This is especially fun for me. I don't have insurance, I'm actually uninsurable in that no one will offer me insurance. And as I'm repeatedly forced to explain that such a thing exists, and there is no magical place I can buy it. (There is, thanks to Obamacare, a stopgap measure...that my state has completely misimplemented and doesn't actually let people into. So I wait for the actual mandate and 'Cannot refused based on pre-existing conditions' stuff to come into effect.)
Hilariously, they then rant about how I could buy it if the gubberment would let me buy it from another state...and I'm forced to point out that I live in Georgia, where the government _does_ allow that (One of the few states that does)...and no insurance company has bothered to take them up on that offer. (Because no insurance companies besides the ones currently here have any _doctors_ here. The entire point of such a law is to allow the insurance company to move their HQ to a different, laxer state, not actually provide competition.)
But, frankly, half the problem is that literally none of them seems to know how much insurance costs, and appear to think it costs about a fifth of what it actually does.
No one in the US has had to sell their house to get medical tests or treatment unless they were purposely trying to manipulate their income and assets to sneak into a government program and have the state pay for their health care.
Medical expenses are the majority cause of bankruptcy. And while you do not have to 'sell your [primary] house' to declare bankruptcy, the idea that _no one_ has sold their house for medical treatment is insane.
As is the idea that 'selling your house' is the problem. The problem is _losing_ it, and plenty of people do not own their home and miss mortgage payments or rent due to medical expenses. But I will take the premise at face value.
Please note this story is from 2001, when medical expenses were much lower. Also note that reason that story was reported was a weird human interest fact it turned out for the best...presumably, the ones that do not are not reported.
You fail to explain how this will reduce the cost of insurance.
The poster didn't say it would reduce the cost of insurance. They said it would reduce the cost of billing insurance, which is a huge medical expense that people are unaware of.
75% of the costs are billing. I assume by 'costs' that doesn't include the doctors salary (Often that's structured as profit, not salary..the doctor owns the place, works 'for free', and just keeps any money left over), but still..that means filling out paperwork to get payment from insurance companies is three times more than the heating and air, the rent, the equipment, receptionist, etc. Three times all that put together.
Basically, imagine the hassles you went through when you returned something you bought online. Even if it went okay and you were only on the phone ten minutes, and the paperwork all worked out. Now imagine having to do one of those for every single patient...and the process blows up on one out of five of them, requiring waiting on hold for two hours.
You know that time that your insurance was supposed to cover something, but apparently didn't realize it, and billed you for it, and you had to call them up and straighten it out? That was because someone at the doctor's office fell down on their job....and the corollary to that is every time insurance was correctly billed, it took a significant amount of time from someone at that office.
In fact, there are almost no medical practices without a full-time employee solely to deal with getting money from insurance companies. (And the ones without are mostly the ones that don't take insurance at all.)
With a single insurance company and a single plan, the costs of billing them would be greatly reduced. Also, presumably, a government-run service would not be quite as weasely when to comes to payment. But even it was, a single set of rules and single contact point would greatly reduce costs.
If you actually think 'letting people who cannot pay for health care die in the street' is the solution, you need to say so, loudly, so no one can accidentally elect you to office^W^W^W^W^Wmisunderstand you, because you're taking a position that is wildly at odds with the _entire_ US population. _No one_ wants sick people dying in the street.
What people (At least, the left) have done is now require everyone to have insurance, so no freeloaders like the one you describe exist. (And in case they do not have insurance, they are fined, and any collected fines are used as part of the money the government reimburses hospitals with for covering uninsured people.)
Actually, wait, no, that's not really the left's doing either. It's the right that has been talking about such freeloaders for years, and repeatedly proposed that people _should_ have to get insurance. The left wanted to do other things, taking the profit out of insurance entirely or even have the government run a competing plan or even all of it, or just have it run the hospitals. But, unable to get any traction with that, the left eventually said, 'Fine, the right's idea is better than nothing.'...at which point the right decided it was the worst idea they'd ever heard.
But, regardless, it's nice to see someone correctly say 'The solution is _either_ to let people die on the street _or_ to have more government regulation than we used to have. Not letting people not get insurance and freeload wasn't working. Either more government regulation, or dead poor people'. You keep repeating that. (I do not think it will have the result you intend, but don't let that stop you.)
Government healthcare is, economically speaking, only about killing people before they cost the system (starting with anyone over 60 years, continuing with long-term disability patients,...). Do you really want your insurance provider to have that principle as it's sole guidance ? Do you really want an organization not bound by contracts and with it's sole incentive to kill you the moment you become unproductive be the sole administrator of your healthcare ?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Oh, wow, thanks I needed that laugh.
You should be comic or something: Hey, folks, would you rather have a private corporation run entirely for profit decide whether or not you get care, or would you rather have the government decide that, which has people in it who have to get elected to office?
Medicare and SS spend more money than they take in, so to finance these pyramid schemes the gov't sells bonds.
SS takes in more than they make, you fucking moron. Which is where as these IOUs come from...the rest of the government borrows from them.
Jesus Christ on pogo stick, it's completely astonishing how many people are complete and total idiots.
Here, let me explain to you: You know how you don't have a job because you're too goddamn stupid to work a cash register? (And I also think it's unfair they fired you! Does it really matter if customers pay you or you pay them? Isn't it enough that money moves?) You know how you have to keep borrowing from your parents to pay off your credit cards? You know how they don't charge you interest?
