We won’t know the price for a while, but I would pay both kidneys and a leg for this 525HP update to the sexiest Audi ever.  From Uncrate.

The first area that needs reform is the insurance companies that cover liability and malpractice.  These should be dismantled and replaced with a federal entity similar to the FDIC which would ensure that health care is insured by people whose primary motivation is public and individual health, not profit and greed.  Reforming tort law and limiting the liability of physicians would also further reduce the expense of providing health care to all.  Yes, if a doctor removes the wrong limb in a procedure, he should be punished and the victim should be compensated, but reasonable limits and punishments should be put in place to remove the motivation of lawyers to enrich themselves based on one person’s misfortune and a physician’s  incompetence.

A second area in dire need of reform is government sponsored drug and health care research.  It should not be put into the hands of private firms whose motivation is to build machines and invent drugs that make the most profit.  The money should be made available in equal measure to public and private universities and government run and funded organizations whose sole purpose is to find cures and treatments for any ailment that may befall you.  AIDS research is underfunded simply because there are not yet enough people infected to justify pouring research funding into finding a cure.  Millions of people suffer from a variety of ailments who are not being treated simply because finding a treatment or a cure is not yet commercially viable.

Third is medical school costs for physicians.  There are many thousands of potential physicians right now who cannot afford medical school under any circumstances.  They have the desire and the aptitude, but not the money or the opportunity.  A government funded program that would fund medical school for all who desire to enter and demonstrate the ability could accomplish two very important things;  It would increase the number of qualified physicians in this country and it would create an instant pool of physicians available to work at reduced wages for the betterment of public health.  The army will pay your way through medical school in exchange for 5 or 6 years of service.  Why can’t the government do the same?  You want to fund and staff a public health clinic in an urban area?  There is no better way.

Fourth is health education for all.  Health education is barely an afterthought in most schools and has certainly been ineffective at teaching kids the dangers of eating at McDonalds and Burger King.  Sure, there is legislation for schools to stress safe sex and no drugs but then only because those are popular political issues that resonate with voters.  Healthy children usually turn into healthy adults and healthy adults usually raise healthy children.  It’s a win/win situation.  The amount of poison we allow our children to put into their bodies at a young age is by definition child endangerment.

Fifth is that we already have socialized medicine.  It’s called medicare.  All we really need to do is eliminate the age requirement and add a few co-pay categories.

There is absolutely no need to create a program that will probably cost trillions and will likely work about as well as the recent banking “reforms”.

I found this youtube video on DVice,  and while it is very simplistic, it covers most of the bases (basics) and offers a few new(er) theories to consider.  It seems that one of most difficult concepts to accept logically, especially by someone with merely a passing knowledge of the sciences, is that the physics of our universe began as a result of the big bang, and that time and space are a function of physics, and thus did not exist prior to the event in question.  More after the jump.

What this means, of course, is that prior to the event, or “Big Bang”, there was nothing.  No space.  No time.  No BOSONS.  Bosons (Photons, K and W- Bosons, Gluons, and the expected Higgs) are those little quanta that somehow jumped into existence some time after this initial period of inflation and effectively allowed space-time to begin it’s existence.  What was in the area before the big bang?  The short answer is; there was no area.  The physics did not yet exist to define a space with any kind of volume or area.  Is it possible that a different space with physics (even if it were different physics) existed prior to the existence of our universe?  Yes but not likely given the entropy problem; that if you allow for time and space to go back for an infinite amount of time, it would by now have already reached it’s final state (stasis) where all temperature is equal and all motion has ceased.  The wrinkle in this is that in the theoretical expanding/contracting/repeating model, the complete obliteration of information (history) from a previous universe would guarantee that it’s existence is meaningless to the subsequent one, and therefore might as well not  have even existed.

Our view of the universe is completely dictated by bosons.  If photons traveled at one foot per year instead of 186,000 miles per second, we would be able to look across the street and see events from 50 years ago.  Similarly, if the gluons that bind quarks together in the atomic nucleus were slightly weaker, atomic nuclei might be much larger and fly apart with the force of a nuclear explosion with the slightest provocation.  Same goes for W- Bosons, which mediate the distance of the leptons from the nucleus.  A slightly different value, and individual atoms would no longer be able to interact the way they do now.

In short, a universe whose physics were even the slightest bit different than ours would likely be unrecognizable.  It could be much larger or it could be infinitesimally tiny.  It could be completely devoid of coherent matter or it could be a giant blob of plasma.  Time could flow faster or slower or even backwards.

