Pretty much my thoughts.

I wonder if socio-economically, being a South African group there's a higher threshold to top the reality of everyday life. Taking murders per capita as an example, it bests (perhaps not the best choice of words) even Mexico by a notable margin even with its drug violence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Population reduction, obviously.

Your belief that we can continue to prosper while drastically cutting our per capita resource consumption is directly contradicted by all of human history.

But that's just not true.

Firstly I'm not defending either US sponsored coup to install Pinochet or his repression. Purely the economic policies.

The fact is, Chile has the highest GDP per capita, the highest literacy rate and the highest Human Development Index of all major South American countries. It's also the least corrupt.

http://tinyurl.com/lf22scc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index
http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2013/results/

Admittedly most of the growth came about in the past 2 decades after Pinochet, but an honest reading of history shows that most of the groundwork was laid while he was in power.I don't take any comfort in attributing economic success to a mass murderer but those are the facts.

Frankly, while I agree with Naomi Klein on a number of things, she is absolutely clueless when it comes to economic policy. You can argue on certain specific policy choices (say restricting labour unions) or on the speed of reforms (which was also a major problem in Russia), but taken as a whole, you can't argue with the results.

More guns doesn't mean more gun violence, just ask the Serbians.
America has (or had) the most guns per capita by far (#1 at 89 guns per 100 people) but was 13th in gun deaths with 10.9 per 100000 people.
Serbia , (#2 in per capita guns at 58 per 100) had only 3.9 gun deaths per 100000 people.
Honduras only had 6.2 guns per 100, but had 64.8 gun deaths per 100000 people!

This quite clearly proves it's not the number of guns per person that's an issue, it's the culture the people live in. Guns aren't the problem, people pointing (and shooting) them inappropriately is the issue.
That said, when a populace has proven it can't be responsible with a dangerous device, it's reasonable to make it more difficult to own the device and require prior training for it's proper usage, and punishment for improper usage. Too bad reason has left the building.

This is Democrat failure of epic proportion.

From Wikipedia:
Politics

"Oakland was politically conservative from the 1860s to the 1950s, led by the Republican-oriented Oakland Tribune newspaper. In the 1950s and '60s, the majority stance shifted to favor liberal policies and the Democratic Party.[156][157] Oakland has by far the highest percentage of registered Democrats of any of the incorporated cities in Alameda County. As of 2009, Oakland has 204,646 registered voters, and 140,858 (68.8%) are registered Democrats, 12,248 (5.9%) are registered Republicans, and 41,109 (20.1%) decline to state a political affiliation.[158] Oakland is widely regarded as being one of the most liberal major cities in the nation.

The Cook Partisan Voting Index of Congressional District 13, which includes Oakland and Berkeley, is D+37; among the six most extremely Democratic congressional districts in the US."

Crime:
Oakland's crime rate began to escalate during the late 1960s, and by the end of the 1970s Oakland's per capita murder rate had risen to twice that of its neighbor city, San Francisco, or that of New York City.[125]

During the first decade of the 21st century Oakland has consistently been listed as one of the most dangerous large cities in the United States.[126] Until 2010 the homicide rate dropped four times in a row, and violent crime in general had dropped 27%.

Violent crime in general, and homicides in particular, increased during 2011.[127] In 2012 Oakland reported 131 homicides, the highest since 2006 (when there were 148 recorded).[128][129]"

I think that you will find reactors don't produce weapons grade plutonium, rather, they produce a grade of plutonium known as reactor grade. Weapons grade plutonium is upwards of 95% Pu239. Reactor grade plutonium is what is known as weapons usable, not weapons ready. This is because of the high contamination factor of Pu240, Pu241, and Pu242. These heavier breads of Pu have both high spontaneous fission rates (bad for your fission weapon), and considerable heat, enough so to make weapons fabrication a problem (is it bad when your closed weapons device needs ventilation to not melt itself). While these problems are addressable in advanced weapons platforms, outside of well established nuclear weapons programs, making weapons from them is very challenging.

The main trouble, however, I think is economics, and nuclear is forced to internalize many of their impacts where as other solutions, mainly fossil fuels, do not. That is a pretty key competitive disadvantage.

Also note that electricity is only a fraction of total power, total power includes many non-electrical uses, most notably motor vehicles via liquid fuels. When you look at solar in this light, it represents a sub-fraction of a percent. So 5% of annual solar electrical generation is only a small part of a larger energy picture, and picture which also needs to be weighted against the rest of the world for which solar provides very little power. This isn't an attack on solar, it is a bringing to light of how vast the gulf is to address climate issues with any one technology.

So I think you will find that he isn't off by orders of magnitude, rather, he was being pretty generous to the total amount of energy produced by solar and wind world wide, and climate issues and emissions are world issues.

Key World Energy STATISTICS IEA:

http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/kwes.pdf

(I trust the IEA's numbers)

But I share the sentiment that we need to reduce coal and gas to address climate concerns. The fact that German emissions have risen for 2 years in a row is troubling to say the least. I consider France and Sweden to be better models, lower CO2 per capita and electrical prices in both cases compared to Germany, and both heavy nuclear users...with Sweden using a fair deal more hydro power than France. Nuclear and hydro are the proven heavy lifters in the area of CO2 reductions, which is why I think his criticism of environmental groups in addressing climate issues is justified as they generally oppose both.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND NUCLEAR POWER 2012 IAEA:

http://www.iaea.org/OurWork/ST/NE/Pess/assets/12-44581_ccnp2012_web.pdf

You have to look at how much individuals pay for healthcare, all hidden costs included, proportional to the amount of money they earn and get to keep.