They are, this analogy, social security, and you are the rest of the budget. And you are standing there arguing that they are borrowing too much and spending too much and will collapse, because look at all those IOUs they have from you! (IOUs are bad, right? So having IOUs must be bad, right?)
Hey, dumbass, it's you who have the problem, they're the people fucking bailing you out. The government has borrowed 2.7 trillion dollars from social security.
You get rid of social security, (even if we _don't_ pay it back, aka, we steal the 2.7 trillion dollars we've already borrowed, aka we default on US government securities), and in the future the rest of the budget is in a lot more trouble and has to borrow more, resulting in more interest. We borrowed $805 billion in 2011, so basically you're saying 'I wish we had to pay interest on an extra $805 billion each year!'.
And having stole 2.7 trillion dollars from our security holders (Even if said holders were ourselves), I can only imagine at what interest rate we'd have to offer on those added bonds. And our existing ones.
TL;DR: Conservatives think a place the government can, and has, borrowed money without interest (Instead of issuing bonds which do cost interest), is somehow causing the budget issues, and the fact that it has so much money is obvious proof that it is bankrupt.
(Medicare, OTOH, hovers on the line of taking in too much and too little, but is not separated out like social security and doesn't have a trust fund, so extra money just disappears into the general budget, and comes out another year, so it's harder to see that it's revenue neutral in general. People gasp and point out that it costs X billion dollars one year, and don't notice it made X billion dollars another. Right now, in a recession, yes, it's costing us.)
Yeah, that's not actually true. There is no such rule, there is no such law, and the NHS will continue to pay for your treatment in their system. (Although obviously not the specific treatment they didn't approve of.)
Now, if you do something unapproved and have complications from that, they might balk at solving that.
That DLC might come up as an option might make sense, even as a project B. But, it's not a natural consequence of things as a point.
And half the time it seems clear that work is required to make the game work _without_ the content. In every place the content would have effected, the game has to check if it's there or not.
Which requires _more_ work and _more_ debugging.
I find the entire premise of this rather dubious to start with. Yes, developers could work on extra content after the master is made but before the game is released...and they used to, with stupid armor packs and maybe an extra two hour quest to go along with it, and sell it for $3.
But as we both know, that's _not_ what's going on with DLCs now, and that's not what people are complaining about.
Okay, I keep hearing people talk about New Vegas DLCs, and I have to say: I have no idea what you people are talking about. I played NV without any DLCs (Well, I think I got some Steam weapon pack or something) and I don't remember _anyone_ talking about _anything_ I couldn't do. I remember maybe a single reference to the Sierra Madre Casino in the original game, and that's it.
Now, yes, the DLCs were obviously actual content cut from the game, and actually belonged in specific places on the map. I don't disagree with that.
But I realized that after I bought them and played them. There's no indication that anything is missing while playing. Unless you count the fact the map is rather larger than the actual areas you can get to, which I thought was actually more realistic than in FO3 where mysteriously you were locked in a square.
I think people's knowledge that the stuff _was_ cut from the game is altering their memory of the actual game, which didn't have any obvious missing areas when playing. When the DLCs were added, there's no place I went 'Oh, _that's_ what goes there.'. (Which has happened to me on plenty of games.)
That's not to say that New Vegas doesn't seem to have parts missing. It's a strangely lurchy game, where the plot sort of falls apart in the middle. Which it does because you have near-total choice over what you can do next, but, still, it loses some forward motion once you deal with Benny.
But that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the DLCs, unless they were somehow supposed to be tied into the game in ways I don't quite see. (Perhaps Lonesome Road was supposed to be, but that was the _last_ DLC and hence presumable the least likely to have been diked out of the original game. I have not played Lonesome Road yet.)
Except it takes just as much worked to dike out the content in the first place.
They had to sit there and create places the DLC would be, and a rough grasp of the DLC, and make the game work _without_ the DLC...
I know everyone thinks 'Of, that's what they're working on when the game is done'...but that doesn't make any sense. I mean, it's true, but it took just as much work during development to build 'the place the DLC might or might not plug in' as it would have to just put the content in the first place.
But to realize this, you have to actually look at how DLCs are set up. No one would have an issue if 1-day DLC had things like 'new costumes for characters', or 'an independent adventure', stuff that idle developers could have actually worked on. (I'm reminded of Batman: Arkham City, which had DLCs exactly like that. The DLCs alter the main storyline not a bit.)
But drawing a circle around actual game content and spending the time and effort to make the game work with or without it is just as complicated as actually writing the damn content at that time and putting it in the game in the first place, and is not really fooling anyone.
So as of right now when I hear very specific claims such as "this weather pattern was absolutely caused by global warming", I'm definitely going to be suspicious.
I think the claim here is more 'statistically, this weather is almost impossible to have happened without being caused by the warming'
I think that's a reasonable claim. It's sorta 'As a doctor, pinpointing the exact cause of long term health problems is difficult, but statistically, your ten heart attacks last year are likely to be due to you eating a pound of bacon every day'.
Yes, any specific amount of heat might be due to anything. Pockets of extreme heat does happen randomly, for no reason we can determine.
But this much? This fast? This long? The odds of that happening without something causing it as very low. Something has clearly changed. And the obvious change is, well, obvious.
And exactly what predicted.For several years I, at least, have been hearing 'The problem with global warming isn't just gradually increasing the temp and sea level. The problem is wild swings in weather.' Well...here's one of them. (And boy will hurricane season this year be fun. Hurricanes are due to the amount of warm water on the surface and cool water below, and guess what long-term heat waves do. So, yeah, lots of fun coming up.)
