Riiiiiiight. It is "justice" to take away someone's liberty and force them to have a reduced standard of health care. That makes perfect sense!
I will never stop at wondering why little people (surely you're not a zillionaire) will keep at protecting the filthy rich... The bourgeois mind control rays seem to be very potent down there...
Reality 101: the big filthy rich will keep insuring that you, the little guy, will **NEVER** be able to get richer. Stop dreaming about "hard work", it's all about connections.
Bullshit. Montana, which has an ethnic makeup similar to Canada, has a lower crime rate than Canada does. Philadelphia, which has an ethnic makeup decidedly different than Canada has a much higher crime rate.
I didn't know that Montana had 225,000 french people... Perhaps it is you who indulges in oxdung???
I'm not obese...I'm not even mildly overweight, and I exercise regularly. Why should I have to pay extra for health care because other people live unhealthy lifestyles?
Because you do not want your health insurer to peek into the most intimate details of your private life.
Still, changing to the "single-payer" system would make things even worse in that regard.
Not at all. The Canadian "single payer" health-care system has only 3% administrative overhead, as opposed to 35%-40% for the private US one. And since everyone is covered identically, there is no time lost finding out if someone is insured for this or that treatment. Nor are people fired because the employer's insurance is tired of paying for the employee's children expensive cancer treatment.
There's also a significant incentive for the single-payer government solution to cut its own costs by, oh, passing legislation on what people are allowed to eat (and I'm sure there are some people out there who already would like to outlaw Big Macs).
There is no such thing in Canada, and pity the hapless government who would pass such laws...
Now, I'm not a big fan of such things, but the notion of that kind of legislation scares me... as does the notion of health care as a bureaucracy. (You thought insurance companies were bad? Wait until they're more like the DMV.)
FUD. There is no bureaucracy; treatment and/or procedure are covered or not. Every time a medical act is performed, it is clear-cut whether it is covered or not.
... drugs are expensive because researching them takes lot of money paying intelligent people with expensive educations, and which may or may not be successful.
Oxdung. Most drug research is performed in university labs with government money. Drugs are expensive because they have to be marketed to the public because in the US, it's a "free" "market".
In Canada, drug prices are strictly regulated, and for the most part, are not marketed to the public. Not having to market is a tremenduous cost cutter and leaves more money for what little research is done by pharmaceutical labs.
In the US, pharmaceutical companies spent three time as much for marketing than they did for research.
The outrage some people seem to express at wealthy people being able to pay other wealthy people for quality healthcare seems a silly to me.
That's because you believe that one day you will become a zillionnaire. Then, one day, you'll realize that no matter how hard you work, you'll get passed over by people sleazier than you who excel more than you in the art of bullshit and licking arse, so you'll never get a zillionnaire.
Maybe if the doctors were all humble and devout servants of the greater good of humanity, they would be just as willing to treat the poor, and not make a lot of money, and things would be more equitable in the world, yeah. But they're not charities, they're people, and their efforts are their own, to dispose of as they will.
But since this will never happen, you better have an universal system that is paid for everybody and that leaves no one behind. Not even the filthy rich.
The real tragedy from Australia's point of view, is that our government has an ideological commitment to drag our healthcare system down to the US's level, instead of bringing it up to match the top performers.
Fortunately, in Canada, people have made well clear that they will not stand for this, and no politician, not even the frothiest right-wing loonies (who are in power in Ottawa, as it happens) would ever dream of ever suggesting a hint of perhaps maybe eventually moving slightly towards a US style health-care system...
Well, it depends on what you mean. If you mean Canada has the same or better results for everybody, no, it does not. Indeed, for many people, it has significantly worse results, especially those in the upper and upper middle class, and that's the point: no one is willing to have their freedom taken away, and their taxes increased, in order to be significantly worse off, even if it benefits others. There's better solutions out there that don't harm a lot of people for the sake of improving the care of a lot of other people.
Canadians have decided long ago that it is not right for a rich man to have better service when it means that everyone else will have worse.
Everyone has the same service; this guarantees that the rich will not gut the service.
This is called "social justice", something sorely lacking in the US.
Ever wondered why the crime rate is so low in Canada? It's not because guns are outlawed. No, it's simply because welfare helps ensure that someone that hit the bottom of the barrel will not have to turn to crime in order to survive.
