Breathalyzers work by calculating the amount of alcohol in the breath, and extrapolating the amount of alcohol in the blood by assuming that the ratio is 2100 to 1 -- that for every gram of ethanol in the breath, there are 2100 grams in the blood. In europe, breath testers assume that the ratio is 2300 to 1.There are many problems with this assumption.

1. The ratio varies from person to person, and women typically have a lower ratio, meaning that breath tests are biased against them.

2. About 1.8% of people have a ratio below 2,100, about 14% have a ratio higher than normal.

3. The ratio depends on the temperature of the breath. The ratio is only 2,100 at 37 °C, and the average temperature of the breath is 34°C. If one is running a fever, the machine will read a higher blood alcohol content, and if one is cold, it will read lower. This is further confounded by the variation in average body temperature between individuals.

4. The ratio will change if the person is still absorbing alcohol into his system. The amount of ethanol vapor will be higher during the absorption phase, which lasts from 20 to 90 minutes, depending on the types and quantities of foods and drinks consumed.

5. The human body generates about three grams of ethanol per day in its normal operation. Ethanol is a byproduct of our digestive system, and the amount generated will vary. People on low calorie, carbohydrate restricted diets will generate more, and their breath can read as high as .02 (1/4 legal limit in the US), without ingesting any external alcohol whatsoever.

6. Ethanol vapor in the lungs takes time to evaporate from lung tissue; faster than normal breathing can lower the reading by as much as 32%, and slow breathing or holding one's breath can raise the reading by the same amount.

So a breath test certainly could be accurate, but it seems about as likely as finding a broken watch showing the correct time. Even if they take you to the station and draw blood, the concentration will vary between arteries and veins, depending if the person is still absorbing alcohol previously consumed. Veins will show a higher reading after absorption is complete, and the law generally states that they are to be used for the blood sampling.

To lower a breath test reading:

1. Lower your body temperature -- remove clothing, drink a lot of cold water, etc.
2. Breathe as fast and deeply as possible before the test.
3. Eat a lot of carbs before drinking.
4. Leave the bar a long time after your last drink.
5. Make sure you don't have a fever (Tylenol and Advil are fever reducers.)

Inflation is caused primarily by the rise of wealth in society, making labor more expensive. If you won the lottery tomorrow, how much would you charge for an hour of labor? The same applies to societies that become richer over time. Today the average unskilled worker earns about 25 times more per hour than he did in 1774, and is also about 25 times richer. The time one spends laboring today buys a lot more milk and bread than it did, for an average worker, in 1774.

Imagine two islands, one where everyone is living in a nice hut with a lot of preserved meat, cheese, wine, spices, etc, and another were everyone lives on the beach and fishes to eat each day. If men on the rich island want to hire others to work in their factory, they'll need to pay them more because both of them have more assets. Rich men can pay more, and rich men demand more for their time. On the poor island, a worker might be available for two fish per day. On the wealthy island that has a lot of preserved fish and a lot of fishing boats, food is easier to acquire and the amount offered for a day of work will have to be higher.

Further, imagine that the supply of fish and food did not rise faster than the amount of other material goods and people on the islands over time. Even if each man pulls two fish from the sea each day for life, and they use fish as money, the richer island would demand more fish per hour of labor, lowering the value of money when compared to labor and services (inflation). Because most things today require human labor to create, their price has risen vs most things that require very little human effort. Fishing nets are now made by machines and their price has fallen over time, but the price to hire a fisherman for a day has steadily gone up since 1774.

This is not to say that labor is the reason that anything is valuable, or is based on the labor that goes into it. It is only to state that as society becomes richer, each rich man demands more assets from other rich men in order to labor for them, raising the cost to produce new assets in terms of what already exists.

If tomorrow everyone suddenly had ten times more of everything they owned yesterday, what would be the only thing that would rise in value? Labor. And as we became richer, we got more of everything we previously had, including money.

“Apple was in very serious trouble, and what was really clear was that if the game were a zero sum game, where if Apple were going to win, Microsoft has to lose, then Apple was going to lose. A lot of people’s heads were in that place at Apple, even in the customer base. There were too many people at Apple playing the game of “if Apple is going to win, Microsoft has to lose.” It was clear that we didn’t have to play that game; Apple wasn’t going to beat Microsoft... Apple didn’t have to beat Microsoft. To me, it was essential to break that paradigm.” Steve Jobs, 2007, on his return to Apple

It saddens me to see such brilliant rhetoric wasted; directed at the victims of a creeping disease, encouraging its proliferation, instead of working to create a vaccine. The irony is palpably maddening.