Now, there could be some other cause out there, something else that happened that cuases heat waves. But as global warming deniers have been looking for quite some time for another explanation of the _gradual_ warming we've had, and constantly failed to find it, it seems unlikely that there's some other explanation of this heat wave that's been overlooked.
Yeah! I have the same problem with the DEA! I mean, sure, they can arrest people for possession of drugs, but what gave them the authority to just _keep_ my drugs?
Wait, I forgot, I'm not an idiot who doesn't understand that, yes, the government will seize property that is actually part of a crime.
(As for the 'outside the US thing'...um, the FBI presumably worked with whatever country that was. Duh. Armed FBI agents don't just randomly break down doors and arrest people in other countries.)
Which is why the FBI page should carefully explain to never follow links on pages like this, and instead to contact their ISP for information how to fix their DNS.
And right now there's an even bigger advantage: After testing positive, you can then proceed to buy health insurance.;)
And as for 'stigma'...yeah, that's dumb. It's not a prescription, it doesn't even require ID. Just drive a few towns over and buy it with cash. Or, of course, buy it online.
If I were this company, I'd have mail-order forms in the box, with a way for people to set up a 'subscription' where they got sent a new test every three months.
Incidentally, I think instead of trying to figure out ways 'around' the 'stigma' of AIDS, we should, you know, stop it from having one. What is this, 1986?
Hell, I had plenty of surgeries in the mid-80s, right when it was coming into the public eye and not yet being tested for in blood. I could have gotten AIDS from blood transfusion. I didn't, but I could have.
And, you know what, it's time we stop using the 'they could have gotten it without sex' excuse, anyway. Even people who got it via unprotected sex...well, they engaged in risky behavior and hit a landmine. That does not mean they are, in any way, bad people, or we should think worse of them. Until I see the same critizism of people injured in car accidents (Driving is pretty risky also), I'm forced to assume this is some sort of homophobia bullshit. (The fact the other thing mentioned was pregnancy test is, I think, telling. Homophobia _and_ misogynistic slut shaming, hand in hand, as God intended.)
Not that I'm suggesting the GP is those things. I'm suggesting he's listening to people who are, that he lives in a place where gossiping about other people is reasonable. Next time that happens, he should just punch them in the face and tell them to mind their own business about medical conditions of others.
You realize that a lot of regions and other countries already have buried lines, right, and hence those numbers are completely, flatly, delusional?
Also, while I have in no idea how much it really costs to bury cable (Except it cannot be a damn 1.6 million dollars a mile, or sewer systems simply would not exist. And building subways would bankrupt the country.), I do have some basic idea how much electricians charge, and in no universe does it cost an electrician $2K to move the cable to your breaker box from from your old meter to a new meter. (We are assuming for some reason that the power company did not hook the new buried lines up to the old meter...why, I don't know.)
$2K is enough to have an electrican walk up and install inside power (with a few outlets, and a ceiling light) to a house with just a meter! Moving a _cable_ from one meter to another for a house already wired for power is trivial...you're basically just paying for the electrician to show up. (Although, again, as I said, if the power company changes how power gets to my house, part of that job is to hook it into my _existing_ systems at that time, like to my actual existing power meter, at which point I'd have power and wouldn't have to hire anyone at all.)
There's no difference between the words kludge and kluge.
You know, for someone rambling about 'geek words', it's pretty funny you didn't check the jargon file to see exactly what that word meant. There actually is a difference, with different origins.
And you added a qualifier that isn't pertinent, "to approximate a netbook". No one is doing that with an iPad.
Oh, I see. You're one of those idiots who does not understand that context flows from the parent posts, even if later posts do not mention it.
I point to the ORIGINAL fucking use of kludge in this thread:
Because the keyboard dock turns it into an Android netbook, rather than a kludgy collection of knocked-together addons where you have to support the display with your knees?
The next post questioned the use of 'kludge', and then other people talked, and then you opened your mouth and stupid fell out. You decided the discussion was about whether not attaching a bluetooth keyboard and using a stand was a 'kludge' in and of itself, probably because you are a complete idiot.
The question was, for the record, whether or not using a bluetooth keyboard and a dock to 'kludge' together a netbook was actually 'kludge' or not.
The lack of a 'filesystem' is game killer to me. I hate it on my iPhone.
Guys, we have Dropbox, and iCloud, and all that other stuff. There is absolutely no reason that a folder on my phone could not be synced with one of those (Or something new), and show up on my computer. And applications could read and write there, etc.
I know this is possible, because I rooted my fricking Nook STR, and installed a program called DropSync (One of many that could do it) and now my entire Dropbox magically shows up on my Nook's SD card, and, if I feel like it, I could install applications to edit files in that and whatnot. I don't, I actually just use that as a quick way to get books to the Nook, along with an OpenOffice and PDF viewers in case I really need to read some other document...but I could. (And the only reason I have to root the Nook was to install any applications at all. If I had an Android device that could get to the Google store to start with, I wouldn't have had to root it.)
I can't even do this on my jailbroken iPhone. I've managed to find an app that will sync a directory with text documents with Dropbox (Called PlainText, if anyone cares.), so I can at least get random information to my phone and get notes back to my computer, and of course the Dropbox app will let me download from Dropbox and even keep things 'offline', but nothing lets me have a directory that just 'is' dropbox...because the iPhone doesn't believe in 'directories' like that at all, at least not ones exposed to the user. So such an app would be mostly pointless.
I can't even imagine trying to use iOS as an actual computing platform, with document creation and whatnot, instead of just something to surf the web with, play video games on, and use a few dedicated apps like a RSS reader and Facebook.
