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The winning Republican climate answer is the third option: carbon pricing. Just as a market-based solution is the Republican policy of choice on most issues, so should it be on climate change.

carbon pricing still encounters opposition among some GOP lawmakers, albeit a shrinking number.

Let’s start with the worry that a price on carbon would hurt working-class families and reduce living standards. We propose returning all the net revenue raised directly to the American people through equal quarterly checks. Under this model, the vast majority of American families would win financially. That makes carbon pricing quite popular

Thus, our carbon fee would be self-financing and revenue-neutral, making it the fiscally conservative choice while eliminating any risk of a fiscal drag. Instead of growing the size of government, our approach would “finance” the transition to a low-carbon future by harnessing the power of the market and leveraging the vast resources of the private sector for innovation and investment.

Finally, border carbon adjustments that extend the reach of domestic carbon pricing to imports and exports would protect the competitiveness of U.S.-based companies.

U.S. manufacturers would actually gain a competitive advantage. No other climate solution offers this benefit.

Local farmers have also proven more reliable in a crisis than the industrial food supply chain. The longer the outbreak continues, the more likely consumers will have to reckon with diminishing agricultural supply, particularly for imported products and those processed in large plants with hundreds of on-the-floor workers who are unable to practice social distancing effectively.

The pandemic has emphasized how valuable robust local food systems are. Supporting yours right now can start with contacting your community’s CSA and placing an order.

A supply chain reliant on a relatively small number of large factories to process and package food is a fragile one. Decentralized and localized systems are more resilient in the face of disruption – meaning more small-scale farms producing more food could be just what we need to protect our communities against future crises.

Food waste in general has emerged as a major issue during the pandemic. At the same time that demand for groceries has surged, vast quantities of food produced by the service sector for now-closed restaurant chains, hotels and cafeterias are being discarded.

Fresh farm produce is healthy and delicious. Most of the time, that’s reason enough to sign up for a community-supported agriculture program (CSA), a system in which one pays to regularly receive goodie bags of whatever happens to be flourishing in nearby farmers’ fields, often along with optional local meat and dairy add-ons. Now, during the Covid-19 pandemic, bolstering local food systems is especially urgent – and there’s more at stake than just really good tomatoes.

Between 0.5% and 1.7% of the global population is born with intersex traits, which means a person does not have typical male-female sex characteristics, according to the United Nations.

Infants born in Germany with visible variations in their sex characteristics often undergo painful and irreversible surgery to give them the appearance of a conventional male or female gender, according to an Amnesty International report published in May.

As CNN's KFile reported, in the years before taking office, many of the administration's top officials harshly criticized President Donald Trump's lack of action against Saudi Arabia and bin Salman.

Sanctioning the crown prince, known as MBS, would have been "too complicated," according to two administration officials, and could have jeopardized US military interests in the kingdom.

One central reason: MBS has near complete control over all the country's levers of power. He is not only the crown prince, he is the deputy prime minister, defense minister, chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, chairman of the Council of Political and Security Affairs and the head of Aramco, the state-owned oil and natural gas company.

The White House has stood its ground over the last few days, defending its decision to spare MBS, though struggling at times to explain its rationale.

Psaki added that as President, Biden's role "is to act in the national interest of the United States. And that's exactly what he's doing."

"We are working to put the US Saudi relationship on the right footing," Price told reporters on Monday.

That's all done little to appease angry lawmakers, including many Democrats, who have lashed out at the Biden team's decision not to sanction MBS. Despite the Biden administration's tough talk, the full recalibration that they promised "did not happen," said a Democratic aide on Capitol Hill.

The Biden administration also failed to keep Congress informed in the run-up to the actions they planned to take, two congressional aides said.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers immediately announced last week that more needed to be done to hold MBS accountable, and some are working up legislation.

"I don't think he does go far enough, although you have to give him credit because he's actually increased sanctions and he's increased the travel bans on those individuals who were directly responsible," Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week."

"I don't think anybody thinks that the crown prince was not responsible, in other words, that he knew about it and that he approved of it," Portman added. "So, I do think there ought to be something additional that focuses on him."