So we come now to the idea of multiple universes.  In the time before the big bang, there was no space, or at least nothing that we could handily describe as a space or anything else.  Let’s call this “stuff” the medium.  Within this “medium”, our universe was created in a huge flash of energy.  Could this have happened elsewhere in this medium?  And if so, how many times?  Since the two most common values in our universe are One and “Holy shit, that’s a lot!!”, I would guess that there would be too many to count.  This multiverse theory, to me, raises a lot of additional questions.  Should we be able to eventually see them?  Not likely, as there are objects in our own universe that are so far away and whose relative motion to us is so great that the light being emitted by them will never reach us.  If crossing the “medium” is a matter of distance, then it is likely that that distance would make the vast distances between stars at opposite ends of our universe seem trivial.  Can we interact with them, somehow?  This is where it gets dicey.  There are things that happen at a subatomic level that seem to indicate the presence of alternate or additional dimensions whose physics is decidedly different from ours.  Quantum entanglement and quantum tunneling are both phenomena which in some ways defy the laws of physics as we know them.  Entanglement implies communication and exchange of information between particles at speeds (speeds which theoretically approach infinite values) beyond what is permissible according to Special Relativity.  This violation might be permissible, however, if the particles communicated outside the frame of our universe or outside the dimensions of space in which we are able to observe physics.  The other energies imparted by Bosons may similarly be “drawn” or taken from alternate dimensions or universes.   Another question is that of relative motion in this “medium”.  If there are multiple universes in the “medium” then it is also likely that some or all of them are in motion relative to each other.  If this is the case, then it is also possible that we may be actually traveling through the “medium” at many many times the speed of light when compared to other objects in the medium.  This does not present a problem for us at all if we consider the universe we exist in to be “closed” and subject to only it’s own physics and therefore the only motion that matters is the motion within the “borders” of the universe.  It does, however, present a problem when you think about opening a gateway into a different universe.  A layman’s understanding of relative motion begins to fall apart when you talk about unbinding the rules from gravity and fixed points in space.  If you picked a fixed point in space (CMB rest frame) and stood in it, the galaxy would begin racing away from you at a speed of 552 km/s and the sun would be racing away even faster, since it is in motion within the galaxy at about 220 km/s.  With that amount of relative motion, combined with the relative motion between two universes, you would almost certainly have to have similar rules of gravity in both universes in order to have a chance of anchoring any type of bridge or gateway.

Another problem in both quantum physics and cosmology is that the universe is almost all empty space and there is no reason to believe that any alternate universe would have any massive particles at all, given that they seem to be relatively rare in ours.  At the quantum level, if you were to put a basketball in the middle of the field at Giant’s stadium to represent the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, it’s corresponding lepton, an electron, would be represented by a softball circling the outer rim of the stadium.  That leaves a whole lot of space.  Similarly, if the basketball represented the earth, the sun would be represented by ball 109 times it’s diameter (about 30 meters tall) located more that 3 miles away, maybe on the Hudson river. Pluto would be represented by another softball in the North part of Baltimore, 150 miles away.

The overall  density of the the universe is very low, roughly 9.9 x 10^-30 grams per cubic centimeter and roughly 96 percent of that mass is in the form of Dark energy (73%) and cold dark matter (23%).  The remaining 4 per cent is ordinary matter, much of  which we can observe directly.  The prevalence of ordinary matter in the universe is on the order of roughly one lone hydrogen atom for every four cubic meters of volume.  Matter, therefore, appears to be anomalous and in this universe, it is quite rare.

The idea that multiple universes might exist is beautiful, romantic, and hopeful.   If we were able to interact with them, we might be able to use their properties to travel vast distances in very little time, or to create vast amounts of energy with little effort.    These and many other theories may ultimately herald the next step in evolution and carry us to the stars and maybe beyond.  There is no evolutionary path for man that does not demand a better understanding of the universe and it’s nature.

