nhebb

Given the bipartisan history of the lawyers for the Copyright Office and the DOJ, one possibility is that they are basing the amicus on their interpretation of the Copyright Act and related legal precedents. My preference would be that public interface part of API's would be public domain. But that's a preference, not a legal opinion.

Comment · 6 years ago

If you prefer video, watch the 1998 PBS piece Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet. I won't link to it because I'm not sure if the site is legit, but I just re-watched a few minutes of it and it's funny to look back at the hype in that era.

Comment · 6 years ago

It's complicated. The US spends more per capita (PPP) than any other country by good margin [1]. Of that, the US government pays roughly 50% of the total cost [2]. The net effect is that the US government already pays as much per capita as many European countries with socialized medicine.

In short, we have a cost problem that's not being tackled. Pharmaceuticals are often targeted, but they're about 8% of our total healthcare costs. We really need politicians that will tackle the other aspects of cost.

The countries that finance public healthcare have tax systems that are considered regressive by US standards. Some states have sales taxes, but we have no national VAT. As I understand it, some countries like Sweden have income taxes on lower income workers, whereas in the US, roughly 45% of households pay no federal income tax.

You can only squeeze so much money out of the wealthy, but the numbers don't add up to cover the projected costs of nationalized healthcare in the US. Taxes would need to be raised across the board. It's easy for campaigning politicians to propose pie-in-the-sky plans, but proposing a financially plausible one would be political suicide.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_health_ex...

Comment · 6 years ago

I don't think 5 star general is a rank anymore. There is also one 6 star, George Washington, General of the Armies.

As far as branches, the Merchant Marines falls under the DoD as well. IIRC, it had the highest casualty rate of any of the branches in WWII.

Comment · 7 years ago

I use airnow.com. The site's usability is fine, and more importantly, their AQI numbers look much more realistic than the data you're getting from PurpleAir. You might consider another data source.

Comment · 7 years ago

> (1) Americans consider housing to be an investment.

Apparently I'm the lone dissenter on this, but I think for many people this is a side benefit that they may hope for, but the primary objective is simply to own a home that they can live in and raise a family.