"There's obviously a difficult balance that the Biden administration is trying to strike here," she added. "The administration is doing a really good balancing act where Biden is saying they are not going to condone the transactional approach or Whatsapp diplomacy."

"There's no question he and other top advisors view Saudi Arabia as far too important to justify" MBS sanctions, the former administration official said.

It believes the hackers are part of the same Russian group behind last year's devastating attack on SolarWinds -- a software vendor -- that targeted at least nine US federal agencies and 100 companies.

The White House's National Security Council and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are both aware of the incident, according to spokespeople. CISA is "working with the FBI and USAID to better understand the extent of the compromise and assist potential victims," a spokesperson said.

When asked about the United States' ability to get ahead of any further cyberattacks, Austin told Starr on Friday it is his responsibility to present President Joe Biden with offensive options.

Cybersecurity has been a major focus for the US government following the revelations that hackers had put malicious code into a tool published by SolarWinds. A ransomware attack that shut down one of America's most important pieces of energy infrastructure — the Colonial Pipeline — earlier this month has only heightened the sense of alarm. That attack was carried out by a criminal group originating in Russia, according to the FBI.

"I'm confident that we can continue to do what's necessary to not only compete, but stay ahead in this in this, in this domain."

Mr. Trump, who aides said had on his mind the specter of the 2012 attacks on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, became increasingly angry as he watched television images of pro-Iranian demonstrators storming the embassy. Aides said he worried that no response would look weak after repeated threats by the United States.

When Mr. Trump chose the option of killing General Suleimani, top military officials, flabbergasted, were immediately alarmed about the prospect of Iranian retaliatory strikes on American troops in the region. It is unclear if General Milley or Mr. Esper pushed back on the president’s decision.

The option that was eventually approved depended on who would greet General Suleimani at his expected arrival on Friday at Baghdad International Airport. If he was met by Iraqi government officials allied with Americans, one American official said, the strike would be called off. But the official said it was a “clean party,” meaning members of Kataib Hezbollah, including its leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Mr. Trump authorized the killing at about 5 p.m. on Thursday, officials said.

The Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments on the latest legal challenge to the decades-old law on Nov. 10; if the court does strike down the law, the president and Congress will need to move quickly to address the tens of millions of Americans who could lose their health coverage.

Trump, who campaigned on slashing drug prices in 2016, supports enacting a faster approval process for new generic drugs to drive down prices and has signed an executive order to import drugs from countries with lower prices.

Biden, meanwhile, has proposed allowing Medicare to negotiate discounts for drugs, in part by setting up an independent review board that would be in charge of determining the value of new drugs by comparing their price tag in other countries. 

Trump has also looked to more broadly reduce health-care costs, in part by issuing a rule that forces hospitals to report the rates they strike with individual insurers for all services, including drugs, supplies, facility fees and care by doctors who work for the facility. If the hospitals fail to comply, they could be forced to pay a $300 per day fine.

Biden aims to increase competition in the health-care market by using antitrust authority to reduce consolidation among providers. The candidate has called for establishing a public health-care option, which would allow for price negotiations with providers and create leverage to obtain lower prices.

Biden frequently says that he would "listen to science" in handling the virus outbreak, contrasting himself from Trump, who frequently disagrees publicly with the nation's leading infectious experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci.

If elected, Biden has said that he would enforce a "national mask mandate," although he's conceded that it would almost face, and likely fall to, a legal challenge. Trump does not support a mask mandate and has largely left the pandemic response up to individual states. 

The proposal lands in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has shed light on many inefficiencies in the American system, including banking. Take the Paycheck Protection Program, for example: It used the regular banking system as an intermediary, which ultimately meant that bigger businesses and those with preexisting relationships with those banks were prioritized over others.

guarantee a more equitable recovery by providing an alternative to Wall Street banks for state and local governments, businesses, and ordinary people,

The public banking bill also does double duty as a climate bill: It would prohibit public banks from investing in or doing business with the fossil fuel industry.

