Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You could consider single-payer to be socialized insurance, but not socialized healthcare.
Well, yes, but by that logic food stamps are 'socialized food insurance'.
I mean, you're absolutely right in that it's not 'socialized medicine', no matter what anyone says.
I'm just saying, we don't really consider the government giving people money to pay for things to be socialized anything. 'Here's your socialized TV, paid for by your tax refund.'
Likewise, the term is wrong in another direction. Even something like the NHS, where the government owns the hospitals, isn't actually 'socialized medicine'. Socialism is where the government owns and operates the means of production.
Aka, it's socialism if the government produces goods and sells them.
Well, probably, it has to be a rather large segment of the market. The government producing postcards and selling them in the capital building is probably not socialism per se, or at least not worth talking about.
But a government providing services, OTOH, is something that governments have been doing for ages. That is the point of a government, to provide services. It does nothing else.
Every. Single. Thing. every government, in the entirety of history, has done, is 'pay people to provide services to citizens'. (Often stupid services, often not to all citizens, but whatever.) Socialism is a qualitative change, not a quantitative one. It is a different role of the government, not how much of an existing role the government plays.
The government producing goods, and selling them, is 'socialism'. That's it.
The government producing services, and giving them away for free, is 'the government'. It's not 'socialism'. it might be 'outside the bounds of what we want this government to do', it might even be outside the bounds of what the government is allowed to do, but it ain't socialism.
(Now, astute people will note I said 'goods' and 'selling', was one thing, and 'services' and 'free' was another, and didn't mention the other two combination. 'goods' and 'free' is communism, and 'services' and 'selling' is just a specific form of use tax.)
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 3, Interesting
So anyway, now it covers the routine stuff, but often not the catastrophic stuff. They'll deny you coverage! WTF!
The real fun is when you have a preexisting condition and hence can't get covered for routine stuff, either.
I had a congenital heart defect, meaning I needed open heart surgery the first day of my life. I had it. It solved the problem, but, as early open heart surgery can often do, it damaged my heart's natural pacemaker, so now I have an artificial one. (Aka, what everyone calls a 'pacemaker', they actually mean 'artificial pacemaker'. Everyone has a 'pacemaker'.)
Fair enough. It's about $15000 in expenses every eight years or so, and, frankly, I can cover that out of my pocket. I'm not a moron, I know the batteries die, I know roughly the costs, I can save up.
But now I can't get insurance for anything else. Forget heart conditions, they won't even bother to attempt to cover me for anything. I call them up, inform them I have a pacemaker, and they politely inform me they will not cover me.
Private insurance is stupid. They simply don't want to actually provide useful insurance. No, everyone needs to pay into a government catastrophic care fund, and whoever needs it can use it. And we should, of course, continue to help subside the care of the poor.
Likewise, we should probably subside a little preventative maintenance, also. A free checkup a year or something will reduce problems down the road.
I'm really having a hard time figure out why we shouldn't provide all care, free, like NHS over in England.
I can vaguely see the argument that costs will be reduced if some people pay for some of their care, but frankly, costs can be just as reduced if the government pays hospitals and doctors set amounts for specific procedures, obviously resulting in them reducing their costs to increase profit.
But the entire manner we're going about solving this problem is backwards, solving it with 'insurance'. Sadly, we're so fucked up that solving it backwards is also helping solve it, like a car stuck in the mud. If nothing else, it will cut into insurance company profits, thus making it harder for them to fuck with the next reform.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I weep every time I see an insurance company being thieved.
Me too. It's like watching one of the economic masterminds of the financial collapse get a parking ticket.
It feels good for a second, and then the realization hits me, all over again, that their decapitated heads still are not impaled on stakes as a warning to others.
I'd say flashing your dick at little girls probably should qualify as a sex crime, just not taking a piss in a back alley. Same with sex in public, there are ways that would be really creepy and ways that wouldn't.
Well, if you want to try to separate those into different categories, go ahead.
But, frankly, people who flash children aren't really the issue here. The amount of people who flash children for sexual gratification and then move on to actually molesting them is probably so microscopic no one can actually find examples of it. Hell, the amount of people who flash adults for sexual gratification is almost nonexistent.
Almost none of the 'people naked in public' are doing it for that purpose, and almost none of them are doing it to children, and almost none of those will move on to actually molesting children. Statistically, we'd probably stop more child molesters by branding 'childless people who buy bags of lollipops' as sex offenders instead of 'naked in public people'.
To put it bluntly, I don't see what rapists get out of raping women that they couldn't get from raping minors which is why I wouldn't trust one to be around them.
The problem with keeping 'normal' rapists away from kids is, at some point, the entire 'sexual offender' gets watered down so much it much it doesn't actually mean anything.
I mean, they're already not going to be put in charge of kids, because they're convicted felons.
Unless we're going to brand all violent criminals the rest of their life and keep them away from all children, ever, even if they've shown no sign of going after children, we really need to draw the line to 'people who have indicated they will go after children' as the people to keep away from children.
Or, to put it another way: there are normal people that violate societies rules about sex, namely, the rules about consent. Those people have hopefully learned their lessons when, after doing that, we slapped them in jail for a while. And then there are those who are attracted to children, and violated society's rule about that. Now, it's possible they've learned their lesson, but unless prisons are doing a lot more therapy than I am aware, they're still attracted to children, and probably don't need to be around them, for everyone's sake.
Normal rapists we have, hopefully, cured of actually raping people, but are still attracted to whoever, and we're okay with that. Child molesters we have, hopefully, cured of actually molesting children, but are still attracted to children, and we're not okay with that.
