovered, so anything that strengthens the healthcare system is good for Canada. Critics of the system are clearly not acting in the best interests of the healthcare of all Canadians, so we must move to suppress such unpatriotic — even treasonous — talk.

Snuffing Out Smoking

After obesity, the next greatest threat to the system is already being addressed by all levels of government: smoking. It will soon be possible, using the same combination of mandatory ID/ATM cards and RFID tags to completely stamp out the purchase of tobacco products. The government would be remiss if they failed to take full advantage of the current wave of public support to make tobacco use illegal everywhere. Canadians are naturally law-abiding: they will quickly adapt to the need for vigilance for signs of illegal tobacco use. Snitch lines may be required in certain areas to provide more support to those Canadians who want to ensure the health of their fellow citizens — and, of course, the essential healthcare system!

Other methods can be used to ensure compliance, especially in the delivery of healthcare: patients who have smoked will be required to wait longer for all services, to be fair to those patients who never smoked. In the model of “plea bargaining”, patients may be able to get faster aid by reporting others who supplied them with tobacco.

Annihilating Alcohol

Alcohol abuse is the next problem to be overcome. The cost to the healthcare system from treating the direct results of alcohol abuse are staggering. It is manifestly unfair that non-drinking Canadians must pay to rectify the self-inflicted damage of alcohol by drinkers. Earlier Canadian and American governments tried to stamp it out during the last century, but they failed. This government will not: we have the tools to enforce compliance that earlier governments lacked.

As a first step, all sales and production of alcoholic beverages will be nationalized. All citizens must apply for permits to allow them to drink alcoholic beverages, which will only be available from government outlets at strictly controlled times. Sensible limits will be applied, so that packaging that encourages abuse (24-packs of beer, 1.18 litre bottles of alcohol, etc.) will be quickly removed from use. Purchase limits will be strictly enforced, to ensure that so called “binge drinking” can be controlled and eliminated. Drunkenness will be dealt with as sabotage of the healthcare system.

Importing alcohol will be eliminated as a source of health problems, and domestic production will be gradually curtailed and then eliminated in turn. Home brewing and winemaking will be very quickly made illegal: snitch lines will certainly be needed to enforce this, but good Canadians will realize that the health of all requires us to clamp down on those who do not follow good health guidelines.

Enforcing Exercise

It’s not going to be easy to make Canadians as healthy as possible, but the vigour of our Universal Healthcare system can only be enhanced by improving the physical well-being of all Canadians. Voluntary efforts to encourage healthy exercise have been a dismal failure, so mandatory exercise is the only way to move forward. In the short term, all public and private schools, offices, factories, and other workplaces will be required to add exercise periods to every workday.

Mandatory exercise, however, will not be allowed to encourage carelessness and risk-taking — so-called “extreme” sports are all foreign concepts to Canadian culture, and should be discouraged at all cost. The healthcare system must not be held hostage to stupid, careless victims of unnecessary accidents. They’ll be in last place for healthcare services, after the obese, the smokers, and the drinkers.

The End Result

Let’s be honest . . . this is going to be a gruelling regime, and some will not have the intestinal fortitude to pull through. By phase IV of our program, we should expect to see some weaker souls emigrating to escape the rigours of our brave new healthy world. We should let them go, but ensure that they have paid a fair price for the privilege of living in the healthiest country in the world: a sliding scale tax on property maxxing out at 90% for the wealthiest.

But what a wonderful country it will be without them: everyone at the absolute peak of health and vitality (because getting sick will be illegal).