“Public banks empower states and municipalities to establish new channels of public investment to help solve systemic crises.”

But, he said, this proposal is particularly comprehensive and supportive.

If Democrats keep control of the House come 2021 and manage to flip the Senate and win the White House, they’ll be able to take some big legislative swings, including and perhaps especially on issues related to the economy.

which theoretically would be more motivated to do public good and invest in their communities than private institutions, which are out for profit.

To be clear, the Public Banking Act isn’t creating a federal public bank.

encourage and enable the creation of public banks across the US. It provides legitimacy to those who are pushing for more public banking, and it also includes regulators as key stakeholders who can support and provide guidance for how those banks should operate.

though different public banks would likely have different areas of emphasis.

They could also facilitate easier access to funds for state and local governments from the federal government or Federal Reserve.

“It’s basically a way to finance state and local investment that doesn’t go through Wall Street and doesn’t leave the community and turn into a windfall for shareholders,

Public banks need the FDIC to provide assurances that it will recognize them in accordance with the bond rating of the city or state they represent.

Tlaib recalled hearing from her constituents when the $1,200 coronavirus stimulus checks went out this spring — people waiting days and weeks for direct deposits, or getting a check in the mail only to lose a substantial portion of it cashing it at the store down the street.

The Public Banking Act allows the Federal Reserve to charter and grant membership to public banks and creates a grant program for the Treasury secretary to provide seed money for public banks to be formed, capitalized, and developed.

“This is more about community development.”

McConnell said the FDIC issuing guidance that it recognizes the city’s — and the state’s — public banks as an AAA rating would send a clear direction to the state financial regulators that the public bank is considered low risk.

The bill would also provide a road map for the FDIC, which insures bank deposits of up to $250,000, to insure deposits for public banks, so people feel assured they won’t lose all their money by choosing to open an account with their state bank instead of, say, Wells Fargo.

the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has historically been charged with chartering national banks in the US, not the Fed, meaning this is a fairly novel idea.

It prohibits the Fed and Treasury from considering the financial health of an entity that controls or owns a bank in grant-making decisions.

So here is the thing about private companies, including, yes, banks: The point of them is to make money, and that drives their decisions. It’s not necessarily evil (though sometimes it kind of is), but it’s just how they work.

The idea behind public banking isn’t that Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley go away; it’s that they have to compete with a government-owned entity — and one that’s a little fairer and more ethical in how it does business.

Public banks, as imagined in the Tlaib/Ocasio-Cortez proposal, would provide loans to small businesses and governments with lower interest rates and lower fees.

Student loans are facilitated directly with BND, but other loans, called participation loans, go through a local financial institution — often with BND support.

According to a study on public banks, BND had some $2 billion in active participation loans in 2014. BND can grant larger loans at a lower risk, which fosters a healthy financial ecosystem populated by a cluster of small North Dakota banks.

Democrats have a lot of ideas, and if they take power come January 2021, there’s a lot they can do.

The Public Banking Act is meant to complement ideas such as the ABC Act and postal banking. And, of course, it’s linked to the Green New Deal, not only because it would bar public banks from financing things that hurt the environment, but also because the idea is that public banks would play a major role in financing Green New Deal and climate-friendly projects.

If former Vice President Joe Biden wins the White House and Democrats control both the House and the Senate come 2021, the talk around these ideas becomes a lot more serious.

The U.S.’s strategic objective in Ukraine is to prevent Russia, China and Iran from being able to declare persuasively to the watching world that they are winning.

Only one nation in the whole world is actively fighting to stop this alliance from winning. Ukraine merely wants the U.S. and Europe to send them the necessary instruments of war—not next summer, but now—with which, as the last year has proved, they will fight to the last man, woman and child. The Ukrainians have already written their blank check. Our fatigue is not an option.

the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, a research organization in Washington, has circulated a detailed rebuttal, as well as a rival book, “FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith,” zeroing in on what it characterizes as Roosevelt’s personal desire to limit Jewish immigration to the United States.