"What They did not want you to ever find out is that your generation, the generation born between 1980-1995, actually outnumbers the Baby Boomers. They knew that if you ever turned your eye towards political reform, you could change the world.

They tried to keep you sated on vapid television shows and vapid music. They cut off your education and fed you brain candy. They took away your music and gave you Top Ten pop stations. They cut off your art and replaced it with endless reality shows for you to plug into, hoping you would sit quietly by as They ran the world. I think They thought you were too dumb to notice.

Indeed, I thought They had won.

But I watched you occupy the capital of Wisconsin. I see you today as you occupy Wall Street. And I see a spark, a glimmer of the glorious new age that is yours. A changing of the guard, a guard that has stood for entirely too long and needs your young legs to take his place.

I watch you turn away from what is easy and stand up for what is right. I see you understand we as a society are only as strong as our weakest link. I see you wise beyond your years. And I am proud. Give ‘em hell, kids. You are beautiful." -Kate Danley

Progress reduces personal freedom, but reducing personal freedom does not create progress.

Many areas of modern living are logically incompatible with personal freedom, and self-directed actions by individuals, because many industries are today so complex that many professionals are required to promise to have a client's best interest in mind; to be paid to be selfless, an impossible task.

Governments, military leaders, doctors, economic advisors, and others are today forced to make decisions on behalf of others. A patient cannot be reasonably asked which drug he would like to purchase unless he knows as much as his doctor. Doctors must act in their patient's best interest, and that requires the explicit separation of the doctor's income from his client's payment. It is impossible to have his own best interest (selling the most profitable drug) and his client's best interest (comparing costs to side effects and efficacy) in mind simultaneously.

Today, the healthcare industry is set up in such a way that doctors may as well be selling spaceships to people who know nothing about interstellar travel. They have a financial incentive to recommend the hyperdrive and plasma engine upgrade, and the would be space-traveller has no way to decide what he wants without depending on the salesman for information.

Doctors are in the business of service and guardianship. Guardians agree to act "selflessly," and are necessarily presumed to be more knowledgable, intelligent, wise, or capable than the people they serve. If not, they would not be needed; a patient would pay the hospital to use their equipment to diagnose and treat himself, and would have enough knowledge of international affairs to know when he must jump in his tank and ride off into battle. In 1775, this was possible; each man owned the most advanced weaponry available to any military (muzzle-loaded muskets). And so it was for 18th-century medicine. It was so simple that anyone could do it, and the only drugs available were basically whiskey and willow bark. There was no need to submit to guardian-doctors when the nation was formed; each man was capable of caring for himself and his family with maximum effectiveness. This was a unique time period in human history. Previously, the protection of the king's castle and his knights was required for average people, who were too poor to afford the weaponry of war, or the safety of castle walls. Affordable guns changed that, making the United States, where each man was his own king, a viable possibility.

Today the story is much different. We are again forced to explicitly trust others to care for us because of advanced technologies. None of us are able to defend ourselves effectively without the "castle walls" of an organized military with high-tech weaponry, and medicine is too complex -- drugs too dangerous and scanning equipment too expensive for anyone to enjoy modern healthcare without trusting someone else to have their best interests in mind.

To live a modern life, we must blindly trust others to make decisions for us, recognizing that we are sometimes unable to balance our needs and wants with the price of their acquisition. We don't know how much to pay for an apple if we can't judge its quality. We must trust someone else to judge it for us, and it is improper for that person to be the apple farmer.

Guardians must perform their duties independent of financial compensation. The relationship between a doctor and a patient he agrees to serve cannot be a trade, because serving others is incompatible with trade. As Alisa Rosenbaum was so eager to tell us, one cannot negotiate a trade and be altruistic at the same time. If either party is truly selfless, he would simply offer what he has as a gift, and refuse anything in return. No one can be paid to hold your interests above his own, lest he return the payment immediately because he has agreed to put your interests first. The payment must therefore be separated in some way from the act of service, and the motivations for serving generated by something other than monetary compensation.