Using a bluetooth keyboard and a stand with an iPad to approximate a netbook (although it's one you cannot use while carrying it, and there's the constant annoyance of having to keep reaching up to the touchscreen) is indeed a kludge. (Assuming you're using kludge as the variant spelling of 'kluge'. The other version of kludge is purely software.)
Adding two things to a device to make it a crappier version of something else is in fact the definition of a kluge: 1./n./ A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software.
I don't know about your solution, but you're dead right about the problem.
I work as a fairly-technically-inclined web developer, and I can't count how many times I've seen other developers say 'I can't figure out how to make my Joomla or Wordpress or whatever give out pages faster, perhaps I need some sort of caching or something'. I check, and it's a ten second load time.
And then I look at it in Firebug and point out their HTML arrives in half a second, and their images arrive in three seconds and are cached on all but the first page, and they were smart enough to include image dimensions to allow the page to render without them. The actual slowness is because they're loading loading a javascript from another server that is not cached, and that script has to get downloaded, and run, and then, at that point it goes and gets an actual ad...at which point the damn page finally renders. So there's nothing anyone can do about the speed.
Can we please figure out something besides this paradigm? I have no problem with ads, but this is insane. Could Google not set it up where you make the ads like <img id='google_ad1' src='/transparent.gif' height.../>, and then asynchronously load some javascript after page load that swaps that with an ad?
All this Javascript is bad enough, but ads are specifically three times as bad simply because of the entire process of 'Connect to another server, download ad Javascript code, run that, it connects back to that server and downloads actual ads, and when it gets the actual ads the page can _finally_ render'.
The last thing I ever ever want to be is a rich guy in a poor place.
I think, honestly, that's the difference between two sorts of people. Some people want to be richer than anyone they know (Which produces crazy results when you're Romney and know a 'few NASCAR owners' and whatnot.)
Other people are like 'Man, it would be cool if everyone was rich, although that can't really work. But at everyone should at least have a job they can live off of, and no one is poor. So if I had money I'd try to start some business that provided jobs or something.'.
So I'd start a local business. Or fix up a location and lease it to someone who has a good business idea, for a cut.
And the thing about it is that it's a form of investment, where you might make money...but who the heck cares? Even if you don't, you made things better off. People got paid for honest work, money moved through the economy, etc.
There dengue fever, inner-city violence, old people with shrinking resources. There's the failure of Business to meet any of its social obligations, there's schools that aren't working. Etc etc etc. I could sit here all day and just list one big problem after another that someone with the supposed "business skills" could attack. The world is full of challenges.
Yeah. Although I have to admit I'm somewhat selfish. If I ended up with a bunch of money that I could spend, say, a million a year on random things, I'd send some of it off to those charities where a tiny amount of money can make a difference...I mean, imagine how many mosquito netting things that would buy.
But a good deal of it I would spend on the small town I live in, to try to help people around me. I'd, I dunno, buy run-down buildings, fix them up, and rent them shops. I'd donate to local charities and parks, and stuff like that.
I know my money could probably do more good elsewhere...but I think seeing the results of it would be impressive.
And it's entirely possible that I'd start some sort of lobbying group to try to change things for the better, but I'd probably direct that locally also, or at least at the state. Washington is too broken to fuck with, honestly, and there are billions of dollars being thrown around like it's nothing, swamping anything I could do in this hypothetical.
No, I think it's something much more prosaic than just the notion of them having "conquered business" and are now looking for the next challenge. I think there is a nagging suspicion that their success had almost nothing to do with their own talent or hard work or innovative thinking and everything to do with being in the lucky sperm club. They believe that even with all their accumulated wealth that there is still the need to "prove themselves" because deep down they realize that (especially in the case of Gov Romney) that so far they have proven absolutely nothing about real achievement.
That actually seems entirely likely. It's certainly why Donald Trump ran. (Donald Trump: The man who managed to lose two and a half fortunes to bankruptcy, and yet consistently is loaned hundreds of millions of dollars.)
And it could be why Romney is running also. Although, frankly, it's nearly impossible to figure anything out about him, as he does not appear to be an actual human being.
'Some sort of control' does not equal a monopoly, you fucktard. Everyone has control over what they are selling, that is the entire premise of them selling it. Unions have control over the labor they are selling, just like the local grocery store has control over the bananas they are selling.
And, just like I can purchase bananas elsewhere, employers can purchase labor elsewhere.
There could be an issue if 90% of possible bananas I could buy were sold by single monopoly or a trust, and there could be an issue if 90% of possible workers that could be hired were in single union. But, of course, that is not true. (And, no, you don't get to try to use geography to make it true, anymore than a single grocery store in town is a monopoly.)
Uh, you just argued a closed shop was a 'monopoly', which, while also very wrong, is not actually the premise here.
The claim was that a union was a monopoly, not the people 'purchasing' labor from it are a monopoly.
If a union shop, by which you mean 'corporation that has a union' has an actual monopoly on purchasing labor, the thing to regulate is the monopoly, aka, the corporation.
Saying 'They sell their labor to a monopoly' is not actually a very relevant point in this discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
No shit.
This is especially fun for me. I don't have insurance, I'm actually uninsurable in that no one will offer me insurance. And as I'm repeatedly forced to explain that such a thing exists, and there is no magical place I can buy it. (There is, thanks to Obamacare, a stopgap measure...that my state has completely misimplemented and doesn't actually let people into. So I wait for the actual mandate and 'Cannot refused based on pre-existing conditions' stuff to come into effect.)