The idea that the Allies could and should have bombed the crematories or the rail lines leading to them came to wide public attention with a 1978 article in Commentary by Mr. Wyman, who reprised it in a best-selling book, “The Abandonment of the Jews,” which became the basis for the 1994 PBS documentary “America and the Holocaust: Many people, the authors say, believe that Roosevelt refused to bomb the camp (an option, historians note, that became feasible only in May 1944, after 90 percent of Jewish victims of the Holocaust were already dead). But the book contends that there is no evidence that any such proposal came to him, though a number of Jewish leaders did meet with lower-level officials to plead for bombing. And while the authors call the objections raised by those officials “specious,” they maintain (echoing others) that bombing would not have significantly impeded the killing.

They pointed in particular to the fate of the 937 German Jewish refugees on the ocean liner St. Louis, who were turned away from Cuba in May 1939 and sent back to other European countries, where 254 died after war broke out. The episode, made famous in the 1974 novel “Voyage of the Damned” and a subsequent film, has come to seem emblematic of American callousness. There is simply no evidence, Mr. Breitman and Mr. Lichtman say, to support accounts that the United States Coast Guard was ordered to prevent the refugees from coming ashore in Florida. What’s more, they were turned away from Cuba, the authors argue, as part of a backlash against a previous influx of some 5,000 refugees to that country, who may have been admitted under the terms of a previously unknown deal between Roosevelt and the Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista, who got reduced tariffs for his nation’s sugar in return. The book notes that the St. Louis affair unfolded against a backdrop of intense isolationist and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States while Roosevelt was preparing to press Congress to allow the sale of weapons to nations victimized by German aggression.

the book points to the War Refugee Board, established by Roosevelt in 1944, which they say may have helped save about 200,000 Jews — a number that, if even 50 percent accurate, they write, “compares well” with the number that might have been saved by bombing Auschwitz.

In “A Breach of Faith” Mr. Medoff argues that Jewish immigration levels in the 1930s were largely below established quotas because of Roosevelt’s animus, not as a result of anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiment in Congress and the State Department. Roosevelt’s vision for America was “based on the idea of having only a small number of Jews,” Mr. Medoff said in an interview. Mr. Breitman and Mr. Lichtman’s book, he added, is just an effort “to rescue Roosevelt’s image from the overwhelming evidence that he did not want to rescue the Jews.”

Mr. Breitman and Mr. Lichtman scoffed at that charge, noting that their book is certainly not always flattering to Roosevelt. They depict him as missing many opportunities to aid Jews and generally refusing to speak specifically in public about Hitler’s Jewish victims, lest he be accused of fighting a “Jewish war.” “This is not an effort to write a pro-Roosevelt book,” Mr. Breitman said. “It’s merely pro-Roosevelt in comparison to some things that are out there.”

In the end, however, their verdict is favorable, crediting Roosevelt’s policies with helping to save hundreds of thousands of Jews, as well as preventing a German conquest of Egypt that would have doomed any future Jewish state. “Without F.D.R.’s policies and leadership,” they write, “there may well have been no Jewish communities left in Palestine, no Jewish state, no Israel.”

Henry L. Feingold, the author of “The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945,” bemoaned the rise of “accusatory” history that elevates retrospective “what ifs” over historical context. Roosevelt, he said, had one overriding concern: to win the war. “The survivors said, ‘You didn’t do enough to save us,’ and who could deny it?” Mr. Feingold said. “But do you write history as it should have been or as it was?”

Any explanation of the actions of Japan's leaders that relies on the "shock" of the bombing of Hiroshima has to account for the fact that they considered a meeting to discuss the bombing on August 8, made a judgment that it was too unimportant, and then suddenly decided to meet to discuss surrender the very next day. Either they succumbed to some sort of group schizophrenia, or some other event was the real motivation to discuss surrender.

We often imagine, because of the way the story is told, that the bombing of Hiroshima was far worse. We imagine that the number of people killed was off the charts. But if you graph the number of people killed in all 68 cities bombed in the summer of 1945, you find that Hiroshima was second in terms of civilian deaths. If you chart the number of square miles destroyed, you find that Hiroshima was fourth. If you chart the percentage of the city destroyed, Hiroshima was 17th. Hiroshima was clearly within the parameters of the conventional attacks carried out that summer.