May 6, 2011

“Reasoning is a non-violent weapon given to us by evolution to help us get our way”

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

Remember that old saw about it being impossible to reason someone out of an opinion they were never reasoned into? Ian Leslie looks at a new paper about the function of reasoning:

This is a widespread habit, of course, and one we might notice in ourselves in other contexts. Whether it’s relationships or politics or the workplace, we have a tendency to start off with we want and then reason backwards towards it; to cloak our true motivations or prejudices in the guise of reason. It’s been shown again and again in studies that we have a very strong ‘confirmation bias’; once we have an idea about the world we like (Obama is un-American, my girlfriend is cheating on me, the world is or isn’t getting warmer) we pick up on evidence we think supports our hypothesis and ruthlessly disregard evidence that undermines it, even without realising we’re doing so.

[. . .]

We tend to think of reason as an abstract, truth-seeking method that gets contaminated by our desires and motivations. But the paper argues it’s the other way around — that reasoning is a non-violent weapon given to us by evolution to help us get our way. Its capacity to help us get to the truth about things is a by-product, albeit a hugely important one. In many ways, reasoning does as much to screw us up as it does to help us. The paper’s authors, Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, put it like this:

The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

April 28, 2011

Learning from mistakes, Martian style

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

I have to admit it’s doubly amusing finding articles like Mars ate my spacecraft!, once for the content and once for the amusing title:

The investigation board made the not-terribly-earth-shaking observation that tired people make mistakes. The contractor used excessive overtime to meet an ambitious schedule. Mars is tough on schedules. Slip by just one day past the end of the launch window and the mission must idle for two years. In some businesses we can dicker with the boss over the due date, but you just can’t negotiate with planetary geometries.

[. . .]

NASA’s mantra is to test like you fly, fly what you tested. Yet no impact test of a running, powered, DS2 system ever occurred. Though planned, these were deleted midway through the project due to schedule considerations. Two possible reasons were found for Deep Space 2’s twin flops: electronics failure in the high-g impact, and ionization around the antenna after the impacts. Strangely, the antenna was never tested in a simulation of Mar’s 6 torr atmosphere.

While the DS2 probes were slamming into the Red Planet things weren’t going much better on MPL. The investigation board believes the landing legs deployed when the spacecraft was 1,500 meters high, as designed. Three sensors, one per leg, signal a successful touchdown, causing the code to turn the descent engine off. Engineers knew that when the legs deployed these sensors could experience a transient, giving a false “down” reading… but somehow forgot to inform the firmware people. The glitch was latched; at 40 meters altitude the code started looking at the data, saw the false readings, and faithfully switched off the engine.

A pre-launch system test failed to detect the problem because the sensors were miswired. After correcting the wiring error the test was never repeated.

H/T to Paula Lieberman for the link.

April 27, 2011

High computer use linked to “smoking, drunkenness, non-use of seatbelts, cannabis and illicit drug use, and unprotected sex”

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Talk about upsetting the stereotype of basement dwelling, dateless nerds:

The revelations come in research conducted lately in Canada among 10 to 16-year-olds by epidemiology PhD candidate Valerie Carson.

“This research is based on social cognitive theory, which suggests that seeing people engaged in a behaviour is a way of learning that behaviour,” explains Carson. “Since adolescents are exposed to considerable screen time — over 4.5 hours on average each day — they’re constantly seeing images of behaviours they can then potentially adopt.”

Apparently the study found that high computer use was associated with approximately 50 per cent increased engagement with “smoking, drunkenness, non-use of seatbelts, cannabis and illicit drug use, and unprotected sex”. High television use was also associated with a modestly increased engagement in these activities.

According to Ms Carson this is because TV is much more effectively controlled and censored in order to prevent impressionable youths seeing people puffing tabs or jazz cigarettes while indulging in unprotected sex etc. The driving without seatbelts thing seems a bit odd until one reflects that old episodes of the The Professionals, the Rockford Files etc are no doubt torrent favourites.

April 24, 2011

No 21-gun salute for royal wedding due to “health and safety” concerns

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:41

Ah, those “elf’n’safety” goons strike again:

When Prince William and Kate Middleton leave Westminster Abbey on Friday, there will be no 21-gun salute to mark their union. Mandrake can disclose that plans for such an honour in Hyde Park were abandoned because of fears over “health and safety” and “noise pollution”.