Paying slightly more taxes than in the US is a very cheap price to pay to insure that I do not risk being mugged each time I walk home late at night.
And everyone is glad to pay those few extra tax dollars.
The "freedom" those measures take away would only benefit the top 0.01% of the population anyways.
So what're they heating the water with? Electricity? In which case it's an electrically powered car.
You laugh, but So what're they heating the water with? Electricity? In which case it's an electrically powered car. ">this has actually been done before...
On the harassment front, the RIAA's representatives apparently attempted to contact a 10 year old child's elementary school under false pretenses, pretending to be a grandparent. The court had to issue a protective order prohibiting the RIAA from contacting the kid. That's going to be tough to explain to a jury.
This is just a test run of their next move, asking for defendants' first-born instead of money, arm and/or leg.
That doesn't mean the law is right. The fact of the matter is that if there are two people that can perform a job, and one can perform it cheaper, it makes sense for the economy to have the job done cheaper.
To the economy, maybe, but definitely not to society. The economy is not everything that counts, you know; there are many important things besides the economy.
I ask you, why is it the law that a person that happened to be born within arbitrarily drawn lines in the sand deserve to charge more for the same job than someone born outside that line?
Because those persons are citizens, and as citizens, they have passed a social contract with their Country to insure that the State of the Country will protect them from many hazards, one being from cheaper labour from abroad.
The laws passed by that social contract call that only Citizens and legal aliens may secure employment. To cater to the whims of the economy would be doing otherwise, and calls for a modification of the laws.
The Citizens will never make that happen, because with labour, you're not dealing with merchandise or a service, but with human beings (Citizen or not).
Cohen? That's a jewish name. This is not surprising; jews are amongst the worst people when it comes to employee treatment. Their niggardlyness is legendary; they will go to great lenghts to avoid paying a fair price for anything.
I heard about someone who puts an extra custom header in his USENET posts which contains the string "when he was a kid, the president of the United Cigar Stores used to throw water bombs at anthills to kill time".
I've long had this idea that someone should send national-security-related incriminating emails to a group of "co-conspirators". It would be something that the government would definitely want to stop if they knew about, like a planned assassination, but it would all be fake, yet look real enough.
Tell that to the two clowns who simulated a terrorist attack in Montréal, some months ago, and who are now rotting in jail, charged with the crime of simulating terrorism...
But why pick the telegraph which has an obvious privacy-related flaw when we also have the example of the telephone?
Did anyone else had a flash of the old Apple commercial where hundreds of people are trying to learn morse code, and then someone comes running in with a telephone...
Actually, where I live (a looooong day's drive from the US federal capital), the authorities in charge of voting have decreed that the technology/procedures for electronic voting is too immature and too diversified (read: not standardized enough) to allow it's continued usage, so it has effectively been outlawed.
I have been working as an election official in various elections lately (at various government levels) and the paper ballot system works perfectly well and offers sufficient accounting speed (barring fuckups, all results are tallied within 2 hours) and fraud prevention safeguards.
Why an OS for an appliance computer? (Because a voting machine is basically an appliance computer).
I mean, what does a voting machine needs to do? Read a keyboard (or touch screen), write to a display device, print a receipt/results, read and write to a RAM card (to get the candidates and put the results).
So why do you need a whole goddammed operating system to do that? Are programmers becoming sufficiently incompetent to be unable to do those basic I/O tasks from scratch???
What's so difficult in booting from ROM? Set stack pointers, memory access registers, jump to start of POST routine and go.
It's not very hard at all.
So why do you need schwindoze (or schlinux) to do all those basic things????
The kicker is that nothing prevents the manager of a moviehouse to copy the film for himself, or to allow the manager to have an employee or anyone else do so...
An Act to amend the Criminal Code (unauthorized recording of a movie)
R.S., c. C-46
Her Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate and House of Commons of Canada, enacts as follows:
L.R., ch. C-46
1. The Criminal Code is amended by adding the following after section 431.2:
Unauthorized recording of a movie
432. (1) A person who, without the consent of the theatre manager, records in a movie theatre a performance of a cinematographic work within the meaning of section 2 of the Copyright Act or its soundtrack
(a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than two years; or
(b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
Unauthorized recording for purpose of sale, etc.