General Anami on August 13 remarked that the atomic bombings were no more menacing than the fire-bombing that Japan had endured for months. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no worse than the fire bombings, and if Japan's leaders did not consider them important enough to discuss in depth, how can Hiroshima and Nagasaki have coerced them to surrender?

If the Japanese were not concerned with city bombing in general or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in particular, what were they concerned with? The answer is simple: the Soviet Union.

Bombing Hiroshima did not foreclose either of Japan's strategic options. The impact of the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island was quite different, however. Once the Soviet Union had declared war, Stalin could no longer act as a mediator -- he was now a belligerent. So the diplomatic option was wiped out by the Soviet move. The effect on the military situation was equally dramatic

The latest Wikileaks dump shows that Clinton’s own inner circle was worried about her dissembling and reluctance to apologize over the email mess, even as the campaign ripped the press for raising those questions. --The media are a bit bored with the story line that she’s clobbering him and want the race to tighten.

But now we have Podesta himself and former Clinton aide Neera Tanden writing frankly about Hillary’s penchant for secrecy and terrible political judgment.

Podesta ripped two longtime loyalists, lawyer Cheryl Mills and spokesman Philippe Reines, along with Clinton attorney David Kendall, for not being “forthcoming on the facts.”

“A lot has to do with her instincts.” Tanden concurred again: “Her instincts can be terrible.”

When the press was harping on the fact that Clinton would not apologize for having a private server, and campaign officials were pushing back hard, it turns out that some privately agreed with the critics.

“Everyone wants her to apologize. And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles heel.”

The disclosure that ObamaCare premiums are rising an average of 25 percent—more in some states, less in others—has provided a measure of vindication for the program’s conservative detractors. It has also given Trump, who wants to repeal ObamaCare, new ammunition against Clinton, who wants to reform it—in part by increasing government subsidies.

The steep premium hikes, and dwindling insurance options in some areas, make clear that President Obama oversold the program.

Now Trump clearly bobbled a statement about his own employees being affected by ObamaCare—only a small percentage are, his company pays the rest—but that doesn’t neutralize the larger issue.

he press has been hungry for a new story line so people don’t check out in the final two weeks. The Wikileaks dump, ObamaCare news and some tightening polls in Florida are all it takes. Perhaps the media will shelve the speculation about Clinton’s Cabinet and treat this once again as a horse race.

What the argument for accommodation is missing is the core reality about Trump. His answer to nearly every problem is himself — his negotiating skill, his strength of purpose, his unique grasp of the national will.

And this permission for violence is paired with an embrace of ethnic and religious bigotry, casting blame and suspicion on Muslims and undocumented immigrants. It would be difficult — or should be difficult — for any Republican to endorse a presidential candidate whose election would cause many of our neighbors to fear for their safety. Or to embrace a candidate who promised to purposely target children in the conduct of the war on terrorism.

He has offered disaffected people an invitation to political violence. “Knock the crap out of them, would you?” he said at one rally. “Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.”

He is offering himself as master of every situation. We are supposed to turn in desperation to the talent and will of one man, who happens to be bristling with prejudice and blazing with ignorance. We are seeing the offer of personal rule by someone with no discernible public or personal virtues.

For Republicans, accommodation with Trump is not just a choice; it is a verdict. None will come away unstained. For evangelical Christians, it is the stain of hypocrisy — making their movement synonymous with exclusion and gullibility. For GOP job seekers, it is the stain of opportunism. (Consider the sad decline into sycophancy of Chris Christie.) For conservatives, it is the stain of betrayal — the equivalent of supporting George Wallace in 1968 as an authentic populist voice.

All this leaves completely horrible options: sitting the election out, supporting a third-party candidate, contemplating a difficult vote for Clinton. But these are the only honorable options.