Hilariously, they then rant about how I could buy it if the gubberment would let me buy it from another state...and I'm forced to point out that I live in Georgia, where the government _does_ allow that (One of the few states that does)...and no insurance company has bothered to take them up on that offer. (Because no insurance companies besides the ones currently here have any _doctors_ here. The entire point of such a law is to allow the insurance company to move their HQ to a different, laxer state, not actually provide competition.)
But, frankly, half the problem is that literally none of them seems to know how much insurance costs, and appear to think it costs about a fifth of what it actually does.
No one in the US has had to sell their house to get medical tests or treatment unless they were purposely trying to manipulate their income and assets to sneak into a government program and have the state pay for their health care.
Medical expenses are the majority cause of bankruptcy. And while you do not have to 'sell your [primary] house' to declare bankruptcy, the idea that _no one_ has sold their house for medical treatment is insane.
As is the idea that 'selling your house' is the problem. The problem is _losing_ it, and plenty of people do not own their home and miss mortgage payments or rent due to medical expenses. But I will take the premise at face value.
So, taking it at face value, let's google 'sell house for medical treatment'. And let's see what do we find...a bunch of home medical stuff...hey, look, the second damn page: http://www.prlog.org/11847260-selling-house-to-pay-for-medical-bills-leads-to-pillow-talk.html
Please note this story is from 2001, when medical expenses were much lower. Also note that reason that story was reported was a weird human interest fact it turned out for the best...presumably, the ones that do not are not reported.
You fail to explain how this will reduce the cost of insurance.
The poster didn't say it would reduce the cost of insurance. They said it would reduce the cost of billing insurance, which is a huge medical expense that people are unaware of.
75% of the costs are billing. I assume by 'costs' that doesn't include the doctors salary (Often that's structured as profit, not salary..the doctor owns the place, works 'for free', and just keeps any money left over), but still..that means filling out paperwork to get payment from insurance companies is three times more than the heating and air, the rent, the equipment, receptionist, etc. Three times all that put together.
Basically, imagine the hassles you went through when you returned something you bought online. Even if it went okay and you were only on the phone ten minutes, and the paperwork all worked out. Now imagine having to do one of those for every single patient...and the process blows up on one out of five of them, requiring waiting on hold for two hours.
You know that time that your insurance was supposed to cover something, but apparently didn't realize it, and billed you for it, and you had to call them up and straighten it out? That was because someone at the doctor's office fell down on their job....and the corollary to that is every time insurance was correctly billed, it took a significant amount of time from someone at that office.
In fact, there are almost no medical practices without a full-time employee solely to deal with getting money from insurance companies. (And the ones without are mostly the ones that don't take insurance at all.)
With a single insurance company and a single plan, the costs of billing them would be greatly reduced. Also, presumably, a government-run service would not be quite as weasely when to comes to payment. But even it was, a single set of rules and single contact point would greatly reduce costs.
If you actually think 'letting people who cannot pay for health care die in the street' is the solution, you need to say so, loudly, so no one can accidentally elect you to office^W^W^W^W^Wmisunderstand you, because you're taking a position that is wildly at odds with the _entire_ US population. _No one_ wants sick people dying in the street.
What people (At least, the left) have done is now require everyone to have insurance, so no freeloaders like the one you describe exist. (And in case they do not have insurance, they are fined, and any collected fines are used as part of the money the government reimburses hospitals with for covering uninsured people.)
Actually, wait, no, that's not really the left's doing either. It's the right that has been talking about such freeloaders for years, and repeatedly proposed that people _should_ have to get insurance. The left wanted to do other things, taking the profit out of insurance entirely or even have the government run a competing plan or even all of it, or just have it run the hospitals. But, unable to get any traction with that, the left eventually said, 'Fine, the right's idea is better than nothing.'...at which point the right decided it was the worst idea they'd ever heard.
But, regardless, it's nice to see someone correctly say 'The solution is _either_ to let people die on the street _or_ to have more government regulation than we used to have. Not letting people not get insurance and freeload wasn't working. Either more government regulation, or dead poor people'. You keep repeating that. (I do not think it will have the result you intend, but don't let that stop you.)
Government healthcare is, economically speaking, only about killing people before they cost the system (starting with anyone over 60 years, continuing with long-term disability patients, ...). Do you really want your insurance provider to have that principle as it's sole guidance ? Do you really want an organization not bound by contracts and with it's sole incentive to kill you the moment you become unproductive be the sole administrator of your healthcare ?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Oh, wow, thanks I needed that laugh.
You should be comic or something: Hey, folks, would you rather have a private corporation run entirely for profit decide whether or not you get care, or would you rather have the government decide that, which has people in it who have to get elected to office?
Medicare and SS spend more money than they take in, so to finance these pyramid schemes the gov't sells bonds.
SS takes in more than they make, you fucking moron. Which is where as these IOUs come from...the rest of the government borrows from them.
Jesus Christ on pogo stick, it's completely astonishing how many people are complete and total idiots.
Here, let me explain to you: You know how you don't have a job because you're too goddamn stupid to work a cash register? (And I also think it's unfair they fired you! Does it really matter if customers pay you or you pay them? Isn't it enough that money moves?) You know how you have to keep borrowing from your parents to pay off your credit cards? You know how they don't charge you interest?
They are, this analogy, social security, and you are the rest of the budget. And you are standing there arguing that they are borrowing too much and spending too much and will collapse, because look at all those IOUs they have from you! (IOUs are bad, right? So having IOUs must be bad, right?)