This beautiful machine has 180 horses, a 0-60 time of 6.2 seconds, and gets 42 miles per gallon of………diesel.  That’s right, it has a 1.8L TDI (TurboDiesel Injection) motor that gets mileage comparable to a Prius and better than any American made hybrid vehicle.  When you look at the production cost of a hybrid, along with the negative environmental effects of discarding toxic batteries after about five years, a clean burning, efficient diesel begins to make a lot more sense.  Plus, this little machine is soooo sexy.  I hope they make it.  More on this beauty at Jalopnik

First of all, as of Friday, February 20th, the market cap for Citicorp was 10.53 Billion dollars.  Waittaminnit!  What? Yep.  $10,530,000,000 is the total value of the company based on it’s stock price.  But didn’t they just get $45 Billion in stimulus money?  Yep.  So they are effectively worth less (35 billion less, to ballpark it) than the amount of money that they took from the taxpayers.  Now, if someone handed you 45 billion dollars, how much would you be worth?  I would imagine 45 billion minus whatever you owe on your mortgage, car, and credit cards.  So about 45 billion dollars. Ok,  about $44,999,900,000.  Sounds to me like we, the taxpayers,  are throwing good money after bad money that we threw at really big greedy assholes.

The idea of giving so much money to a company that has acted so irresponsibly is itself an act of irresponsibility.  The mystery is, and remains, why are we doing it?  Does Citicorp have some kind of a magical grip on the government psyche that has them convinced that it can’t fail?  Maybe so.  If you, like me, have less than $250,000 deposited in Citibank, then you have nothing to worry about if the bank fails except for maybe a slow payout by the FDIC.  What if you have more?  I mean a lot more?  Then you should be worried.  So who does the bailout protect?  Obviously people much wealthier than you or I.  So you, the taxpayer, have generously given up your hard earned cash to save the rich bastards that caused this mess in the first place.

I want to know why Citicorp isn’t forced to sell off it’s profitable units for cash and use that cash mitigate the losses of its unprofitable units.  I would guess (wildly) that if they did so, there would be no need for any public assistance at all, and that a more responsible bank operator would step in to take it’s place if it folded.  Survival of the fittest.  Easy concept.  The average person would be better off if they were allowed to fail.

What about the auto industry?  Too big to fail?  Maybe so.  One in 10 people work in or around the auto industry in this country and putting them all out of work would be bad.  Or would it?  Many of these people had a hand in the demise of the industry by demanding unreasonable labor contract terms which include job banks where they get paid to sit around and do the jumble in the local paper.  Would the factories and the robots and the computers and the dies and the various other hard assets disappear into thin air if GM failed?  Probably not.  Someone would probably make a lowball offer, break the union, and step in to start making cars that make sense.  One in ten people work in the car industry.  One in 15 people are already unemployed, and rising.  Combine the two for 17 per cent unemployment overall.  That is less than most of Europe and less than almost all of Asia.

Citicorp got money to loosen up the credit markets, as did Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and many others.   These banks then turned around and raised credit card interest rates and reduced credit limits to many of their customers, while not increasing lending in any way.  This shameful practice was uncovered BEFORE the second stimulus bill was passed.  So whose side do you think the government is on?  Certainly not mine.  Many recipients of stimulus money assert that they need the money to cover short term expenses, such as payroll and purchasing.  Everyone knows someone who owns a small business.  Walk into the small business of your choice and ask what happens when they can’t make payroll.  I’ll help you out with that one.  They lay a few people off, or they tap an emergency fund, or they change their business model (raise prices, etc)  to try to generate more income.  They rarely go to a bank to ask for a loan because the bank will almost always say NO.  A small business owner would be forced to shutter his business if he couldn’t meet expenses.  Are they getting any help?  You know the answer to that one.  Are they too big to fail?  Obviously not.  How many people are employed by small businesses?  By some definitions (how big does a business have to be to be considered small) 6 in 10 people nationwide work for a small business.  Remember, only 1 in 10 work in the auto industry, and about 20 million or 1 in 7 work in some capacity for government (Federal, state, and local).  So lets break it down.

14,000,000 in auto industry and peripheral industries

20,000,000 in government

87,000,000 in small business.

9,000,000 give or take, unemployed

24,000,000 in other large business and finance.

154,000,000 is the total estimated workforce (These figure is from the 2005 Department of labor report combined with census data, the most recent I could find).

If you loosen lending or provide government direct lending to small businesses, you help save the vast majority of jobs that exist in our economy and also create new jobs.  If you fund only big business and banking, you only encourage bad behavior and irresponsible business practices.  Give the average Joe $300,000 to start a business and he will likely put 10 people to work.  That’s ten people that pay taxes and buy cars, groceries, and homes.  Tell me how many people are going to buy homes with the $20 billion that GM wants.

I think it’s fairly obvious that a whole bunch (barrel?) of monkeys wrote this bill and that their organ grinders are the fattest fat cats in the country.  And calling our legislators monkeys is an insult to your average monkey’s intelligence.