One of the Prince’s pals tells me: “We thought it would be a fitting tribute for the wedding, but we were told that, because of health and safety, and noise pollution concerns, it would involve too much red tape to get a new salute authorised.”

Twenty-one gun salutes in Hyde Park and Green Park are a traditional military honour, carried out by the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, to mark important royal occasions including Coronation Day and the official birthdays of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s wedding in 1840 began with such a tribute.

April 23, 2011

QotD: The debunking problem in media

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:23

[. . .] the second issue is how people find out about stuff. We exist in a blizzard of information, and stuff goes missing: as we saw recently, research shows that people don’t even hear about retractions of outright fraudulent work. Publishing a follow-up in the same venue that made an initial claim is one way of addressing this problem (and when the journal Science rejected the replication paper, even they said “your results would be better received and appreciated by the audience of the journal where the Daryl Bem research was published”).

The same can be said for the New York Times, who ran a nice long piece on the original precognition finding, New Scientist who covered it twice, the Guardian who joined in online, the Telegraph who wrote about it three times over, New York Magazine, and so on.

It’s hard to picture many of these outlets giving equal prominence to the new negative findings that are now emerging, in the same way that newspapers so often fail to return to a debunked scare, or a not-guilty verdict after reporting the juicy witness statements.

All the most interesting problems around information today are about structure: how to cope with the overload, and find sense in the data. For some eyecatching precognition research, this stuff probably doesn’t matter. What’s interesting is that the information architectures of medicine, academia and popular culture are all broken in the exact same way.

Ben Goldacre, “I foresee that nobody will do anything about this problem”, Bad Science, 2011-04-23

April 22, 2011

Houston loses space shuttle sweepstakes

Filed under: History, Space, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:26

Houston has a problem with the allocation of the soon-to-be retired space shuttles:

Which city, in the whole of the United States, would the average person associate most clearly with America’s towering achievements, and no few sorrows, over the past half century of sending men and women into space? Why, Houston, of course — home of the Johnson Space Centre, where NASA’s mission control is located. We know this from all that has been said and done in the past. The first words Neil Armstrong uttered as Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon in 1969 were: “Houston, Tranquility base here — the Eagle has landed.”

The name of Houston will forever be associated with the manned exploration of space. No astronaut ever radioed laconically back from a crippled spaceship, “Manhattan, we have a problem”. Yet, in NASA’s recent selection of the final destinations for its four extant space shuttles, now that the last operational ones are about to be pensioned off, New York City will get Enterprise, the first of the shuttles that was rolled out in 1976, while Houston gets snubbed.

A score or more of museums and other institutions around the country competed for the honour of having a shuttle in their permanent collection. Apart from offering an appealing display, each had to be ready to stump up $28.8m to cover the cost of preparing and transporting the winged spacecraft to its new location. Of the three other remaining shuttles, Discovery is destined for the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum annexe outside Washington, DC. After the launch in late June of the 135th (and last) mission in the shuttle programme, Atlantis will remain in Florida to be exhibited at the Kennedy Space Centre’s visitor centre.

Meanwhile, after its own final mission later this month, Endeavour, the youngest of the shuttles, will be ferried to Los Angeles to end its days in the California Science Centre, alongside existing exhibits of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, and close to the old Rockwell plant in Palmdale where the shuttle was developed. Meanwhile, just up the road, at Edwards Air Force Base, is the runway where nearly half of all shuttle flights touched down.

April 21, 2011

Elon’s Dragon may “land on Mars”

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:35

While you’re talking up your own private space venture, you can probably be excused for a bit of boasting:

Famous upstart startup rocket company SpaceX, bankrolled and helmed by renowned internet nerdwealth hecamillionaire Elon Musk, has once again sent its goalposts racing ahead of its rapidly-advancing corporate reality.

