Work on making it cost less for government to work. This means allowing greater discretion for pay raises, fewer government contractors, more government FTE's, incentives to spend less, rather than the current incentives to spend more (e.g. remove the system where your project loses funding next year if you don't spend your entire budget in the current year), and allowing government workers to be fired or laid off for incompetence. In addition, the red tape *really* needs to be addressed. There's some real talent in the government worker pool, but their work is often stifled by onerous approval processes and mandates from top-level executives that really should not be making ground-level decisions.
Granted there may be a sampling bias, but the social media age has made things much worse. my family, who were mostly apolitical when I was growing up, have mostly become conspiracy theorists since Obama took office. If you saw how mainstream this kind of shit is in places like Oklahoma, you might be concerned about it too.
Liberals might say some dumb shit from time to time, but they don't often go around proposing to kill everyone who doesn't agree with them the way right wingers tend to.
Liberals who do that are called goths
No, they're called anarchists.. I've met a few of them, too. Jackasses like the ones in Seattle during the G8 (or 6, or whatever, can't remember what the number was) or in the ALF. They're out there, but they're not nearly as common as the right wingers. What freaks me out isn't that there are *some* right wingers that do this, it's that *most* right wingers are cavalier in their attitude about killing.
My point about the minimum wage is that it only loosely correlates to employment, as employers will pay the absolute minimum they can per employee, regardless of the benefit they see from the employee. It might hurt some businesses at the margins, and increase prices a bit, but could seriously put a dent in our poverty problem.
You should really buy an economics book.
The rest of your post.....isn't that the same as saying video games caused someone to kill? BTW it entertains me that you think having your town bombed would give you more perspective on the topic, when it could as easily narrow your perspective.
I'm just saying that if several million right wingers say it in jest, a few of them aren't going to get the joke, and think it's for real. I've been all over, and I've seen many kinds of people, but the only kind that scare me more than right wingers are meth addicts (there tends to be some overlap there, which leads to a very scary combination). Liberals might say some dumb shit from time to time, but they don't often go around proposing to kill everyone who doesn't agree with them the way right wingers tend to. As for the economics thing.. If you're really worried about the minimum wage, you're looking in the wrong place in terms of employment costs. Obamacare is going to roughly double the cost of hiring a minimum wage employee, compared to the 20% pay increase from a wage hike. If we went the sensible route and had a tax-based health care system like every other country in the first world employers wouldn't have to shoulder that burden. A basic income might be a better system than a minimum wage from an economics perspective, but that has exactly zero chance of ever happening in the US.
My point about the minimum wage is that it only loosely correlates to employment, as employers will pay the absolute minimum they can per employee, regardless of the benefit they see from the employee. It might hurt some businesses at the margins, and increase prices a bit, but could seriously put a dent in our poverty problem.
As for McVeigh.. Maybe his target was just feds, but I really do think he targeted the day care for maximum effect, though I can't prove it. I have grown up around right wingers (many in my family), and I've seen a disturbingly casual attitude from them regarding killing people that don't agree with them, including attitudes toward killing children (though they think fetuses are sacred, for some reason). I'm really not trying to bait when I say that I think this was a right wing nut job(s), I have seen enough of them in my lifetime that I would not be at all surprised if one of them went and did the kind of thing that they joke about all time.. If you saw my FB feed, you would just see my extended family doing nothing but posting jokes about killing liberals and/or brown people all day. Somewhere out there is someone who takes this shit seriously, and I think it's more likely than not that this bombing in Boston was done by just such a person. So I'm just calling my guess.
Okay then, who do your predjudices tell you he was trying to kill? Clearly your predjudices lead you to assume I adhere to a political party (wrong, btw). My home city was bombed by right wing militants, so I think I have a bit more perspective than you when it comes to armed right wing nut jobs that talk about starting revolutions.
I don't see a word of violence there. But then again, fucktards like yourself scream "racist" anytime anyone disagrees with your president. You don't give a fuck about the facts. You'll twist shit around. You'll lie and cheat to get your own way. You just want to be a hateful fuck who spreads schism. I hope it comes back to bite you in the ass in the worst of ways.