Coleman and his team are completing a major revision of the SAT to be unveiled in January 2014 and launched in the spring of 2015. He wants the test to “propel” students toward deeper learning of real things

That means fewer abstruse vocabulary words (like “abstruse”) and essays that are based on documents so human graders can evaluate the correctness of their writers’ arguments, not just their style.

The U.S. rode to economic supremacy with the world’s highest share of young college grads, but now its percentage of graduates at the typical age of graduation is behind those of Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Sweden, and the U.K., the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says.

The message: Real life is messy. You’re not given five answers to choose from. And America shouldn’t depend on something resembling an IQ test to rake geniuses from the rubbish.

The SAT and its rival, the ACT, are part of the problem. Designed to ferret out hidden talent, the tests have become, for some students at least, barriers to higher education. Scores are highly correlated with family income; Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls the SAT a “wealth test.”

Since the earliest days of the republic, there have been two schools of thought about the merits of sorting students, as recounted in Nicholas Lemann’s 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. Thomas Jefferson, who believed in a “natural aristocracy,” said that in Virginia all w

New Englander Henry Adams was less disdainful of the rubbish. He said Jefferson’s natural aristocracy was no better than regular old aristocracy: “I would trust one as soon as the other with unlimited power.”

The SAT was launched in 1926 as a variant of an intelligence test used in World War I to place soldiers and sailors. Harvard adopted it in 1934.

The University of California long resisted using standardized tests but in 1968—swamped by more qualified applications than it could handle—began requiring applicants to submit SAT scores as a way to screen out lower achievers.

Admissions officers at about 850 four-year colleges now make standardized tests optional for some or all of their applicants

To be less cynical, the tests do stigmatize low scorers and distract people “from what they really need to do, which is mastering academic subjects in their high school,” says Wake Forest University sociologist Joseph Soares, whose school went SAT-optional in 2008.

These articles are submitted to a group from Translators Without Borders that produces medical articles for Wikipedias in languages spoken in countries that often lack high-quality medical information. Examples include an article in Javanese on dengue fever and one in Hindi on urinary tract infection. Creating these high-quality medical articles fits neatly with efforts by the Wikimedia Foundation to make deals with cellphone carriers to provide Wikipedia content free of data charges, especially in the developing world

“If we want to get high-quality information to all the world’s population, Wikipedia is not just a viable option, but the only viable option,” Dr. Azzam said.

nearly five million Americans fall into what’s called the “Medicaid gap”

In Germany, employees' premiums are a percentage of their incomes, so low-wage workers simply pay rock-bottom insurance rates.

Germany actually pioneered this type of insurance—it all started when Otto von Bismarck signed his Health Insurance Bill of 1883 into law. (It’s still known as the “Bismarck model” because of his legacy, and other parts of Europe and Asia have adopted it over the years.)

You can think of this setup as the Goldilocks option among all of the possible ways governments can insure health. It's not as radical as single-payer models like the U.K.’s, where the government covers everyone. And it's also not as brutal as the less-regulated version of the insurance market we had before the ACA.

Since there are no provider networks in Germany, doctors don’t know what other providers patients have seen, so there are few ways to limit repeat procedures.

All things considered, it’s good to be a sick German. There are no network limitations, so people can see any doctor they want. There are no deductibles, so Germans have no fear of spending hundreds before their insurance ever kicks in.

There’s also no money that changes hands during a medical appointment. Patients show their insurance card at the doctor’s office, and the doctors' association pays the doctor using money from the sickness funds. "You don’t have to sit at home and sort through invoices or wonder if you overlooked fine print,”

That insurance card, by the way, is good for hospital visits anywhere in Europe.

of all of the countries studied, Germans were the most likely to be able to get a same-day or next-day appointment and to hear back from a doctor quickly if they had a question. They rarely use emergency rooms, and they can access doctors after-hours with ease.

And Germany manages to put its health-care dollars to relatively good use: For each $100 it spends on healthcare, it extends life by about four months, according to a recent analysis in the American Journal of Public Health. In the U.S., one of the worst-performing nations in the ranking, each $100 spent on healthcare resulted in only a couple of extra weeks of longevity.

those differences aside, it’s fair to say the U.S. is moving in the direction of systems like Germany’s—multi-payer, compulsory, employer-based, highly regulated, and fee-for-service.