Hey, dumbass, it's you who have the problem, they're the people fucking bailing you out. The government has borrowed 2.7 trillion dollars from social security.
You get rid of social security, (even if we _don't_ pay it back, aka, we steal the 2.7 trillion dollars we've already borrowed, aka we default on US government securities), and in the future the rest of the budget is in a lot more trouble and has to borrow more, resulting in more interest. We borrowed $805 billion in 2011, so basically you're saying 'I wish we had to pay interest on an extra $805 billion each year!'.
And having stole 2.7 trillion dollars from our security holders (Even if said holders were ourselves), I can only imagine at what interest rate we'd have to offer on those added bonds. And our existing ones.
TL;DR: Conservatives think a place the government can, and has, borrowed money without interest (Instead of issuing bonds which do cost interest), is somehow causing the budget issues, and the fact that it has so much money is obvious proof that it is bankrupt.
(Medicare, OTOH, hovers on the line of taking in too much and too little, but is not separated out like social security and doesn't have a trust fund, so extra money just disappears into the general budget, and comes out another year, so it's harder to see that it's revenue neutral in general. People gasp and point out that it costs X billion dollars one year, and don't notice it made X billion dollars another. Right now, in a recession, yes, it's costing us.)
Yeah, that's not actually true. There is no such rule, there is no such law, and the NHS will continue to pay for your treatment in their system. (Although obviously not the specific treatment they didn't approve of.)
Now, if you do something unapproved and have complications from that, they might balk at solving that.
That DLC might come up as an option might make sense, even as a project B. But, it's not a natural consequence of things as a point.
And half the time it seems clear that work is required to make the game work _without_ the content. In every place the content would have effected, the game has to check if it's there or not.
Which requires _more_ work and _more_ debugging.
I find the entire premise of this rather dubious to start with. Yes, developers could work on extra content after the master is made but before the game is released...and they used to, with stupid armor packs and maybe an extra two hour quest to go along with it, and sell it for $3.
But as we both know, that's _not_ what's going on with DLCs now, and that's not what people are complaining about.
Okay, I keep hearing people talk about New Vegas DLCs, and I have to say: I have no idea what you people are talking about. I played NV without any DLCs (Well, I think I got some Steam weapon pack or something) and I don't remember _anyone_ talking about _anything_ I couldn't do. I remember maybe a single reference to the Sierra Madre Casino in the original game, and that's it.
Now, yes, the DLCs were obviously actual content cut from the game, and actually belonged in specific places on the map. I don't disagree with that.
But I realized that after I bought them and played them. There's no indication that anything is missing while playing. Unless you count the fact the map is rather larger than the actual areas you can get to, which I thought was actually more realistic than in FO3 where mysteriously you were locked in a square.
I think people's knowledge that the stuff _was_ cut from the game is altering their memory of the actual game, which didn't have any obvious missing areas when playing. When the DLCs were added, there's no place I went 'Oh, _that's_ what goes there.'. (Which has happened to me on plenty of games.)
That's not to say that New Vegas doesn't seem to have parts missing. It's a strangely lurchy game, where the plot sort of falls apart in the middle. Which it does because you have near-total choice over what you can do next, but, still, it loses some forward motion once you deal with Benny.
But that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the DLCs, unless they were somehow supposed to be tied into the game in ways I don't quite see. (Perhaps Lonesome Road was supposed to be, but that was the _last_ DLC and hence presumable the least likely to have been diked out of the original game. I have not played Lonesome Road yet.)
That's not why you shouldn't buy 3. There's a much much better reason you shouldn't buy 3.
Except it takes just as much worked to dike out the content in the first place.
They had to sit there and create places the DLC would be, and a rough grasp of the DLC, and make the game work _without_ the DLC...
I know everyone thinks 'Of, that's what they're working on when the game is done'...but that doesn't make any sense. I mean, it's true, but it took just as much work during development to build 'the place the DLC might or might not plug in' as it would have to just put the content in the first place.
But to realize this, you have to actually look at how DLCs are set up. No one would have an issue if 1-day DLC had things like 'new costumes for characters', or 'an independent adventure', stuff that idle developers could have actually worked on. (I'm reminded of Batman: Arkham City, which had DLCs exactly like that. The DLCs alter the main storyline not a bit.)
But drawing a circle around actual game content and spending the time and effort to make the game work with or without it is just as complicated as actually writing the damn content at that time and putting it in the game in the first place, and is not really fooling anyone.
So as of right now when I hear very specific claims such as "this weather pattern was absolutely caused by global warming", I'm definitely going to be suspicious.
I think the claim here is more 'statistically, this weather is almost impossible to have happened without being caused by the warming'
I think that's a reasonable claim. It's sorta 'As a doctor, pinpointing the exact cause of long term health problems is difficult, but statistically, your ten heart attacks last year are likely to be due to you eating a pound of bacon every day'.
Yes, any specific amount of heat might be due to anything. Pockets of extreme heat does happen randomly, for no reason we can determine.
But this much? This fast? This long? The odds of that happening without something causing it as very low. Something has clearly changed. And the obvious change is, well, obvious.
And exactly what predicted.For several years I, at least, have been hearing 'The problem with global warming isn't just gradually increasing the temp and sea level. The problem is wild swings in weather.' Well...here's one of them. (And boy will hurricane season this year be fun. Hurricanes are due to the amount of warm water on the surface and cool water below, and guess what long-term heat waves do. So, yeah, lots of fun coming up.)