In fact it could very well be someone like yourself trying to set up the Tea Party... with any luck you posted from a traceable IP because it's very likely whoever did this would be online monitoring posts about it, as you are.
$10 says this was militant tea baggers. They all post so much crazy shit about killing people on facebook and eventually one of them snaps and acts on it.
The regulations on individual plans are much looser than group plans. My first son is autistic, and individual plans are not required to cover that. In addition, individual plans are allowed to drop you for filing claims, which means that if you get cancer or some other expensive disease you're pretty much screwed. Maybe you can find cheap plans, but you need to be aware of what you're really buying.
The idea that a salaried employee can have his employers (and optionally tax payers) by his balls and squeeze hard to get paid more is quaint, but doesn't apply in most of the real world. Most people in this world actually have to compete in order to make money. You know: bakers, electricians, computer consultants, personal trainers, hairdressers, etc. They work an hour, they get paid an hour. And if they don't work well, they lose customers.
Yes, but bakers at least get minimum wage. Not so with rent-a-coders.
I make my living as a programmer for hire. Clients find me, ask for the moon, and I give it to them - but my hourly rate only reflects time on task. I don't charge my clients for trips to the water cooler. Unless I'm on site, I average about 6 hours a day. But this can be compensated by the fact you can adjust your own rates. For all the bitching about evil corporations, I'm surprised more people don't start their own S Corp and do this. It's a lot more responsibility, but you are the master of your own fate. (You are still responsible for your own fate when working for a business, but I suppose a lot of people don't see it that way) In fact, you may not even see corporations as all that evil when you're on the other end of the stick.
Mostly it's the lack of health insurance. If we went to a single-payer system, I would be glad to go that route, but I can't risk my kids getting cancer while I'm off being my own boss and not able to afford the $3k/month family health insurance that can drop you for no reason.
Pay for your own damn healthcare and keep your socialist hands off of my money and I will pay for mine.
Sure thing, as long as you keep your libertarian car off my streets that I paid for with my tax dollars. You can build your own parallel road, buying up land as you go.
I think you are missing the OP point. Rationally speaking, it should not matter who buys the insurance – indirectly from the employer or directly from the employee – it is coming out of the employee’s wages. People who can’t afford health care is a different matter.
If I buy medical insurance though my employer, my employer gets a tax break. If I buy medical care for myself, I don’t. Then factor in that people who buy their own health care tend to be sicker and more expensive than those who get it through work. That causes a big distortion.
The problem is that everyone needs health care, and when you need it you don't have the leverage to shop around. Employer-based health care has caused part of the out of control cost increases by hiding the real cost. But that doesn't mean we don't all need health care. If you have a captive market (a sick patient), you can charge anything you want, and the whole "supply and demand" argument goes out the window. A single-payer government system can set prices, meaning that health care providers can't gouge (insurance companies don't care if they gouge -- they just pass the added costs on to you). Look at Sweden -- they pay less than half what we do, yet they get significantly better health care. Hell, even Canada is way ahead of us on this, and look, they have a debt that's miniscule! Why? Because public health care is cheaper than private health care.
A single payer health care system would free employers from the burden of providing health care, allow entrepreneurs to pursue their own business goals without fear of losing health coverage, and provide massive cost savings by allowing everyone to receive preventative care rather than having the 50 million uninsured people end up in the ER once their condition has deteriorated to the point where they can no longer ignore their illness.
The role of an emergency room as a health care center is there because they are required by law to not refuse treatment and that many people somehow figure out how to avoid paying for medical costs. It is skewing the way that people seek health care assistance when
The real "solution" is to simply let doctors be entrepreneurs and for them to charge reasonable professional rates for services rendered in an open competitive marketplace where the patients are the customers. All of the messes in the health care industry are precisely because this doesn't happen and the government trying to meddle into that client-practioner relationship.
Thank goodness engineers aren't paid by insurance companies and government agencies to build homes and businesses.... at least in most cases. Even more so, that such activity is seem as "essential to life" and deemed something that should be nationalized with all engineers encouraged to become government employees.
I like how you edited out this part of my comment:
Unless you decide that anyone who can't pay for medical care should die, health care becomes a shared cost to society.