The business of creating drugs, and medical or military equipment is still the domain of men with their own best interests in mind, who hold their own needs above all others. By this process, they accidentally serve by more and more efficiently producing what their neighbors want to buy. Manufacturers, in serving their own needs and wants, create the machines and materials needed by the service professions, which are growing in number as the world becomes increasingly complex. The future of modern society will depend upon our ability to keep those who serve from cooperating and trading with people that produce. Doctors serving patients must not be friends with the drug and equipment manufacturers. Armies protecting us must not have dinner with Lockheed executives.

It is like a pilot who agrees to fly you and your plane to a distant location. He must not only negotiate the price before the flight, he must also get into the plane. If the pilot remains on the ground and directs the plane by remote control, his motivations are no longer necessarily in line with yours. He is free to improve efficiency by taking more dangerous routes, or save fuel by slowing the trip, or save money by reducing the safety features of the plane. Doctors are today unshielded from the moral dangers inherent in flying by remote control, as are military and political leaders, who have promised to have the best interests of Americans in mind, but are prodded by manufacturers at every turn to use their products in ever larger quantities.

To correct the problems of government and healthcare, we must put the pilots back into the planes they have agreed to fly, and separate the duties of their service from the influence of the plane's manufacturer. Doctors must not be paid by drug companies, and must avoid friendship or association with drug company salesmen, just as political leaders must avoid the company of lobbyists and the friendship of the businessmen that supply the wealth government consumes. Both doctors and politicians must not earn income by shifting their loyalty away from those they have promised to serve.

Trading is an inherently adversarial process that results in a better life for both combatants. Service is an inherently cooperative process. If you have wine and I have cheese, it's easy to attempt to negotiate away as little of my cheese for as much of your wine as possible, but if I have wine and you agree to feed me, I have to trust you and cooperate with you by telling you what I like to eat, and how many calories I require, and what types of food I like. Because your side of the trade is ambiguous, especially if I have no knowledge of cheese-making or cannot properly judge its quality, I must trust you to do your best to create something that benefits me at the lowest cost, and have no control over the final product. I cannot negotiate with someone who serves me; I must accept what he produces and offer gifts of gratitude, as it were, in exchange. Those that serve agree to make the world better in the future. Those that produce have already improved the world in the past. They are two sides of the same coin, but the motivation to produce and trade is fundamentally different from the motivation to be in service to other people.

As we progress to ever increasing levels of expertise and division of labor, more and more trust will be put in others to make decisions for us; to tell us what to do because we cannot properly make the decisions ourselves. It stands to reason that all our decisions will eventually be made by other people, and when that happens, we won't really be making any decisions at all, except one -- to allow others to control our lives, and to trust them to avoid abusing us. Primitive men are slaves to themselves, waking to farm their own land, milk their own cows, and tend to their own children. Men of the future will be slaves to each other, each depending more and more heavily on the decision-making of others. In the past, the decision to remove a gangrened limb might be made by its owner. Today, the owner visits another man, and asks to be told what to do. Today if almost anything goes wrong, we ask someone else to tell us how to fix it. The trend can only continue as each of us becomes more specialized, and the machines that support our lifestyles become more complex.

It is imperative that we all understand that it is impossible for any of us to be paid to put others' interests ahead of our own, and if we are all to eventually be in the business of service, it is best to insure that the interests of servants and their masters be aligned as much as possible.

Many conservatives and libertarians believe that when China inflates its currency, it makes the products they produce cheaper for Americans by lowering the value of its currency (and invisibly taxing its citizens).

This is like claiming that higher inflation in America will make our industries better able to produce higher quality goods at a lower cost. It is bizarre to claim that taxes and inflation cripple private industry’s attempts to innovate and improve their products (true), and also time claim that the same actions in China will have the opposite effect.

Dollars and RMB are just mediums of exchange and units of account. If one prison is using Marlborough and another is using Lucky Strike, a flood of new cigarette money, or additional confiscation and abuse by guards will not improve a prison’s efficiency in creating pruno and shanks made for export to other prisons. A shank is still a shank, the change in value is driven by changes in the relative wealth of traders, not the value of their money.