Now, there could be some other cause out there, something else that happened that cuases heat waves. But as global warming deniers have been looking for quite some time for another explanation of the _gradual_ warming we've had, and constantly failed to find it, it seems unlikely that there's some other explanation of this heat wave that's been overlooked.
Windows NT has a POSIX interface in it somewhere. It's done to try and tempt people to port their POSIX code to windows.
Actually it was done entirely because specific US government purchasing rules required only the purchase of OSes with POSIX interfaces.
There was never any intent that anyone actually _use_ that interface. It was so they could fill a checkmark on 'Required OS features'.
Yeah! I have the same problem with the DEA! I mean, sure, they can arrest people for possession of drugs, but what gave them the authority to just _keep_ my drugs?
Wait, I forgot, I'm not an idiot who doesn't understand that, yes, the government will seize property that is actually part of a crime.
(As for the 'outside the US thing'...um, the FBI presumably worked with whatever country that was. Duh. Armed FBI agents don't just randomly break down doors and arrest people in other countries.)
Which is why the FBI page should carefully explain to never follow links on pages like this, and instead to contact their ISP for information how to fix their DNS.
Which I suspect is what it did.
And right now there's an even bigger advantage: After testing positive, you can then proceed to buy health insurance. ;)
And as for 'stigma'...yeah, that's dumb. It's not a prescription, it doesn't even require ID. Just drive a few towns over and buy it with cash. Or, of course, buy it online.
If I were this company, I'd have mail-order forms in the box, with a way for people to set up a 'subscription' where they got sent a new test every three months.
Incidentally, I think instead of trying to figure out ways 'around' the 'stigma' of AIDS, we should, you know, stop it from having one. What is this, 1986?
Hell, I had plenty of surgeries in the mid-80s, right when it was coming into the public eye and not yet being tested for in blood. I could have gotten AIDS from blood transfusion. I didn't, but I could have.
And, you know what, it's time we stop using the 'they could have gotten it without sex' excuse, anyway. Even people who got it via unprotected sex...well, they engaged in risky behavior and hit a landmine. That does not mean they are, in any way, bad people, or we should think worse of them. Until I see the same critizism of people injured in car accidents (Driving is pretty risky also), I'm forced to assume this is some sort of homophobia bullshit. (The fact the other thing mentioned was pregnancy test is, I think, telling. Homophobia _and_ misogynistic slut shaming, hand in hand, as God intended.)
Not that I'm suggesting the GP is those things. I'm suggesting he's listening to people who are, that he lives in a place where gossiping about other people is reasonable. Next time that happens, he should just punch them in the face and tell them to mind their own business about medical conditions of others.
You realize that a lot of regions and other countries already have buried lines, right, and hence those numbers are completely, flatly, delusional?
Also, while I have in no idea how much it really costs to bury cable (Except it cannot be a damn 1.6 million dollars a mile, or sewer systems simply would not exist. And building subways would bankrupt the country.), I do have some basic idea how much electricians charge, and in no universe does it cost an electrician $2K to move the cable to your breaker box from from your old meter to a new meter. (We are assuming for some reason that the power company did not hook the new buried lines up to the old meter...why, I don't know.)
$2K is enough to have an electrican walk up and install inside power (with a few outlets, and a ceiling light) to a house with just a meter! Moving a _cable_ from one meter to another for a house already wired for power is trivial...you're basically just paying for the electrician to show up. (Although, again, as I said, if the power company changes how power gets to my house, part of that job is to hook it into my _existing_ systems at that time, like to my actual existing power meter, at which point I'd have power and wouldn't have to hire anyone at all.)
There's no difference between the words kludge and kluge.
You know, for someone rambling about 'geek words', it's pretty funny you didn't check the jargon file to see exactly what that word meant. There actually is a difference, with different origins.
And you added a qualifier that isn't pertinent, "to approximate a netbook". No one is doing that with an iPad.
Oh, I see. You're one of those idiots who does not understand that context flows from the parent posts, even if later posts do not mention it.
I point to the ORIGINAL fucking use of kludge in this thread:
Because the keyboard dock turns it into an Android netbook, rather than a kludgy collection of knocked-together addons where you have to support the display with your knees?
The next post questioned the use of 'kludge', and then other people talked, and then you opened your mouth and stupid fell out. You decided the discussion was about whether not attaching a bluetooth keyboard and using a stand was a 'kludge' in and of itself, probably because you are a complete idiot.
The question was, for the record, whether or not using a bluetooth keyboard and a dock to 'kludge' together a netbook was actually 'kludge' or not.
The lack of a 'filesystem' is game killer to me. I hate it on my iPhone.
Guys, we have Dropbox, and iCloud, and all that other stuff. There is absolutely no reason that a folder on my phone could not be synced with one of those (Or something new), and show up on my computer. And applications could read and write there, etc.
I know this is possible, because I rooted my fricking Nook STR, and installed a program called DropSync (One of many that could do it) and now my entire Dropbox magically shows up on my Nook's SD card, and, if I feel like it, I could install applications to edit files in that and whatnot. I don't, I actually just use that as a quick way to get books to the Nook, along with an OpenOffice and PDF viewers in case I really need to read some other document...but I could. (And the only reason I have to root the Nook was to install any applications at all. If I had an Android device that could get to the Google store to start with, I wouldn't have had to root it.)