You and I disagree fundamentally on whether or not someone should die because they're broke. I don't think they should, you clearly think they should.
Yeah, health care should definitely be eliminated as an employer benefit. That's what's caused the entire healthcare debacle in the first place: employers pay for health because it's a pretax benefit. You end up to a place where "insurance" just means paying for everything, and has no meaning anymore. And also hugely expensive.
Buy your own health insurance for cheap (for the small chance you'll have a heart attack or other catastrophic health care problem that a few percent of the population have). For the other stuff (colds and whatnot), just pay out of pocket. It would be cheap if everyone didn't have Cadillac health programs.
Close, but not quite. Unless you decide that anyone who can't pay for medical care should die, health care becomes a shared cost to society. A single payer health care system would free employers from the burden of providing health care, allow entrepreneurs to pursue their own business goals without fear of losing health coverage, and provide massive cost savings by allowing everyone to receive preventative care rather than having the 50 million uninsured people end up in the ER once their condition has deteriorated to the point where they can no longer ignore their illness.
Amazon.com is looking to hire thousands of people, right now. Not saying that that makes a dent, but there are companies with very strong growth right now.
I interviewed with Amazon. After the second in-person interview I had nailed technical questions, but was not offered a job. No matter, I was offered a job for 20k more in Portland where cost of living is lower and the culture better. Honestly Amazon didn't look like a great place to work, particularly given the location, starting salary, and amount of hours you're expected to put in. Might be okay right out of school before you have a life, but not a great place if you have a family to take care of.
Slashdot Mirror
Work on making it cost less for government to work. This means allowing greater discretion for pay raises, fewer government contractors, more government FTE's, incentives to spend less, rather than the current incentives to spend more (e.g. remove the system where your project loses funding next year if you don't spend your entire budget in the current year), and allowing government workers to be fired or laid off for incompetence. In addition, the red tape *really* needs to be addressed. There's some real talent in the government worker pool, but their work is often stifled by onerous approval processes and mandates from top-level executives that really should not be making ground-level decisions.
Granted there may be a sampling bias, but the social media age has made things much worse. my family, who were mostly apolitical when I was growing up, have mostly become conspiracy theorists since Obama took office. If you saw how mainstream this kind of shit is in places like Oklahoma, you might be concerned about it too.
Liberals might say some dumb shit from time to time, but they don't often go around proposing to kill everyone who doesn't agree with them the way right wingers tend to.
Liberals who do that are called goths
No, they're called anarchists.. I've met a few of them, too. Jackasses like the ones in Seattle during the G8 (or 6, or whatever, can't remember what the number was) or in the ALF. They're out there, but they're not nearly as common as the right wingers. What freaks me out isn't that there are *some* right wingers that do this, it's that *most* right wingers are cavalier in their attitude about killing.
My point about the minimum wage is that it only loosely correlates to employment, as employers will pay the absolute minimum they can per employee, regardless of the benefit they see from the employee. It might hurt some businesses at the margins, and increase prices a bit, but could seriously put a dent in our poverty problem.
You should really buy an economics book. The rest of your post.....isn't that the same as saying video games caused someone to kill? BTW it entertains me that you think having your town bombed would give you more perspective on the topic, when it could as easily narrow your perspective.
I'm just saying that if several million right wingers say it in jest, a few of them aren't going to get the joke, and think it's for real. I've been all over, and I've seen many kinds of people, but the only kind that scare me more than right wingers are meth addicts (there tends to be some overlap there, which leads to a very scary combination). Liberals might say some dumb shit from time to time, but they don't often go around proposing to kill everyone who doesn't agree with them the way right wingers tend to. As for the economics thing.. If you're really worried about the minimum wage, you're looking in the wrong place in terms of employment costs. Obamacare is going to roughly double the cost of hiring a minimum wage employee, compared to the 20% pay increase from a wage hike. If we went the sensible route and had a tax-based health care system like every other country in the first world employers wouldn't have to shoulder that burden. A basic income might be a better system than a minimum wage from an economics perspective, but that has exactly zero chance of ever happening in the US.