The US government pays a lot for healthcare. When you work for a major university (as I have you), you became acquainted with how much funding their university hospital gets for research from the government. And in countries like Canada, where you can't even find a doctor and have to wait months to see one, of course the spending will be less as they have fewer medical providers and fewer variety of services. But your point is well taken. The US government does spend more "tax" dollars per capita than many of these other socialist healthcare utopias.

I agree with this from the article you posted:

"So what’s the moral of the story? Simple, notwithstanding the shallow rhetoric that dominates much of the debate, the United States does not have anything close to a free-market healthcare system."

Because we have just a partially socialized system, we have only a partial healthcare clusterfuck. But it can get much worse. Ask my colleague why he came to the US for cancer treatment (like Canadian politicians and the rich do) and didn't stay in Canada.

The US government has more money than other governments, so it can spend more. But I was referring to how much individuals pay, not how much a government pays. So, I'm not entirely sure I understand your question fully since I don't equate "Americans" to the US government. Not one and the same.

And look at what's included under "healthcare" costs. Is paying the overpaid humongous US "healthcare" bureaucracy a "healthcare" cost? What about Congressional medical insurance? Or military hospitals?
It's really hard to know, given the lack of economic calculation involved in government spending.

But you can see both sides use the same "US spends more per capita" to come to opposite conclusions. One says, it spends more but because it is not more socialist, it sucks more (not true, though). The other says, it spends more, so it means it is too socialist compared to other countries.

See if you can find data on where exactly the money is spent and the breakdown, more specifically than "healthcare."

No, the US spends MORE TAX MONEY per capita than, say, Sweden and all those other countries with "free" healthcare.(except for 3 of them) Swedes do pay more taxes, yes, but its not because of healthcare.
ON TOP of all those taxes, Americans pay private insurance or bankrupt themselves in order to actually get healthcare when they need it.

http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2013/02/23/which-nation-has-the-most-per-capita-government-spending-on-healthcare-france-italy-the-united-states-
sweden-canada-greece-or-the-united-kingdom/

Last graph (adjusted for inflation per capita) should be put in a separate diagram because of high risk of misinterpretation (750-->7000 instead of 2000-->7000)

He forgot one thing, people today are more productive then they were 60 year ago (Productivity growth 1947-2012)

To bypass this problem spending should compared with GDP ( market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time): Total Government expenditures by major category of expenditure as percantages of GDP: 1938-2009. It is stable since 1968, nearly 30% of the GDP.

Actually America's GDP is only 1st in the world because our population is 3rd in the world. Our GDP per capita is about 8th.You probably have a better standard of living if you live in Singapore, Norway, Switzerland or Hong Kong. I think we'd be doing even better if were were spending more on education and wasting less on the military.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita

@jimnms

(1)

I don't accept that the US is a more violent country by nature, therefore to me approaching it by cutting down all violence as you say is not plausible.

People can wax lyrically about a gun and violence obsessed culture but as far as I'm concerned the pervasiveness of Western society means you can say that about just about any country nowadays.

Socio-economic conditions determine the rate of murder and all indicators show that despite the US having a high per capita income rate, it has a drastically above average murder rate.

The only logical conclusion I see is that the easy availability of guns empowers the ratio of violent people with a tool designed to liquefy people's insides resulting in this.

(2)

I agree that the media focus on mass shootings ignores the wider issue. It is true however that mass shootings are certainly more common in the US that in equally highly developed countries so that mere fact is still newsworthy. The significantly higher murder rate of the US to any other developed country should be the issue but nobody seems to ever talk about it from the snippets I see.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

You mention China. Mass murder sprees certainly can happen in any country regardless of gun regulation. Nothing will stop the occasional delusion but resourceful individual from improvising but it stands to reason that looking at the wider trend, despite China being drastically less developed it's murder rate per capita is 20% of the US.

As I pointed out.. it's about the same number of metro areas per capita, and the video didn't mention the actual populations living in metro areas in the two countries. Also, I wouldn't assume that UK non-metro areas are demographically similar to their US equivalents. I think we need to see the per capita violent crime in metro areas stats for both countries.
If anyone here has these, post them!

I agree that he should have shown urban crime rates in the UK if those datas <wink> are available.

But if you assume (dangerous I know) the trends are similar, then 3 times the violent crime rate (per capita) in 1/6th the number of metropolitan areas means that UK cities are 18 times as violent as American cities.

"One study asserts that Americans are more likely to be shot to death than people in the world’s other 35 wealthier nations. While this is literally true, it is irrelevant—except, perhaps to people terrified not of death per se but just death by gunshot. A fact that should be of greater concern but which the study fails to mention—is that per capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent. Of course, it may be speculated that murder rates around the world would be higher if guns were more available. But there is simply no evidence to support this."

Study by Harvard:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

No offence taken at these guys. I can understand the individual's desire to get the best wage they can. It's human nature. And therein lies the socialist principle. It's a philosophy contrary to human nature. I work in a field where Unions are illegal, and rightfully so, because it would lead to price fixing, monopolistic practices and it would be generally contrary to the public good. The same is true for labor unions. It's legalized monopoly and price fixing of labor and contrary to the public good as it either increases consumer prices, or makes US products less competitive, either forcing businesses to shut down (like Hostess), or ship jobs overseas. But, Unions aren't the greatest evil for US labor costs. Like I pointed out before, the cost to business of employing people here continues to escalate for the previously mentioned reasons. Healthcare in particular has to be reformed, and I don't mean the new healthcare legislation. It does nothing to rein in costs and, instead, will increase labor costs. Note the number of businesses that are already limiting worker's hours to make them ineligible. That's progress? Don't get me wrong, I'm for healthcare for all, but it has to be affordable. How can we justify spending double per capita on healthcare what the rest of the developed Nations of the World do? Unsustainable and it's growing leaps and bounds by the year.