As I said before...they've managed to take the one job that would let them take possession of the cell phones of children and browse through them.
I doubt there are any specific rules about having certain pictures on your cell phone, so they couldn't be looking for those pictures. There are often rules about what clothing depicts, but cell phones are not clothing. I would be astonished if any rule at all says 'You may not have a specific type of pictures in your personal possession that no one else sees.'.
And the only sort of actual crime possession of a picture there is child porn.
So, assuming that they weren't just conducting a random invasion of privacy, assuming they were actually 'doing their job' and trying to find something that would actually be verboten at the school by looking through the pictures, child porn is essentially the only thing they could possibly be looking for.
So, to recap: They got the sole job that would give them access to things that might have child porn on them, and then started looking for it, and found it.
They're pretty clearly deliberately in possession of child porn. As was mentioned, 'accidentally' isn't much of an excuse, but this is clearly, 100% premeditated, planned-entire-career-around-the-search deliberate possession of child porn.
And they're working in a school. And had the child porn at school.
The thing is, there actually is a middle ground between saying 'No, you can do whatever you want' and 'You are under arrest for the felony of child pornography.'
I'm actually of the option we should fine people under 18 both for producing pictures of themselves, and for receiving said pictures. Or perhaps require them to attend a class instead.
I'd fine them for unprotected sex too if I could figure out a way. (Besides fining pregnant or STD-infected teenagers, but I think they've rather learned their lessons there so that's rather vicious.) It's stupid behavior, it's something they need to learn not to do.
It's something that should be explicitly covered in sex ed classes, saying 'You can have sex responsibly and then later, if you break up, it's not like they can retroactively get you pregnant...but if they have pictures of you, now everyone has pictures of you...'.
Likewise, I'd actually have passing around said pictures to people without the subject's consent be a misdemeanor with 30 days in jail. That's simply not acceptable in society. I think that law should probably apply to adults, also, although in the case of teenagers, it's worse, as people can end up with accidental child porn.
Of course, we need an actual law about this, and not threaten using child pornography laws in this manner. That law should have a specific exception saying 'If you are legally allowed to have sex with someone, you are legally allowed to possess a picture of them naked.'
I was always assured a lot of things when I was a kid, and the same thing here.
Sometimes, looking back, I can see what adults might have thought I was doing, and why they acted the way they did...
...but, you know what? That actually just makes them factually incorrect.
And if they'd told me, I could have corrected their misunderstandings.
Now, adults still need to 'interfere' in their kids life. But the thing is, teenagers aren't stupid...they're ignorant and poor judges of risk in a specific way. Teenagers think, essentially, that they cannot come to harm, because the worse harm they've ever suffered is getting stung by bees or being grounded for a month or something.
Adults, of course, are poor judges of risk in entirely different ways, as they focus on 'spectacular' risk and not the actual probable ones.
But back to teenagers, adults need to make sure they understand the actual fact of things, and that is really not helped by adults lying to them about risks in an attempt to 'compensate' for teenagers having a poor understanding of it.
And it certainly doesn't help when adults natter about 'emotional harm' from sex like some people here are. Jesus Christ. Two teenagers having sex that doesn't result in any physical problems is not going to 'harm' them in any sense at all, people used to get married when teenagers.
Now, of course, there might be emotional harm from the knowledge getting out, but if we're going to worry about the emotional harm that teenagers cause to other teenagers by teasing, well, perhaps we should start at some saner issue, like the fact that absolutely no one is willing to do anything about it at all, instead of trying to stop teenagers from doing an activity that might get them teased. By that logic, we should forbid band!
Something like half the charges of 'sex offender' are pure nonsense.
We should limit that to people who have actually attempted non-consensual sexual actions towards others.
I would go into specifics on what those are, but let me instead mention what they aren't.
Public indecency.
Sex in public
Consensual photography of people over the age of consent.
Those are just the examples of the top of my head. Yes, they should be illegal, at least the first two. And I'd be okay with some sort of fine for the last, especially if said pictures were copied without consent of the subject.
Someone streaking at a football game or a couple who decided to screw around at makeout point, sure, haul them into jail, give them a fine, whatever.
That does not, however, mean we should brand such people 'sex offenders', which should essentially be limited to sexual assaulters and child molesters. (In fact, I think we need two categories there.)
Perhaps, perhaps, we could have a 'abuser of authority' category too, for adults who tend to enter legal sexual relationships with young people under their care. (Like a high school teacher who sleeps with his above-age-of-consent students.), but the hilarious thing there is, currently, that's not a 'sex offender', as it is not illegal. (Well, it is in some places.)
We don't need to keep those people away from children per se, but we do need to make sure they don't end up in charge of them.
So three categories of sexual offenders:
One who rapes adults, and essentially should be able to do whatever he wants. (You can hardly keep people away from adults.)
One who abuses society's trust by seducing 'adult' young people under his care, and hence should be kept away from having young people under his care.
One who molests children, and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near them.
Instead, we've got one category, with all that, plus the guy who didn't want to wait in line for the bathroom at a concert when he was 17 and pissed in the woods, and a cop saw him.
Hey, moron, voting that a bill is deemed passed is voting for that bill. It's passing the bill and passing changes to the bill at the same time.
Just because parliamentary rules allow more than one way of passing a bill doesn't mean it's not 'representative', you imbecile.
I swear to God, Republicans simply cannot stop demonizing parliamentary procedures that happen all the time, by both parties. And the goddamn media just goes right along with it, because the American people are goldfish.
Now, of course, some Democrats are then going to argue they didn't vote for the language in the bill, and they will, of course, be lying, and Republicans should feel free to call them on that next election. But parliamentary tricks to keep from having to register a specific vote in a specific way are not some amazing new thing that Democrats suddenly thought of.
