Rubio just made a huge play for Bush's base with his speak today.  He's started off praising the Bush family and wishing them the best, gave a speak about rebuilding the military, and then ending the speak promising a New American Century (a not so veiled nod to the neo-conservative doctrine). I think Kasich is going to drop out too, making Rubio the only establishment candidate left, he could pick up the majority of the Bush/Kasich support...  could be enough to overtake Trump in Nevada.

Hey James, sorry to bring this up again, I'm not picking on you and I don't think you're a wackaloo or anything, but I've been thinking about this and doing some research - mostly because I couldn't explain it either, and science is an interest of mine - and I wanted to share what I've found.

The NASA website goes into more detail about the Orion mission and what they need to learn from the Van Allen belt:
http://www.nasa.gov/content/five-things … light-test

Radiation Levels – Traveling 15 times farther into space than the International Space Station will take Orion beyond the radiation protection offered by Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. In fact, the majority of EFT-1 will take place inside the Van Allen Belts, clouds of heavy radiation that surround Earth. No spacecraft built for humans has passed through the Van Allen Belts since the Apollo missions, and even those only passed through the belts – they didn’t linger.
Future crews don’t plan to spend more time than necessary inside the Van Allen Belts, either, but long missions to deep space will expose them to more radiation than astronauts have ever dealt with before. EFT-1’s extended stay in the Van Allen Belts offers a unique opportunity to see how Orion’s shielding will hold up to it. Sensors will record the peak radiation seen during the flight, as well as radiation levels throughout the flight, which can be mapped back to geographic hot spots.

Basically, in the Apollo mission, astronauts just passed through the belt quickly, the Orion mission plans to linger there. (This is consistent with the NASA video, when the engineer is talking about crossing the belt, he's also drawing a trajectory around the Earth, and it looks to be an orbiting trajectory.  The goal is to spend more time there, to simulate long term radiation exposure, to make sure the shielding is strong enough for long term missions, that may expose people to more radiation.

Here's a Popular Science video that talks about Apollo crossing the Van Allen belt:

The video is consistent with what NASA is saying about the Apollo and Orion missions. What's interesting about the Pop Science video, is that they admit that crossing the Van Allen belt was a gamble, but that they were willing to take the risk and they went anyway.

Also interesting, Amy Shira Teitel is pretty fucking cute.

And even if they did, there's an information/education gap... so a provider can easily swindle a consumer into procedures they don't really need. The opposite is true as well, a consumer wary of being swindled may refuse services that could save their life.

It's a failed market. It's was a failed market before the HMO was created, it's a failed market still.

Like other failed markets, such as public goods and utilities, government intervention is needed.

I have no doubt quality of service will go down because of the lack of competition.  That's the ultimate trade off we're faced with, cost vs quality.

I still think single payer is inevitable as costs continue to rise. The decision between good service at an ever increasing price, or adequate service at a reasonable price.  As cost rise, fewer and fewer are able to affords good service, the low cost and adequate service becomes more attractive.

Is that you John?

That's like saying that Obamacare is the first step towards universal healthcare. And you can't know for sure that privatization would be a disaster, just like you can't know for sure what next weeks lottery numbers are going to be.

The average American's 401k balance doesn't really mean anything, if a privatized social security system is structured differently than a 401k.  For example, they could require automatic enrollment for any employee working in the US to make sure everyone participates, the could require that employers pay in as well which is how I believe Europes retirement scemes work, and they could set guidelines for the investment that can be held in them to minimize the risk to the employee.

Bottom line, we could probably make privatized social security work.  But we can probably save social security as well. We just need the political will, and the public demand for it to happen. And like most issues in this country, I don't think we'll get there until we're pretty much on the brink.