Exports become more appealing to rich nations not because the value of money has changed, but because the exporting nation has become poorer; its average quality of life reduced, relative to the richer nation. Just as a man brought from 1960 to the present era would be willing to work long hours in exchange for an average modern lifestyle, so too are men living in oppression and poverty in the third world.

The value of a nation's money is not the driver of changes in levels of imports or exports. They are correlated because government actions that affect the nation's average quality of life also affect the value of money. A government that makes life harder for its citizens makes them willing to accept less for their labor. A government that taxes so heavily that it leaves every citizen naked and starving will have a nation of laborers willing to exchange what they produce for food and shelter. A government that takes as little as possible, and encourages the growth of business within its borders, will see the price that its people demand for the products they produce rise over time.

Obamacare, will lower per capita insurance costs by forcing everyone to be part of the system. It avoids the risk that only sick people will purchase health insurance, and allows companies to price insurance based on actual disease rates without calculating the probability that a new customer is already sick. This is one reason that group insurance for companies is cheaper per person.

Many people feel it is immoral to force people into the group system, but this is somewhat strange; they often don’t feel it is immoral to force everyone into military-protection “insurance.” We are all forced to pay for universal military protection, and the cost is lower, per capita, because we are all forced into the plan.

If each citizen were able to choose to purchase protection or not (ignoring the free-rider problem), military “insurance companies,” would have higher per person costs to defend its customers. People living in areas more susceptible to enemy attacks would be more likely to purchase protection, just as people more likely to get sick are more likely to purchase health insurance. The same “self-selection bias” problem exists in pricing insurance against international violence.

Additionally, if one is against universal health, one should also be against universal police forces, because people with larger families or more assets enjoy more benefits relative to people who don’t own anything, have no children, and live in safe neighborhoods. If each of us should pay individually for health insurance, surely we should all pay for police and courts based upon how many of our children and assets they are required to protect.

If one claims that he should be free to choose to live with the risk that he may be hospitalized, without insurance protection, should he not similarly demand that he be free to choose life without the protection of police? Should he not be free to select the level of police protection he desires, so that he is free to avoid paying for services and accept the risk that his home may be burgled? If one is in favor of a public police force, one should also favor universal healthcare for the same reasons.

My opinion is that the only legitimate function of government is the military protection of its citizens, and that army services cannot be privatized, because a company with profits as its primary goal would necessarily engage itself in conquest and slave-trading, if motivated by profit and nothing else. Military and governance must be motivated by something other than the desire for material gain; if we must trust someone with enough power to defend the nation, we must also trust them to avoid enslaving the nation.

This is why ancient civilizations separated the merchant class from the nobility; aristocrats were expressly forbidden to engage in any form of trade at all. Trading was to be shunned completely and rulers were raised from birth to be disgusted with the very thought of trading for material gain. Income of royalty was to be donated, citizens were to pay “tribute,” to their leaders who so honorably and nobly protected the kingdom from invasion, unmotivated by the desire for mutual exchange. Rulers and royalty were to be motivated only by honor and and the duty to defend.

If the physical protection of citizens is a government’s only purpose, what difference does it make if invaders are men and machines, or diseases and viruses crossing borders undetected? If it is government’s legitimate duty to protect our physical bodies against damage from bullets and bombs, should it sit idly by if the damage is caused by an infectious agent? What is the difference between an invading army of men, and an invasion by an army of viruses and bacteria? If an alien race were to invade the nation, and each extraterrestrial were no bigger than an atom, would the military be absolved of any duty to defend us? 

If a horde of walking sharks suddenly emerged from the sea, killing millions and leaving a swath of bloody terror in their wake, would it be the responsibility of private citizens to have adequate insurance coverage for their own hospitalization, and enough weapons to fend off the sharks? I don’t see a fundamental difference between an invasion by man-eating sharks, hijacked planes hitting tall buildings, and an army of men with guns crossing the border. Why are citizens asked to pay for a private defense and elimination of intruders when a life-threatening invasion is of one type, but rely on government for protection from another?

To be logically consistent, if one recognizes the necessity of a military entrusted with the duty to defend its people from physical harm, one must also recognize that the size or shape of the invaders does not matter. A person who falls ill at the hands of a virus, hell bent on destroying his body, is no different than a person attacked by an enemy soldier.