My point about the minimum wage is that it only loosely correlates to employment, as employers will pay the absolute minimum they can per employee, regardless of the benefit they see from the employee. It might hurt some businesses at the margins, and increase prices a bit, but could seriously put a dent in our poverty problem.
As for McVeigh.. Maybe his target was just feds, but I really do think he targeted the day care for maximum effect, though I can't prove it. I have grown up around right wingers (many in my family), and I've seen a disturbingly casual attitude from them regarding killing people that don't agree with them, including attitudes toward killing children (though they think fetuses are sacred, for some reason). I'm really not trying to bait when I say that I think this was a right wing nut job(s), I have seen enough of them in my lifetime that I would not be at all surprised if one of them went and did the kind of thing that they joke about all time.. If you saw my FB feed, you would just see my extended family doing nothing but posting jokes about killing liberals and/or brown people all day. Somewhere out there is someone who takes this shit seriously, and I think it's more likely than not that this bombing in Boston was done by just such a person. So I'm just calling my guess.
Okay then, who do your predjudices tell you he was trying to kill? Clearly your predjudices lead you to assume I adhere to a political party (wrong, btw). My home city was bombed by right wing militants, so I think I have a bit more perspective than you when it comes to armed right wing nut jobs that talk about starting revolutions.
Wow, you're seriously going to sit here and defend McVeigh as having unintentionally killed people? And you ask why people think you're nuts?
He was attacking a federal building. Please continue to talk. I'm interested in seeing if you can spew forth more idiocy.
The day care center of a federal building. He intentionally killed a disproportionately large number of children.
I don't see a word of violence there. But then again, fucktards like yourself scream "racist" anytime anyone disagrees with your president. You don't give a fuck about the facts. You'll twist shit around. You'll lie and cheat to get your own way. You just want to be a hateful fuck who spreads schism. I hope it comes back to bite you in the ass in the worst of ways.
Methinks thou dost protest too much
I'll take the bet you ignorant, self righteous, pathetic welfare state piece of shit.
Geez, now why might we get the idea that right wingers are violent?
Except they'd be more likely to attack a government building. Not people celebrating Patriot's day.
I was a few miles away from the OKC bombing when it happened. Guess where his target was? That's right, the day-care center.
I will, if only to see how this plays out. If you're going to accuse someone, you better have some evidence.
It's a bet. This is not the same as an accusation, it's a guess based on evidence (tax day, patriot day, "boston tea party").
So you're taking the bet then?
In fact it could very well be someone like yourself trying to set up the Tea Party... with any luck you posted from a traceable IP because it's very likely whoever did this would be online monitoring posts about it, as you are.
Paranoid much?
Don't speak too soon, this could be a right-wing militia group for all we know.
More than likely, given that it's on tax day.
$10 says this was militant tea baggers. They all post so much crazy shit about killing people on facebook and eventually one of them snaps and acts on it.
The regulations on individual plans are much looser than group plans. My first son is autistic, and individual plans are not required to cover that. In addition, individual plans are allowed to drop you for filing claims, which means that if you get cancer or some other expensive disease you're pretty much screwed. Maybe you can find cheap plans, but you need to be aware of what you're really buying.
The idea that a salaried employee can have his employers (and optionally tax payers) by his balls and squeeze hard to get paid more is quaint, but doesn't apply in most of the real world. Most people in this world actually have to compete in order to make money. You know: bakers, electricians, computer consultants, personal trainers, hairdressers, etc. They work an hour, they get paid an hour. And if they don't work well, they lose customers.
Yes, but bakers at least get minimum wage. Not so with rent-a-coders.
I make my living as a programmer for hire. Clients find me, ask for the moon, and I give it to them - but my hourly rate only reflects time on task. I don't charge my clients for trips to the water cooler. Unless I'm on site, I average about 6 hours a day. But this can be compensated by the fact you can adjust your own rates. For all the bitching about evil corporations, I'm surprised more people don't start their own S Corp and do this. It's a lot more responsibility, but you are the master of your own fate. (You are still responsible for your own fate when working for a business, but I suppose a lot of people don't see it that way) In fact, you may not even see corporations as all that evil when you're on the other end of the stick.