And while we're at it, the 'nuclear option' is attempting to have the parliamentarian declare the filibuster unconstitutional, not using the perfectly normal reconciliation rules that get used all the time. (Nor is it changing the filibuster rule at the start of a session.)
No, I'm annoyed you take an expanded example and compare it to the most concise way of doing something in Ruby, and pretend that demonstrates something.
The two examples are essentially identical.
They pass parameters different ways, but they are both functions, on a 'database table object' that return an array of result.
That's it. That's how you do that in the framework. It's a single function on a specific object. You get an array of arrays back.
You just decided to find an example with a bunch of padding around to pretend that PHP was absurdly more work to use, that people would 'rather type' the other.
I just rewrote it to be less expanded out, as you were bitching that PHP was too much typing or some other such nonsense.
Your example idiotically had the php tags, it had braces on lines by themselves, it created an array and stored it in a variable instead of just using the array, etc.
The PHP and the Ruby were both functionally one line, with two surrounding lines to define the function. The PHP line was about 50% longer than the Ruby one.
Which would be a fine thing to point out, but pretending it was 11 lines is just, well, lying.
I don't care if you got it out of an actual example from the framework site. Examples are often expanded to make them easier to understand.
The actual fact of the matter is that SolarPHP and Ruby on Rails can both make a query, and assign it to an array on the current object, using a single command, no matter what sort of silliness you're trying to use to make it otherwise.
It appears this specific command is slightly longer in PHP, and it also appears that it's slightly hard to access the framework, although that's almost certainly not true.
As I've pointed out, your 'Post' there is either a) an idiotically-name global object (Ugh), or b) the Ruby is on the object with that function, and if that was true of where the PHP was, or the PHP could just use $this->fetchAll(), not $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll().
Re:TrueCrypt file named DSC43423.jpg
on
Hollow Spy Coins
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· Score: 1
Yeah, or the same thing in your mp3s in an microSD card in your phone.
Use really obscure music, or hell, just invent some, so that you can cram as much information in as you want, and no one will be able to tell that it's 'off'. (Whereas you might actually luck across a Pink Floyd fan or whatever who actually decides to listen to one of the songs and notices slight distortion.)
Re:Sounds rather disappointing, really
on
Hollow Spy Coins
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· Score: 1
Good luck with that.
I have an iPhone, and car keys, and that's all that's normally in my front pockets.
I try to put them in different pockets, but about 1/4th the time, they end up in the same one anyway.
Re:Hiding in plain sight
on
Hollow Spy Coins
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Oh, no, they actually care about laptops. And phones. They actually know those can hold data, so just might take them even if they can't find any.
Tape it to the circuit board of your travel alarm clock. Or your electric razor.
If they hit themselves on the head, and end up with negative data due to amnesia, they can guess things about people they've never even heard of! (Which will come in handy with the amnesia.)
Likewise, I've added every high school person I've run across. Why not? It's like a ongoing class reunion. 'Hey, that total screwup apparently has a good job and a nice family. And this person is...living in China for the past decade? Oh, look, that guy likes that TV show I like. Those two people got married, I called that a decade and a half ago. Heh, that hot girl is now teaching high school, and looks just as good. I know what all the boys in that class are thinking about.' (Those are all actual examples from my high school classmates.)
When you have nothing to do you can just browse amongst these people you used to see every day, all day, and now haven't thought of in years. They aren't 'friends', they're acquaintances, but you can't 'acquaintance' people.
From all those high school friends, you can figure out that...I grew up in White County, Georgia. Which is a) wrong, I grew up one county over, and b) pretty public information anyway.
Now, looking at my other friends, you might conclude I'm into theatre, which is also true...but I'm not an actor, as almost all my theatre friends are, I'm a techie, so you'd probably get that wrong.
What you wouldn't be able to figure out by looking at my facebook friends is that I'm a massive nerd with a barely five digit/. account. None of my nerd friends are facebook friends, simply because I talk to them in other forums. (Granted, there are nerdy things listed in my actual interests, but we're talking about extrapolated interests from friends.)
So, really, you'd get a pretty screwed up idea of my life if you looked at my facebook friends.
Yes, if you use fetchAll(), you have to pass in an array to do the select. Oooh, scary.
Whereas, with Ruby, you apparently just keep appending functions to the object.
Which then results in an interesting question: How the heck do you optionally add parameters to a select using the Ruby framework?
In SolarPHP, you add, or don't add, a record to an array. In Ruby on Rails you...what?
Apologizes as I don't actually know Ruby coding, but it would look something like this:
Post.where($whereclausearray).join($joinarray).order($order).groupby($sortby).having($having)
With all the ones you aren't using as NULL, just in case you want to use one? Hrm.
Likewise, SolarPHP requires 'status = ?', whereas Ruby on Rails just has the field name, which is more 'concise'...as long as you don't need to make it 'status LIKE ?', which you can do in PHP, but not in the that Ruby syntax.
Now, I'm sure you can actually do that query somehow, and my 'optional clauses' comment is silly but that's my point. You're nitpicking over rather microscopic language differences. Actually, not even that. You're nitpicking over framework differences, and pretending that a slightly more verbose language is somehow a lot worse.
Any programmer with the slightest bit of knowledge knows that, while being more verbose doesn't make a language better (See: COBOL.), it also doesn't really make it any worse. Likewise, you haven't show that PHP actually is more verbose, just that a single function inside a framework (Which adds verbosity) is. Meanwhile, as I pointed out, the PHP function you're comparing to the Ruby function can, in fact, actually do more, so actually it's a case of 'comparing a command with more functionality to a simpler command with less'.