The German government is similarly trying to push more people into “family physician” programs, in which just one doctor would serve as a gatekeeper.

like the U.S., Germany may see a shortage of primary-care doctors in the near future, both because primary-care doctors there don’t get paid as much as specialists, and because entrenched norms have prevented physician assistants from shouldering more responsibility

With limitations on how much they can charge, German doctors and hospitals instead try to pump up their earnings by performing as many procedures as possible, just like American providers do.

Similarly, “In Germany, it will always be an operation,” Göpffarth said. “Meanwhile, France and the U.K. tend to try drugs first and operations later.”

With few resource constraints, healthcare systems like America's and Germany's tend to go with the most expensive treatment option possible. An American might find himself in an MRI machine for a headache that a British doctor would have treated with an aspirin and a smile.

Perhaps the biggest difference between our two approaches is the extent to which Germany has managed to rein in the cost of healthcare for consumers. Prices for procedures there are lower and more uniform because doctors’ associations negotiate their fees directly with all of the sickness funds in each state. That's part of the reason why an appendectomy costs $3,093 in Germany, but $13,000 in the U.S.

Now, Maryland is going a step further still, having just launched a plan to cap the amount each hospital can spend, total, each year. The state's hospital spending growth will be limited to 3.58 percent for the next five years. “We know that right now, the more [doctors] do, the more they get paid,” John Colmers, executive director of Maryland’s Health Services Cost Review Commission, told me. “We want to say, ‘The better you do, the better you get paid.’”

certain U.S. states have tried a more German strategy, attempting to keep costs low by setting prices across the board. Maryland, for example, has been regulating how much all of the state’s hospitals can charge since 1977. A 2009 study published in Health Affairs found that we would have saved $2 trillion if the entire country’s health costs had grown at the same rate as Maryland’s over the past three decades.

“In Germany, there is a uniform fee schedule for all physicians that work under the social code,” Schlette said. “There’s a huge catalogue where they determine meticulously how much is billed for each procedure. That’s like the Bible.”

“The red states are unlikely to follow their lead. The notion that government may be a big part of the solution, instead of the problem, is anathema, and Republican controlled legislatures, and their governors, would find it too substantial a conflict to pursue with any vigor.”

no other state has Maryland’s uniform, German-style payment system in place, “so Maryland starts the race nine paces ahead of the other 46 states,” McDonough said.

the unique spirit of each country is what ultimately gets in its way. Germany’s more orderly system can be too rigid for experimentation. And America’s free-for-all, where hospitals and doctors all charge different amounts, is great for innovation but too chaotic to make payment reforms stick.

rising health costs will continue to be the main problem for Americans as we launch into our more Bismarckian system. “The main challenge you’ll have is price control,” he said. “You have subsidies in health exchanges now, so for the first time, the federal budget is really involved in health expenditure increases in the commercial market. In order to keep your federal budget under control, you’ll have to control prices.”

Projects like the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset or the Pebble watch (both of which were Kickstarter successes that went on to become big independent businesses; the former was acquired last year by Facebook for $2 billion) course with a special energy that derives from the exchange of far-flung resources among the sympathetic and like-minded. The realized object takes on a kind of totemic significance through the aspirations and the values of the community that brought it into being

Until last October, Kickstarter’s terms of use stipulated that project creators had only two options to discharge their obligations: ship or refund

Today, in response to situations like ZPM’s, creators can refund, ship or explain, and if a full audit — financial or narrative — shows that the creators have made “every reasonable effort” toward a decent outcome, the backers are encouraged to feel satisfied. Strickler told me he feels it undermines the whole concept of crowdfunding to guarantee that products will be delivered or that refund money will be held in escrow; the acceptance of some risk, after all, is an integral part of patronage

Ethan Mollick, who has published several papers on crowdfunding, has found that more than 80 percent of hardware projects ship with significant delays. Most of those do ultimately deliver something, but Mollick has found that 14 percent of the projects studied have, since 2012, shipped either nothing at all or something too shoddy to use