Mostly it's the lack of health insurance. If we went to a single-payer system, I would be glad to go that route, but I can't risk my kids getting cancer while I'm off being my own boss and not able to afford the $3k/month family health insurance that can drop you for no reason.
Pay for your own damn healthcare and keep your socialist hands off of my money and I will pay for mine.
Sure thing, as long as you keep your libertarian car off my streets that I paid for with my tax dollars. You can build your own parallel road, buying up land as you go.
Do I really need to enumerate the many ways in which that statement is utterly stupid, or can you figure it out on your own?
I think you are missing the OP point. Rationally speaking, it should not matter who buys the insurance – indirectly from the employer or directly from the employee – it is coming out of the employee’s wages. People who can’t afford health care is a different matter.
If I buy medical insurance though my employer, my employer gets a tax break. If I buy medical care for myself, I don’t. Then factor in that people who buy their own health care tend to be sicker and more expensive than those who get it through work. That causes a big distortion.
The problem is that everyone needs health care, and when you need it you don't have the leverage to shop around. Employer-based health care has caused part of the out of control cost increases by hiding the real cost. But that doesn't mean we don't all need health care. If you have a captive market (a sick patient), you can charge anything you want, and the whole "supply and demand" argument goes out the window. A single-payer government system can set prices, meaning that health care providers can't gouge (insurance companies don't care if they gouge -- they just pass the added costs on to you). Look at Sweden -- they pay less than half what we do, yet they get significantly better health care. Hell, even Canada is way ahead of us on this, and look, they have a debt that's miniscule! Why? Because public health care is cheaper than private health care.
A single payer health care system would free employers from the burden of providing health care, allow entrepreneurs to pursue their own business goals without fear of losing health coverage, and provide massive cost savings by allowing everyone to receive preventative care rather than having the 50 million uninsured people end up in the ER once their condition has deteriorated to the point where they can no longer ignore their illness.
The role of an emergency room as a health care center is there because they are required by law to not refuse treatment and that many people somehow figure out how to avoid paying for medical costs. It is skewing the way that people seek health care assistance when
The real "solution" is to simply let doctors be entrepreneurs and for them to charge reasonable professional rates for services rendered in an open competitive marketplace where the patients are the customers. All of the messes in the health care industry are precisely because this doesn't happen and the government trying to meddle into that client-practioner relationship.
Thank goodness engineers aren't paid by insurance companies and government agencies to build homes and businesses.... at least in most cases. Even more so, that such activity is seem as "essential to life" and deemed something that should be nationalized with all engineers encouraged to become government employees.
I like how you edited out this part of my comment:
Unless you decide that anyone who can't pay for medical care should die, health care becomes a shared cost to society.
You and I disagree fundamentally on whether or not someone should die because they're broke. I don't think they should, you clearly think they should.
Yeah, health care should definitely be eliminated as an employer benefit. That's what's caused the entire healthcare debacle in the first place: employers pay for health because it's a pretax benefit. You end up to a place where "insurance" just means paying for everything, and has no meaning anymore. And also hugely expensive.
Buy your own health insurance for cheap (for the small chance you'll have a heart attack or other catastrophic health care problem that a few percent of the population have). For the other stuff (colds and whatnot), just pay out of pocket. It would be cheap if everyone didn't have Cadillac health programs.
Close, but not quite. Unless you decide that anyone who can't pay for medical care should die, health care becomes a shared cost to society. A single payer health care system would free employers from the burden of providing health care, allow entrepreneurs to pursue their own business goals without fear of losing health coverage, and provide massive cost savings by allowing everyone to receive preventative care rather than having the 50 million uninsured people end up in the ER once their condition has deteriorated to the point where they can no longer ignore their illness.
Amazon.com is looking to hire thousands of people, right now. Not saying that that makes a dent, but there are companies with very strong growth right now.
I interviewed with Amazon. After the second in-person interview I had nailed technical questions, but was not offered a job. No matter, I was offered a job for 20k more in Portland where cost of living is lower and the culture better. Honestly Amazon didn't look like a great place to work, particularly given the location, starting salary, and amount of hours you're expected to put in. Might be okay right out of school before you have a life, but not a great place if you have a family to take care of.