As for the missing $this-> stuff in Ruby, apparently, Ruby is using global variables or something, or alternately those two commands aren't actually that comparable, the Ruby one being inside an object that knows what 'Post' is, and PHP one being somewhere else that doesn't know what 'blog' is. If the PHP one was inside the same object, it would be using $this->fetchall() instead of referencing some complicated chain to find it.
Um, perhaps you need to think about what you're saying.
You might not be familiar with PHP, and thus unfamiliar with how it how it handles objects, but it's pretty easy to guess how a framework would return all records from a query if you know anything about PHP. It would return an array of arrays. Perhaps the repeated array is an associative array, perhaps it is column indexed and there's another command to get the associative ones.
You know, like the actual commands the language itself has, which I know because, heh, I'm a PHP programmer and know the language.
I'm uncertain why fetchAll needs an array object passed as a parameter, I have to mentally replace the question mark with "public", then assume the second parameter is an order-by parameter since I see the DESC.
fetchAll would need an array object passed as a parameter because you might want to use multiple WHERE clauses, which I, OTOH, have no idea how to do in the Ruby example. Likewise, I have no idea how to do a LIKE instead of an =, whereas I can see how to do that in the PHP command. Don't bitch because the PHP framework command is more powerful than the Ruby one.
Likewise, while you don't know the format of the fetchAll() function, um, you're unlikely to magically know the format of the Post object, either.
I can't guess what _model is, I don't know what blogs really represents
Presumably $this->_model is how you look up the database framework, in the framework. But your confusion is because these two pieces of code aren't identical. The Ruby appears to be inside some sort of object that is already linked to the blog table (You'll notice it doesn't reference what table it's using at all.), whereas the PHP code to to call a function on that object. (Which is why, as I said, it was insanely stupid to write a function to do that, instead of just calling the existing function.)
If the PHP was actually on the object, it would be calling the fetchAll function like $this->fetchAll(array('status = ?' => 'public'), 'created DESC');
I'd give an example of what the PHP is doing in Ruby, but I have no idea how to access objects like that.
I'm fairly certain @posts is a plural set/object of more Post objects, which represents a row in a database, where status is public, then ordered descending. I can probably iterate through it. As an outsider, I could read this, lookup the column names for the row and almost immediately start using it.
And I, as a PHP programmer, have NO IDEA what a 'Post object' is or does. You somehow know it represents 'rows in a database'. Well, good for you, but that's not actually very intuitive at all. That's language knowledge you have. If you asked random people what a Post object would do to a database, most would guess 'insert and/or update a record'.
In fact, looking at it, I think you're wrong, and Posts represents the table itself, which means that @posts almost certainly is not an array of them. (Which means, instead of being inside a table object like I said above, we're in a database object or possible Post is some global object, although that seems like a very stupid name. Also, why is it capitalized if it's a table name? I have no idea.)
I do not know if blog is iterable or if it's rows it has grabbed are even accessible. $records may be the result of some manipulation it performs on the query result. I just don't know, and that makes me uncomfortable.
Yes, not knowing the exact syntax of a language does result in several questions. Just like, you know, any language.
And I urge you to actually read the paragraphs above, and compare your words:
'I'm fairly certain @posts is a plural set/object of more Post objects' vs 'if it's rows it has grabbed are even accessible'
'I can probably iterate through it.' vs. 'I do not know if blog is iterable'
'fairly certain...status is public, then ordered descending' vs. 'may be the result of so
I wouldn't say that you would "End up without one" unless your game ended really quickly.
I usually play where everyone gets a continent, so, yeah, I'd often not end up with one until some other nation would actually go and manually spread one to me.
I'm not actually seeing what I proposed as religion more complicated than other civic stuff.
I mean, you're supposed to be playing a civilization, right?
Um, why stop there? Forgive my lack of indent, I can't be bothered to figure it out.
That function can be identically written as:
public function actionIndex() {
$this->list = $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll(array('where' => array('blogs.status = ?' => 'public'),'order' => 'blogs.created DESC'));
}
Also, I have the feeling that 'blogs' was just thrown in to make it longer. This calls a function on a 'blogs' object, which is presumably linked to the blogs table somehow, and will presumably use 'blogs' by default. You can just use 'status' and 'created' as the Ruby example does. So:
public function actionIndex() {
$this->list = $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll(array('where' => array('status = ?' => 'public'),'order' => 'created DESC'));
}
Also, I don't know in what universe you commonly pass a single array to functions instead of, you know, actual function parameters. While I'm sure in some universe there's some framework that lets you do that, in reality you'd have a fetchAll($where,$order=NULL) function that you could use here, with array passing used for really options stuff, and an array passed in for $where. And, also, inexplicably, your function name has doubled in PHP.
So it would more likely be something like:
public function index() {
$this->list = $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll(array('status = ?' => 'public'), 'created DESC');
}
Vs: def index
@posts = Post.where(:status => 'public').order('created DESC')
end
Yeah, that's massively shorter. Why, in PHP, you have to...um...explicitly use $this to access your own class and use array() to make an array. The horrors, the horrors!
Why on earth you're writing a public function for this is beyond me, though. I think you just did that because PHP takes longer to define a public function.
A sane programmer would just, instead of defining a class to have actionIndex() on, and then making such an object, and then calling $random_obect->actionIndex(); and then $records = $random_obect->list(); would just do this:
Slashdot Mirror
You could consider single-payer to be socialized insurance, but not socialized healthcare.