I can't even do this on my jailbroken iPhone. I've managed to find an app that will sync a directory with text documents with Dropbox (Called PlainText, if anyone cares.), so I can at least get random information to my phone and get notes back to my computer, and of course the Dropbox app will let me download from Dropbox and even keep things 'offline', but nothing lets me have a directory that just 'is' dropbox...because the iPhone doesn't believe in 'directories' like that at all, at least not ones exposed to the user. So such an app would be mostly pointless.
I can't even imagine trying to use iOS as an actual computing platform, with document creation and whatnot, instead of just something to surf the web with, play video games on, and use a few dedicated apps like a RSS reader and Facebook.
Using a bluetooth keyboard and a stand with an iPad to approximate a netbook (although it's one you cannot use while carrying it, and there's the constant annoyance of having to keep reaching up to the touchscreen) is indeed a kludge. (Assuming you're using kludge as the variant spelling of 'kluge'. The other version of kludge is purely software.)
Adding two things to a device to make it a crappier version of something else is in fact the definition of a kluge: 1. /n./ A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software.
I don't know about your solution, but you're dead right about the problem.
I work as a fairly-technically-inclined web developer, and I can't count how many times I've seen other developers say 'I can't figure out how to make my Joomla or Wordpress or whatever give out pages faster, perhaps I need some sort of caching or something'. I check, and it's a ten second load time.
And then I look at it in Firebug and point out their HTML arrives in half a second, and their images arrive in three seconds and are cached on all but the first page, and they were smart enough to include image dimensions to allow the page to render without them. The actual slowness is because they're loading loading a javascript from another server that is not cached, and that script has to get downloaded, and run, and then, at that point it goes and gets an actual ad...at which point the damn page finally renders. So there's nothing anyone can do about the speed.
Can we please figure out something besides this paradigm? I have no problem with ads, but this is insane. Could Google not set it up where you make the ads like <img id='google_ad1' src='/transparent.gif' height... />, and then asynchronously load some javascript after page load that swaps that with an ad?
All this Javascript is bad enough, but ads are specifically three times as bad simply because of the entire process of 'Connect to another server, download ad Javascript code, run that, it connects back to that server and downloads actual ads, and when it gets the actual ads the page can _finally_ render'.
The last thing I ever ever want to be is a rich guy in a poor place.
I think, honestly, that's the difference between two sorts of people. Some people want to be richer than anyone they know (Which produces crazy results when you're Romney and know a 'few NASCAR owners' and whatnot.)
Other people are like 'Man, it would be cool if everyone was rich, although that can't really work. But at everyone should at least have a job they can live off of, and no one is poor. So if I had money I'd try to start some business that provided jobs or something.'.
So I'd start a local business. Or fix up a location and lease it to someone who has a good business idea, for a cut.
And the thing about it is that it's a form of investment, where you might make money...but who the heck cares? Even if you don't, you made things better off. People got paid for honest work, money moved through the economy, etc.
There dengue fever, inner-city violence, old people with shrinking resources. There's the failure of Business to meet any of its social obligations, there's schools that aren't working. Etc etc etc. I could sit here all day and just list one big problem after another that someone with the supposed "business skills" could attack. The world is full of challenges.
Yeah. Although I have to admit I'm somewhat selfish. If I ended up with a bunch of money that I could spend, say, a million a year on random things, I'd send some of it off to those charities where a tiny amount of money can make a difference...I mean, imagine how many mosquito netting things that would buy.
But a good deal of it I would spend on the small town I live in, to try to help people around me. I'd, I dunno, buy run-down buildings, fix them up, and rent them shops. I'd donate to local charities and parks, and stuff like that.
I know my money could probably do more good elsewhere...but I think seeing the results of it would be impressive.
And it's entirely possible that I'd start some sort of lobbying group to try to change things for the better, but I'd probably direct that locally also, or at least at the state. Washington is too broken to fuck with, honestly, and there are billions of dollars being thrown around like it's nothing, swamping anything I could do in this hypothetical.
No, I think it's something much more prosaic than just the notion of them having "conquered business" and are now looking for the next challenge. I think there is a nagging suspicion that their success had almost nothing to do with their own talent or hard work or innovative thinking and everything to do with being in the lucky sperm club. They believe that even with all their accumulated wealth that there is still the need to "prove themselves" because deep down they realize that (especially in the case of Gov Romney) that so far they have proven absolutely nothing about real achievement.
That actually seems entirely likely. It's certainly why Donald Trump ran. (Donald Trump: The man who managed to lose two and a half fortunes to bankruptcy, and yet consistently is loaned hundreds of millions of dollars.)
And it could be why Romney is running also. Although, frankly, it's nearly impossible to figure anything out about him, as he does not appear to be an actual human being.
'Some sort of control' does not equal a monopoly, you fucktard. Everyone has control over what they are selling, that is the entire premise of them selling it. Unions have control over the labor they are selling, just like the local grocery store has control over the bananas they are selling.
And, just like I can purchase bananas elsewhere, employers can purchase labor elsewhere.
There could be an issue if 90% of possible bananas I could buy were sold by single monopoly or a trust, and there could be an issue if 90% of possible workers that could be hired were in single union. But, of course, that is not true. (And, no, you don't get to try to use geography to make it true, anymore than a single grocery store in town is a monopoly.)
Uh, you just argued a closed shop was a 'monopoly', which, while also very wrong, is not actually the premise here.
The claim was that a union was a monopoly, not the people 'purchasing' labor from it are a monopoly.
If a union shop, by which you mean 'corporation that has a union' has an actual monopoly on purchasing labor, the thing to regulate is the monopoly, aka, the corporation.
Saying 'They sell their labor to a monopoly' is not actually a very relevant point in this discussion.