Protecting other human beings with powerful weaponry, be they bullets or drugs, is a business of honor and duty, and cannot be operated as private enterprises without encouraging ruinous corruption. A guard must be trusted to refuse bribes, and a general must be trusted to never rent the services of his army, and soldiers must never sell sensitive information, no matter how high the price. 

In the same way, a doctor must be trusted to offer the best advice, drugs, and procedures that are in the patient's best interest. He must be driven by a duty to protect his patient's body from disease, not a desire for profit. A doctor who knows that a $4 drug will be more effective, and have less side effects, must avoid recommending a $100 drug that will earn him a higher commission. He must be trusted to avoid unnecessary procedures and tests, even though he knows they will be profitable for him or his hospital.

The problem in both businesses (doctoring and soldiering) is that customers are powerless to negotiate in good faith. A citizen does not know how much to spend on military, does not know enough about  the stability of international governments to know how dangerous or likely invasion may be. And a patient does not know enough about medicine to know the risks and benefits of various drugs and procedures. Customers are forced to trust doctors and military leaders.

We must trust soldiers to avoid abusing their power by enslaving us tomorrow at gunpoint, or entering our homes to steal our assets, or accepting bribes from those that would do us harm. Soldiers must separate their duties from the desire to profit by trading some of the power they hold for material gain. And doctors must do the same, keeping their duty to their patients separate from their desire to profit by recommending more expensive treatments.

If guarding our borders is a legitimate function of government, medicine should logically be included as a legitimate function as well. Both are jobs best left to men who are motivated not by pecuniary incentives, but instead live to uphold their honor and duty to the citizens that they protect and serve. Both military and doctors must depend upon the profit-driven manufacturing of the private sector, to create weapons and medical equipment, but perhaps a return to the old methods would be best. Perhaps doctors and generals should have no direct access to negotiations, as was done with the aristocracy of the middle-ages. All trading was done at arm’s length, with middlemen and servants engaging themselves in the "nasty, lowly and dishonorable" business of negotiation and trade, so that rulers were free to protect the kingdom from harm without any danger of corruption (trading power for money.)

Guardians and doctors are necessarily in the same business; they both protect people from harm, and both must avoid the temptation to trade power for money at the expense of their customers. This is the purpose of regulators. A patient is unable catch a doctor prescribing more expensive or less effective drugs, or performing harmful or useless surgeries. A regulator is designed to know as much as a doctor, and to audit the actions of physicians and insure that they are not taking advantage of patients for profit. They are needed only because patients are incapable of judging a doctor's quality without knowing as much as the doctor (removing the need to hire a doctor).

In any business where one party agrees to care for the other, using superior firepower or knowledge, regulation is needed. One party has agreed to act in good faith, but absent any oversight, is free to abuse the other party without risk; without oversight, the abuse would never be discovered.

A case could be made in support of a private, voluntary regulatory system, where doctors agree to be audited by private-market regulators, but the source of the regulator is not important, per se, because his job is in both cases an honorable duty, and by that I mean to say that he must be trusted with a power to protect us from harm that is unmatched by his salary. A soldier is not driven to fight, or driven to risk his life because of the money he receives. He is driven to protect because he enjoys being “selfless,” he enjoys being viewed as a good man, a hero worthy of respect and honor. He would certainly prefer to avoid a salary in the first place, and instead be showered with enough material gifts to sustain him in a lifestyle befitting a man who risks his life for the well-being of others.

The same can be said of both doctors and regulators, and even professional investment advisors, who require regulation for the same reasons -- they have superior knowledge and have the ability to agree to invest a client’s money in the best way possible, but can secretly invest in vehicles that offer the largest kickbacks and commissions. Again, a business that agrees to care for its clients by using superior knowledge or physical force is a morally dangerous situation that is ripe with opportunities for corruption.

Societies have, in the past, tried to separate trade and protection with caste systems and morality, and today we try to separate them with regulation. It is likely in our best interest to focus not on how "free" or "regulated" markets should be, or on how large government becomes, per se. We must concentrate on separating the duties of guardianship from the business of efficient production. One requires men to faithfully serve those they have sworn to protect, and the other requires an unending willingness to shift from one supplier to another and constant adaption to create the best products possible at the lowest cost. They are fundamentally incompatible processes.