Well, yes, but by that logic food stamps are 'socialized food insurance'.
I mean, you're absolutely right in that it's not 'socialized medicine', no matter what anyone says.
I'm just saying, we don't really consider the government giving people money to pay for things to be socialized anything. 'Here's your socialized TV, paid for by your tax refund.'
Likewise, the term is wrong in another direction. Even something like the NHS, where the government owns the hospitals, isn't actually 'socialized medicine'. Socialism is where the government owns and operates the means of production.
Aka, it's socialism if the government produces goods and sells them.
Well, probably, it has to be a rather large segment of the market. The government producing postcards and selling them in the capital building is probably not socialism per se, or at least not worth talking about.
But a government providing services, OTOH, is something that governments have been doing for ages. That is the point of a government, to provide services. It does nothing else.
Every. Single. Thing. every government, in the entirety of history, has done, is 'pay people to provide services to citizens'. (Often stupid services, often not to all citizens, but whatever.) Socialism is a qualitative change, not a quantitative one. It is a different role of the government, not how much of an existing role the government plays.
The government producing goods, and selling them, is 'socialism'. That's it.
The government producing services, and giving them away for free, is 'the government'. It's not 'socialism'. it might be 'outside the bounds of what we want this government to do', it might even be outside the bounds of what the government is allowed to do, but it ain't socialism.
(Now, astute people will note I said 'goods' and 'selling', was one thing, and 'services' and 'free' was another, and didn't mention the other two combination. 'goods' and 'free' is communism, and 'services' and 'selling' is just a specific form of use tax.)
So anyway, now it covers the routine stuff, but often not the catastrophic stuff. They'll deny you coverage! WTF!
The real fun is when you have a preexisting condition and hence can't get covered for routine stuff, either.
I had a congenital heart defect, meaning I needed open heart surgery the first day of my life. I had it. It solved the problem, but, as early open heart surgery can often do, it damaged my heart's natural pacemaker, so now I have an artificial one. (Aka, what everyone calls a 'pacemaker', they actually mean 'artificial pacemaker'. Everyone has a 'pacemaker'.)
Fair enough. It's about $15000 in expenses every eight years or so, and, frankly, I can cover that out of my pocket. I'm not a moron, I know the batteries die, I know roughly the costs, I can save up.
But now I can't get insurance for anything else. Forget heart conditions, they won't even bother to attempt to cover me for anything. I call them up, inform them I have a pacemaker, and they politely inform me they will not cover me.
Private insurance is stupid. They simply don't want to actually provide useful insurance. No, everyone needs to pay into a government catastrophic care fund, and whoever needs it can use it. And we should, of course, continue to help subside the care of the poor.
Likewise, we should probably subside a little preventative maintenance, also. A free checkup a year or something will reduce problems down the road.
I'm really having a hard time figure out why we shouldn't provide all care, free, like NHS over in England.
I can vaguely see the argument that costs will be reduced if some people pay for some of their care, but frankly, costs can be just as reduced if the government pays hospitals and doctors set amounts for specific procedures, obviously resulting in them reducing their costs to increase profit.
But the entire manner we're going about solving this problem is backwards, solving it with 'insurance'. Sadly, we're so fucked up that solving it backwards is also helping solve it, like a car stuck in the mud. If nothing else, it will cut into insurance company profits, thus making it harder for them to fuck with the next reform.
I weep every time I see an insurance company being thieved.
Me too. It's like watching one of the economic masterminds of the financial collapse get a parking ticket.
It feels good for a second, and then the realization hits me, all over again, that their decapitated heads still are not impaled on stakes as a warning to others.
And a single tear rolls down my cheek.
Build. Nuclear. Power Plants.
I'd say flashing your dick at little girls probably should qualify as a sex crime, just not taking a piss in a back alley. Same with sex in public, there are ways that would be really creepy and ways that wouldn't.
Well, if you want to try to separate those into different categories, go ahead.
But, frankly, people who flash children aren't really the issue here. The amount of people who flash children for sexual gratification and then move on to actually molesting them is probably so microscopic no one can actually find examples of it. Hell, the amount of people who flash adults for sexual gratification is almost nonexistent.
Almost none of the 'people naked in public' are doing it for that purpose, and almost none of them are doing it to children, and almost none of those will move on to actually molesting children. Statistically, we'd probably stop more child molesters by branding 'childless people who buy bags of lollipops' as sex offenders instead of 'naked in public people'.
To put it bluntly, I don't see what rapists get out of raping women that they couldn't get from raping minors which is why I wouldn't trust one to be around them.
The problem with keeping 'normal' rapists away from kids is, at some point, the entire 'sexual offender' gets watered down so much it much it doesn't actually mean anything.
I mean, they're already not going to be put in charge of kids, because they're convicted felons.
Unless we're going to brand all violent criminals the rest of their life and keep them away from all children, ever, even if they've shown no sign of going after children, we really need to draw the line to 'people who have indicated they will go after children' as the people to keep away from children.
Or, to put it another way: there are normal people that violate societies rules about sex, namely, the rules about consent. Those people have hopefully learned their lessons when, after doing that, we slapped them in jail for a while. And then there are those who are attracted to children, and violated society's rule about that. Now, it's possible they've learned their lesson, but unless prisons are doing a lot more therapy than I am aware, they're still attracted to children, and probably don't need to be around them, for everyone's sake.
Normal rapists we have, hopefully, cured of actually raping people, but are still attracted to whoever, and we're okay with that. Child molesters we have, hopefully, cured of actually molesting children, but are still attracted to children, and we're not okay with that.
As I said before...they've managed to take the one job that would let them take possession of the cell phones of children and browse through them.