The plucky challenger has stated that its “Dragon” capsule is not merely capable of delivering supplies to the International Space Station: it is — potentially — also capable of carrying astronauts to the space station and back down to Earth again.

In a statement released yesterday, Musk and SpaceX also make the bold claim that the Dragon, once fitted with modifications that the company is now developing under NASA contract, would also be able to land “almost anywhere on Earth or another planet with pinpoint accuracy, overcoming the limitation of a winged architecture that works only in Earth’s atmosphere” (our emphasis).

April 20, 2011

One size rules don’t fit all

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Health, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:14

Dentists who have their spouses on their patient list are running the risk of losing their licenses:

Dentists are permitted to treat their spouses — but they better not have sex.

Put another way, dentists who have sex with their spouses better not be messing around with their teeth.

This is the current law of the land in Ontario, one that many dentists are secretly flouting and calling “dumb” and “stupid.”

In an interview with the Star earlier this week, Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews conceded the dentists may have a point and has agreed to review the restriction.

H/T to Chris Greaves for the link.

April 19, 2011

The “super-organism” that is eating the Titanic

Filed under: History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:17

This is absolutely fascinating:

In 2000, Roy Cullimore, a microbial ecologist and Charles Pellegrino, scientist and author of Ghosts of the Titanic discovered that the Titanic — which sank in the Atlantic Ocean 97 years ago — was being devoured by a monster microbial industrial complex of extremophiles as alien we might expect to find on Jupiter’s ocean-bound Europa. What they discovered is the largest, strangest cooperative microorganism on Earth.

Scientists believe that this strange super-organism is using a common microbial language that could be either chemical or electrical — a phenomenon called “quorum sensing” by which whole communities “sense” each other’s presence and activities aiding and abetting the organization, cooperation, and growth.

The microbes are consuming the wreck’s metal, creating mats of rust bigger than a dozen four-story brownstones that are creeping slowly along the hull harvesting iron from the rivets and burrowing into layers of steel plating. The creatures also leave behind “rusticles,” 30-foot icicle-like deposits of rust dangling from the sides of the ship’s bow. Structurally, rusticles contain channels to allow water to flow through, and they seem to be built up in a ring structure similar to the growth rings of a tree. They are very delicate and can easily disintegrate into fine powder on even the slightest touch.

Things that keep on rising in price … like healthcare costs

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Kevin Libin points out that Michael Ignatieff may have been even more accurate than he himself realized:

The politicians are finally talking about it, but if you listened to what Mr. Ignatieff said during last week’s English-language debate, you might have found yourself feeling a bit depressed. Perhaps because the Liberal leader effectively argued that if Canadians wanted to keep getting decent medical treatment, they were going to have to learn to live without lots of other things.

“This comes down to a moment of choice,” Mr. Ignatieff intoned. Canadians could either vote for personal income tax breaks, planned corporate income tax cuts, new equipment for the Canadian Forces, all promised by the Conservatives, or, he said, “you can support health care.”

To be accurate, he used language that was far more politically loaded (“multi-million dollar expenditure on prisons … big gifts to upper-middle class Canadians”), but his message was the same: affording public health care means sacrificing other possible priorities.

There’s certainly much to suggest he’s got a point.

If our healthcare costs keep rising, unbounded by any kind of cost control, it will either consume the economy, or cause its collapse. And, of course, the large number of soon-to-retire Baby Boomers are about to need much higher health spending as the natural aging process starts taking its inevitable toll. Fun times ahead, folks.

Already, nine out of 10 provinces spend the majority of their own source revenues (which excludes federal transfers) on health care, according to the Fraser Institute’s report “Canada’s Medicare Bubble.” Only Alberta is just barely under 50%; Nova Scotia spends 88%.

With all the good will in the world, the government can’t keep increasing their healthcare spending . . . they’re almost out of money already.

April 18, 2011

The Magic Washing Machine, by Hans Rosling

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

H/T to Jon for the link.

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