(2) A person who, without the consent of the theatre manager, records in a movie theatre a performance of a cinematographic work within the meaning of section 2 of the Copyright Act or its soundtrack for the purpose of the sale, rental or other commercial distribution of a copy of the cinematographic work
(a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than five years; or
(b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
Forfeiture
(3) In addition to any punishment that is imposed on a person who is convicted of an offence under this section, the court may order that anything that is used in the commission of the offence be forfeited to Her Majesty in right of the province in which the proceedings are taken. Anything that is forfeited may be disposed of as the Attorney General directs.
Forfeiture -- limitation
(4) No order may be made under subsection (3) in respect of anything that is the property of a person who is not a party to the offence.
Published under authority of the Speaker of the House of Commons
I mean, with UNIX, it's easy to write complex applications thanks to the "each program is a filter" paradigm and with pipes.
Each program sends it's output to the next, and so on.
So why not do the same with processes?
A program would define serveral separate processes (functions), which are then parallelized through pipes; then, the various processes (functions) would simply be executed through the OS what would take care of the scheduling.
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Reality 101: the big filthy rich will keep insuring that you, the little guy, will **NEVER** be able to get richer. Stop dreaming about "hard work", it's all about connections.
However, the US **HAS** a great medical system... As long as you are one of the élites.
In Canada, drug prices are strictly regulated, and for the most part, are not marketed to the public. Not having to market is a tremenduous cost cutter and leaves more money for what little research is done by pharmaceutical labs.
In the US, pharmaceutical companies spent three time as much for marketing than they did for research.
That's because you believe that one day you will become a zillionnaire. Then, one day, you'll realize that no matter how hard you work, you'll get passed over by people sleazier than you who excel more than you in the art of bullshit and licking arse, so you'll never get a zillionnaire. But since this will never happen, you better have an universal system that is paid for everybody and that leaves no one behind. Not even the filthy rich.Everyone has the same service; this guarantees that the rich will not gut the service.
This is called "social justice", something sorely lacking in the US.
Ever wondered why the crime rate is so low in Canada? It's not because guns are outlawed. No, it's simply because welfare helps ensure that someone that hit the bottom of the barrel will not have to turn to crime in order to survive.
Paying slightly more taxes than in the US is a very cheap price to pay to insure that I do not risk being mugged each time I walk home late at night.
And everyone is glad to pay those few extra tax dollars.
The "freedom" those measures take away would only benefit the top 0.01% of the population anyways.
Period.
The laws passed by that social contract call that only Citizens and legal aliens may secure employment. To cater to the whims of the economy would be doing otherwise, and calls for a modification of the laws.
The Citizens will never make that happen, because with labour, you're not dealing with merchandise or a service, but with human beings (Citizen or not).
And the same is the case with most other countries, probably even including yours!.
Cohen? That's a jewish name. This is not surprising; jews are amongst the worst people when it comes to employee treatment. Their niggardlyness is legendary; they will go to great lenghts to avoid paying a fair price for anything.
I heard about someone who puts an extra custom header in his USENET posts which contains the string "when he was a kid, the president of the United Cigar Stores used to throw water bombs at anthills to kill time".
I have been working as an election official in various elections lately (at various government levels) and the paper ballot system works perfectly well and offers sufficient accounting speed (barring fuckups, all results are tallied within 2 hours) and fraud prevention safeguards.
Why an OS for an appliance computer? (Because a voting machine is basically an appliance computer).
I mean, what does a voting machine needs to do? Read a keyboard (or touch screen), write to a display device, print a receipt/results, read and write to a RAM card (to get the candidates and put the results).
So why do you need a whole goddammed operating system to do that? Are programmers becoming sufficiently incompetent to be unable to do those basic I/O tasks from scratch???
What's so difficult in booting from ROM? Set stack pointers, memory access registers, jump to start of POST routine and go.
It's not very hard at all.
So why do you need schwindoze (or schlinux) to do all those basic things????
The kicker is that nothing prevents the manager of a moviehouse to copy the film for himself, or to allow the manager to have an employee or anyone else do so...
Why should it be hard?
I mean, with UNIX, it's easy to write complex applications thanks to the "each program is a filter" paradigm and with pipes.
Each program sends it's output to the next, and so on.
So why not do the same with processes?
A program would define serveral separate processes (functions), which are then parallelized through pipes; then, the various processes (functions) would simply be executed through the OS what would take care of the scheduling.
Just like the problem with America is that it's full of americans...