I doubt there are any specific rules about having certain pictures on your cell phone, so they couldn't be looking for those pictures. There are often rules about what clothing depicts, but cell phones are not clothing. I would be astonished if any rule at all says 'You may not have a specific type of pictures in your personal possession that no one else sees.'.
And the only sort of actual crime possession of a picture there is child porn.
So, assuming that they weren't just conducting a random invasion of privacy, assuming they were actually 'doing their job' and trying to find something that would actually be verboten at the school by looking through the pictures, child porn is essentially the only thing they could possibly be looking for.
So, to recap: They got the sole job that would give them access to things that might have child porn on them, and then started looking for it, and found it.
They're pretty clearly deliberately in possession of child porn. As was mentioned, 'accidentally' isn't much of an excuse, but this is clearly, 100% premeditated, planned-entire-career-around-the-search deliberate possession of child porn.
And they're working in a school. And had the child porn at school.
The prosecution rests.
The thing is, there actually is a middle ground between saying 'No, you can do whatever you want' and 'You are under arrest for the felony of child pornography.'
I'm actually of the option we should fine people under 18 both for producing pictures of themselves, and for receiving said pictures. Or perhaps require them to attend a class instead.
I'd fine them for unprotected sex too if I could figure out a way. (Besides fining pregnant or STD-infected teenagers, but I think they've rather learned their lessons there so that's rather vicious.) It's stupid behavior, it's something they need to learn not to do.
It's something that should be explicitly covered in sex ed classes, saying 'You can have sex responsibly and then later, if you break up, it's not like they can retroactively get you pregnant...but if they have pictures of you, now everyone has pictures of you...'.
Likewise, I'd actually have passing around said pictures to people without the subject's consent be a misdemeanor with 30 days in jail. That's simply not acceptable in society. I think that law should probably apply to adults, also, although in the case of teenagers, it's worse, as people can end up with accidental child porn.
Of course, we need an actual law about this, and not threaten using child pornography laws in this manner. That law should have a specific exception saying 'If you are legally allowed to have sex with someone, you are legally allowed to possess a picture of them naked.'
Or doesn't the american health care system cover that either?
No, the american 'health care system' does not cover testing for any disease at all, until you get sick enough to produce symptoms.
I was always assured a lot of things when I was a kid, and the same thing here.
Sometimes, looking back, I can see what adults might have thought I was doing, and why they acted the way they did...
And if they'd told me, I could have corrected their misunderstandings.
Now, adults still need to 'interfere' in their kids life. But the thing is, teenagers aren't stupid...they're ignorant and poor judges of risk in a specific way. Teenagers think, essentially, that they cannot come to harm, because the worse harm they've ever suffered is getting stung by bees or being grounded for a month or something.
Adults, of course, are poor judges of risk in entirely different ways, as they focus on 'spectacular' risk and not the actual probable ones.
But back to teenagers, adults need to make sure they understand the actual fact of things, and that is really not helped by adults lying to them about risks in an attempt to 'compensate' for teenagers having a poor understanding of it.
And it certainly doesn't help when adults natter about 'emotional harm' from sex like some people here are. Jesus Christ. Two teenagers having sex that doesn't result in any physical problems is not going to 'harm' them in any sense at all, people used to get married when teenagers.
Now, of course, there might be emotional harm from the knowledge getting out, but if we're going to worry about the emotional harm that teenagers cause to other teenagers by teasing, well, perhaps we should start at some saner issue, like the fact that absolutely no one is willing to do anything about it at all, instead of trying to stop teenagers from doing an activity that might get them teased. By that logic, we should forbid band!
Something like half the charges of 'sex offender' are pure nonsense.
We should limit that to people who have actually attempted non-consensual sexual actions towards others.
I would go into specifics on what those are, but let me instead mention what they aren't.
Public indecency.
Sex in public
Consensual photography of people over the age of consent.
Those are just the examples of the top of my head. Yes, they should be illegal, at least the first two. And I'd be okay with some sort of fine for the last, especially if said pictures were copied without consent of the subject.
Someone streaking at a football game or a couple who decided to screw around at makeout point, sure, haul them into jail, give them a fine, whatever.
That does not, however, mean we should brand such people 'sex offenders', which should essentially be limited to sexual assaulters and child molesters. (In fact, I think we need two categories there.)
Perhaps, perhaps, we could have a 'abuser of authority' category too, for adults who tend to enter legal sexual relationships with young people under their care. (Like a high school teacher who sleeps with his above-age-of-consent students.), but the hilarious thing there is, currently, that's not a 'sex offender', as it is not illegal. (Well, it is in some places.)
We don't need to keep those people away from children per se, but we do need to make sure they don't end up in charge of them.
So three categories of sexual offenders:
One who rapes adults, and essentially should be able to do whatever he wants. (You can hardly keep people away from adults.)
One who abuses society's trust by seducing 'adult' young people under his care, and hence should be kept away from having young people under his care.
One who molests children, and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near them.
Instead, we've got one category, with all that, plus the guy who didn't want to wait in line for the bathroom at a concert when he was 17 and pissed in the woods, and a cop saw him.
Hey, moron, voting that a bill is deemed passed is voting for that bill. It's passing the bill and passing changes to the bill at the same time.
Just because parliamentary rules allow more than one way of passing a bill doesn't mean it's not 'representative', you imbecile.
I swear to God, Republicans simply cannot stop demonizing parliamentary procedures that happen all the time, by both parties. And the goddamn media just goes right along with it, because the American people are goldfish.