If backers lack an absolute right to a product, and their legal options are limited, the policy only heightens their feeling of entitlement to full disclosure. “I long ago gave up on getting a machine, but I want my $250 of information,”

A chief tenet of the Internet age is belief in the natural proliferation of democracy and decentralization, in the ability of distributed networks of everyday people to achieve what once required top-down hierarchies and a great concentration of power. When you contribute to a Kickstarter campaign that funds an album or a documentary, you’re participating in the creation of cultural value outside the risk-averse bureaucracies of mass cultural production. You’re kicking in to cut out the middlemen of music labels or Hollywood studios.

it wasn’t until 2010, when the founders were faced with an iPhone tripod proposal, that they had to decide if such commercial projects qualified as “creative” in the way they intended. As Strickler remembers it, the tripod’s creators responded that their particular tools happened to be injection molding and AutoCAD software, but that their enterprise was absolutely in the spirit of the platform. Kickstarter agreed to host the project, but that decision inspired a sustained effort to shape best practices for gadget campaigns. Its new rules included a requirement that there be a working prototype, and a prohibition on fancy computer renderings

At the same time, like all 21st-century consumers, Kickstarter backers have been trained to expect a world custom-engineered for total frictionlessness. Everything is supposed to work easily, right away and well. O

manufacturing remains a supremely difficult process, the success of which continues to rely on marshaling a lot of resources: development money, an extensive network of trusted vendors, the dedicated personnel to sit in conference rooms in concrete campuses in Shenzhen and Dongguan and refuse to budge until the product is streaming off the assembly line in the right amounts, at the right quality and at the agreed-upon price.

the advice became overwhelming. “They’re doing it on their own schedule, nights and weekends, taking up a huge amount of Igor’s time when he’s got a ton of work to do,” she said. “People got insulted because they couldn’t be involved as much as they wanted.”

The ongoing calls for transparency put pressure on ZPM to carry on all of its business in public, but transparency and efficacy can be incommensurable ideals. ZPM couldn’t blame its vendors in updates, even for the mistakes they were consistently making, if the company wanted to keep working with them — or with anyone at all. The backers had a hard time understanding this; they continued to operate under the shared assumption that more demo­cracy, more engagement and more transparency lead inexorably to more success.

ZPM also could not publish a full financial audit, because open books make meaningful cost negotiation impossible. “I just can’t publish our financials, our cost breakdown,” Tambasco said. “If I do that then when I go to get this thing made, then everybody knows how much I have in the bank. Then what they’re going to do is just drain that money.”Which is exactly what happened.

When one of those consultants demanded, in the spring of 2014, that the project act like a “real start-up” and go into what people in Silicon Valley often call “stealth mode,” the updates came to an abrupt halt. The founders hoped that by posting their email addresses and phone numbers, and offering to field queries and complaints in person, they might assuage the backer community, but this plan, in hindsight, seemed misbegotten. It only confirmed for the backers that their one plank of accountability — the public nature of the story on offer — had been withdrawn.

the reality of ZPM’s failure was pretty banal: The founders were naïve and inexperienced, well intentioned but clumsy, and they serially trusted and paid the wrong people for ineffective help.

The backers suspected that Polyakov would try to sell the intellectual property and pocket the proceeds, but in fact Polyakov’s total asking price for the company was $35,000 to settle the founders’ legal and professional debts, equity consideration for their angel investors and, most important, a guarantee that Buckman would honor ZPM’s commitment to its backers.

it's dismaying in the sense that people who occupy a position of relative privilege seem to go out of their way to avoid acknowledging it. A recent example is M. Todd Henderson, a law professor at the University of Chicago whose annual household income exceeds $250,000, putting him comfortably ahead of 98 percent of his fellow Americans. Henderson was foolish enough to write a blog post venturing that even though he and his wife earn more than $250,000, his Hyde Park neighbor Barack Obama shouldn't raise his taxes because "we can't afford it"