Now, of course, some Democrats are then going to argue they didn't vote for the language in the bill, and they will, of course, be lying, and Republicans should feel free to call them on that next election. But parliamentary tricks to keep from having to register a specific vote in a specific way are not some amazing new thing that Democrats suddenly thought of.
And while we're at it, the 'nuclear option' is attempting to have the parliamentarian declare the filibuster unconstitutional, not using the perfectly normal reconciliation rules that get used all the time. (Nor is it changing the filibuster rule at the start of a session.)
No, I'm annoyed you take an expanded example and compare it to the most concise way of doing something in Ruby, and pretend that demonstrates something.
The two examples are essentially identical.
They pass parameters different ways, but they are both functions, on a 'database table object' that return an array of result.
That's it. That's how you do that in the framework. It's a single function on a specific object. You get an array of arrays back.
You just decided to find an example with a bunch of padding around to pretend that PHP was absurdly more work to use, that people would 'rather type' the other.
It's your PHP example.
I just rewrote it to be less expanded out, as you were bitching that PHP was too much typing or some other such nonsense.
Your example idiotically had the php tags, it had braces on lines by themselves, it created an array and stored it in a variable instead of just using the array, etc.
The PHP and the Ruby were both functionally one line, with two surrounding lines to define the function. The PHP line was about 50% longer than the Ruby one.
Which would be a fine thing to point out, but pretending it was 11 lines is just, well, lying.
I don't care if you got it out of an actual example from the framework site. Examples are often expanded to make them easier to understand.
The actual fact of the matter is that SolarPHP and Ruby on Rails can both make a query, and assign it to an array on the current object, using a single command, no matter what sort of silliness you're trying to use to make it otherwise.
It appears this specific command is slightly longer in PHP, and it also appears that it's slightly hard to access the framework, although that's almost certainly not true.
As I've pointed out, your 'Post' there is either a) an idiotically-name global object (Ugh), or b) the Ruby is on the object with that function, and if that was true of where the PHP was, or the PHP could just use $this->fetchAll(), not $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll().
Yeah, or the same thing in your mp3s in an microSD card in your phone.
Use really obscure music, or hell, just invent some, so that you can cram as much information in as you want, and no one will be able to tell that it's 'off'. (Whereas you might actually luck across a Pink Floyd fan or whatever who actually decides to listen to one of the songs and notices slight distortion.)
Good luck with that.
I have an iPhone, and car keys, and that's all that's normally in my front pockets.
I try to put them in different pockets, but about 1/4th the time, they end up in the same one anyway.
Oh, no, they actually care about laptops. And phones. They actually know those can hold data, so just might take them even if they can't find any.
Tape it to the circuit board of your travel alarm clock. Or your electric razor.
If they hit themselves on the head, and end up with negative data due to amnesia, they can guess things about people they've never even heard of! (Which will come in handy with the amnesia.)
Likewise, I've added every high school person I've run across. Why not? It's like a ongoing class reunion. 'Hey, that total screwup apparently has a good job and a nice family. And this person is...living in China for the past decade? Oh, look, that guy likes that TV show I like. Those two people got married, I called that a decade and a half ago. Heh, that hot girl is now teaching high school, and looks just as good. I know what all the boys in that class are thinking about.' (Those are all actual examples from my high school classmates.)
When you have nothing to do you can just browse amongst these people you used to see every day, all day, and now haven't thought of in years. They aren't 'friends', they're acquaintances, but you can't 'acquaintance' people.
From all those high school friends, you can figure out that...I grew up in White County, Georgia. Which is a) wrong, I grew up one county over, and b) pretty public information anyway.
Now, looking at my other friends, you might conclude I'm into theatre, which is also true...but I'm not an actor, as almost all my theatre friends are, I'm a techie, so you'd probably get that wrong.
What you wouldn't be able to figure out by looking at my facebook friends is that I'm a massive nerd with a barely five digit /. account. None of my nerd friends are facebook friends, simply because I talk to them in other forums. (Granted, there are nerdy things listed in my actual interests, but we're talking about extrapolated interests from friends.)
So, really, you'd get a pretty screwed up idea of my life if you looked at my facebook friends.
Erm, I don't think I said anything about what the Ruby was doing at all.
*checks it out*
Yes, if you use fetchAll(), you have to pass in an array to do the select. Oooh, scary.
Whereas, with Ruby, you apparently just keep appending functions to the object.
Which then results in an interesting question: How the heck do you optionally add parameters to a select using the Ruby framework?
In SolarPHP, you add, or don't add, a record to an array. In Ruby on Rails you...what?
Apologizes as I don't actually know Ruby coding, but it would look something like this:
Post.where($whereclausearray).join($joinarray).order($order).groupby($sortby).having($having)
With all the ones you aren't using as NULL, just in case you want to use one? Hrm.
Likewise, SolarPHP requires 'status = ?', whereas Ruby on Rails just has the field name, which is more 'concise'...as long as you don't need to make it 'status LIKE ?', which you can do in PHP, but not in the that Ruby syntax.
Now, I'm sure you can actually do that query somehow, and my 'optional clauses' comment is silly but that's my point. You're nitpicking over rather microscopic language differences. Actually, not even that. You're nitpicking over framework differences, and pretending that a slightly more verbose language is somehow a lot worse.
Any programmer with the slightest bit of knowledge knows that, while being more verbose doesn't make a language better (See: COBOL.), it also doesn't really make it any worse. Likewise, you haven't show that PHP actually is more verbose, just that a single function inside a framework (Which adds verbosity) is. Meanwhile, as I pointed out, the PHP function you're comparing to the Ruby function can, in fact, actually do more, so actually it's a case of 'comparing a command with more functionality to a simpler command with less'.
As for the missing $this-> stuff in Ruby, apparently, Ruby is using global variables or something, or alternately those two commands aren't actually that comparable, the Ruby one being inside an object that knows what 'Post' is, and PHP one being somewhere else that doesn't know what 'blog' is. If the PHP one was inside the same object, it would be using $this->fetchall() instead of referencing some complicated chain to find it.
Um, perhaps you need to think about what you're saying.
You might not be familiar with PHP, and thus unfamiliar with how it how it handles objects, but it's pretty easy to guess how a framework would return all records from a query if you know anything about PHP. It would return an array of arrays. Perhaps the repeated array is an associative array, perhaps it is column indexed and there's another command to get the associative ones.
You know, like the actual commands the language itself has, which I know because, heh, I'm a PHP programmer and know the language.
I'm uncertain why fetchAll needs an array object passed as a parameter, I have to mentally replace the question mark with "public", then assume the second parameter is an order-by parameter since I see the DESC.
fetchAll would need an array object passed as a parameter because you might want to use multiple WHERE clauses, which I, OTOH, have no idea how to do in the Ruby example. Likewise, I have no idea how to do a LIKE instead of an =, whereas I can see how to do that in the PHP command. Don't bitch because the PHP framework command is more powerful than the Ruby one.
Likewise, while you don't know the format of the fetchAll() function, um, you're unlikely to magically know the format of the Post object, either.
I can't guess what _model is, I don't know what blogs really represents
Presumably $this->_model is how you look up the database framework, in the framework. But your confusion is because these two pieces of code aren't identical. The Ruby appears to be inside some sort of object that is already linked to the blog table (You'll notice it doesn't reference what table it's using at all.), whereas the PHP code to to call a function on that object. (Which is why, as I said, it was insanely stupid to write a function to do that, instead of just calling the existing function.)
If the PHP was actually on the object, it would be calling the fetchAll function like $this->fetchAll(array('status = ?' => 'public'), 'created DESC');
I'd give an example of what the PHP is doing in Ruby, but I have no idea how to access objects like that.
I'm fairly certain @posts is a plural set/object of more Post objects, which represents a row in a database, where status is public, then ordered descending. I can probably iterate through it. As an outsider, I could read this, lookup the column names for the row and almost immediately start using it.
And I, as a PHP programmer, have NO IDEA what a 'Post object' is or does. You somehow know it represents 'rows in a database'. Well, good for you, but that's not actually very intuitive at all. That's language knowledge you have. If you asked random people what a Post object would do to a database, most would guess 'insert and/or update a record'.
In fact, looking at it, I think you're wrong, and Posts represents the table itself, which means that @posts almost certainly is not an array of them. (Which means, instead of being inside a table object like I said above, we're in a database object or possible Post is some global object, although that seems like a very stupid name. Also, why is it capitalized if it's a table name? I have no idea.)
I do not know if blog is iterable or if it's rows it has grabbed are even accessible. $records may be the result of some manipulation it performs on the query result. I just don't know, and that makes me uncomfortable.
Yes, not knowing the exact syntax of a language does result in several questions. Just like, you know, any language.
And I urge you to actually read the paragraphs above, and compare your words:
'I'm fairly certain @posts is a plural set/object of more Post objects' vs 'if it's rows it has grabbed are even accessible'
'I can probably iterate through it.' vs. 'I do not know if blog is iterable'
'fairly certain...status is public, then ordered descending' vs. 'may be the result of so
I wouldn't say that you would "End up without one" unless your game ended really quickly.
I usually play where everyone gets a continent, so, yeah, I'd often not end up with one until some other nation would actually go and manually spread one to me.
I'm not actually seeing what I proposed as religion more complicated than other civic stuff.
I mean, you're supposed to be playing a civilization, right?
I realized after I posted that I said 'you' a lot, and I was really talking about the grandparent, not you, thasmudyan.
Um, why stop there? Forgive my lack of indent, I can't be bothered to figure it out.
That function can be identically written as:
public function actionIndex() {
$this->list = $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll(array('where' => array('blogs.status = ?' => 'public'),'order' => 'blogs.created DESC'));
}
Also, I have the feeling that 'blogs' was just thrown in to make it longer. This calls a function on a 'blogs' object, which is presumably linked to the blogs table somehow, and will presumably use 'blogs' by default. You can just use 'status' and 'created' as the Ruby example does. So:
public function actionIndex() {
$this->list = $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll(array('where' => array('status = ?' => 'public'),'order' => 'created DESC'));
}
Also, I don't know in what universe you commonly pass a single array to functions instead of, you know, actual function parameters. While I'm sure in some universe there's some framework that lets you do that, in reality you'd have a fetchAll($where,$order=NULL) function that you could use here, with array passing used for really options stuff, and an array passed in for $where. And, also, inexplicably, your function name has doubled in PHP.
So it would more likely be something like:
public function index() {
$this->list = $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll(array('status = ?' => 'public'), 'created DESC');
}
Vs:
def index
@posts = Post.where(:status => 'public').order('created DESC')
end
Yeah, that's massively shorter. Why, in PHP, you have to...um...explicitly use $this to access your own class and use array() to make an array. The horrors, the horrors!
Why on earth you're writing a public function for this is beyond me, though. I think you just did that because PHP takes longer to define a public function.
A sane programmer would just, instead of defining a class to have actionIndex() on, and then making such an object, and then calling $random_obect->actionIndex(); and then $records = $random_obect->list(); would just do this:
$records = $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll(array('status = ?' => 'public'), 'created DESC');
Civ IV is certainly that moddable.